Caught in the middle: Narratives of family and class in Philippine short fiction

Abstract

Many works of Philippine short fiction in English have depicted conventional and unconventional middle-class families, utilizing them as a milieu for exploring the conflicts and conditions arising from the material condition of class inequality and exploitation in the Philippines. The first section of the paper examines various perspectives on the concept of “family,” situating it within a Marxist and Philippine context, while the second section looks at the term “middle class” and explains its use in this paper as a framework for literary analysis. The final part of this paper looks at a selection of Philippine short stories in English, and discusses how the fantasies of the middle-class regarding family and identity have been used not only to produce successful, well-crafted literary works, but also texts that reveal the contradictions in our country’s history and culture, as characters grapple with the dissonance between the paradigm of the ideal, traditional family and the lived experience of real, fractured families. In sum, this paper explores the twin thematic concerns of class and family in our country’s stories—in particular, how Filipino families in fiction can provide a valuable vantage point for the consideration of social, cultural, and political issues pertaining to class identity and struggle.