60 pages • 2 hours read
Jenny JacksonPineapple Street
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Social Context: Class Structures in 21st-Century America
Pineapple Street explores class structures in 21st-century America, particularly those at work in the upper echelons of New York City, one of the most expensive cities in the world. Class structures in the United States can be loosely divided into three classes: upper, middle, and lower. However, many people do not neatly fall into one of these three categories, particularly those in the middle class, which encompasses a broad range of incomes and lifestyles. The American class system is a hierarchy based on money. The upper class, people with extreme wealth, make up about 1% of the entire American population. Thus, it is very rare to be extremely wealthy in America. Roughly 50% of Americans fall into the middle class, though this number has been steadily declining since the 1970s. This means that about 50% of Americans are members of the lower class. Thus, to be a member of the elite upper class is to be largely out of touch with the realities that govern the majority of American society.
Because the United States of America is a capitalist system, many Americans are encultured to view socio-economic status as a choice rather than an inevitability. The national mythology of the American Dream claims that with enough hard work, any citizen can achieve any goal in this fabled land of opportunity. However, the harsh reality of American society includes significant historical inequalities that make the concept of the American Dream more of a fallacy than a possibility. For example, laws that once forbade people of color to hold bank accounts or own property have resulted in gross differences in opportunity that have been perpetuated from generation to generation. Because of such policies, Black people are to this day at a significant financial disadvantage because systemic racism made it nearly impossible for Black families to develop wealth that they could pass down to their children. This ongoing social issue is particularly relevant to Jackson’s novel, for the Stockton wealth comes directly from New York real estate, and the buying of property in Brooklyn is inextricably linked to the infrastructure of Black oppression. For example, neighborhoods in Brooklyn have historically been built by people of color and immigrants who made homes in these areas. However, because of redlining policies, when wealthy white people like the Stocktons started buying up houses, property, and assets in historically Black neighborhoods, Black people were pushed out. The wealthy white investors like the Stocktons then remade the neighborhood in their own image, rendering neighborhoods in Brooklyn too expensive for the locals to live in. This process, called gentrification, has repeatedly enriched already wealthy white people and impoverished people of color who have been pushed out of the middle class.
In a 2019 study, economists predicted that American millennials (those born in the 1980s and the 1990s) will inherit up to 68 trillion dollars in wealth from their parents and grandparents. The issue of inherited wealth is also crucial to the plot of this novel. Inherited wealth will significantly freeze people within their socio-economic classes, because inherited wealth makes it all the more difficult for people from the middle class to move into the upper class. It is likewise just as difficult for people from the lower class to move into the middle class. In this novel, both Georgiana and Curtis represent constructive versions of how such ultra-privileged millennials can put their inherited wealth to good use for the larger benefit of society. These two characters ultimately decide to create foundations out of their inherited wealth. This is a laudable but controversial decision, because divesting themselves of their family wealth often involves selling out stocks, in which case the stock would be devalued for the rest of the family who also holds investments in that same stock. It is important to note that even in a metropolis like New York City, there is very little contact between Americans who belong to different social classes. The upper class tends to stay within a tight bubble of privilege, barely interacting with people from other classes. This informal division leads to distrust and misunderstanding and furthers inequality.
Literary Context: Satirical Portrayals of Class in America
Pineapple Street is a contemporary critique of a relevant cultural issue in America today. Class divisions based on wealth form a very real hierarchy in American society, but because of the cultural taboo against discussing one’s finances, it is often considered rude to speak about such things openly. Unlike societies whose hierarchies developed from family-based systems of royalty and nobility, class in America is based on money and inherited wealth. American literature that focuses on the upper class is therefore often satirical in nature because there is always something to criticize about the realities of class differences in a country that espouses equality as one of its primary values.
One of the most famous satirists of class in America is writer Edith Wharton. Wharton was herself a member of the upper class in New York City; her father’s family gained its wealth through real estate, and she married a man within the New York aristocratic circle. Despite her privileged background, Wharton was a radical woman whose ideas were ahead of her time. She and her husband divorced in 1913 at a time when divorce was still considered a scandal, if it was even allowed to occur at all. Her novels and short stories thus chronicled the lives of wealthy New Yorkers, and her characters were modeled after members of her own society. Wharton used humor and satire to criticize her own community’s absurd rules, conservative views, and obsession with class. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence. In this novel, Newland Archer, the inheritor of wealth and a gentlemanly legacy, becomes disillusioned with his privileged lifestyle when he falls in love with a disgraced woman. In her novel The Custom of the Country (1913), a Midwestern girl named Undine Spragg seeks entrance into the elite world of wealthy Manhattanites through guile, sexuality, and manipulation. In both topic and tone, Wharton’s novels are thus literary progenitors of Jackson’s Pineapple Street.
Novels that capture the frustration and less privileged side of the income gap in America are also formative in the literary trend that has led to the publication of Pineapple Street. For example, S. E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders (1967) tells the story of two rival groups of teenage boys—one upper class, one lower class. The central characters are the teenage boys belonging to the lower class, and the novel explores their vulnerabilities, their fractured home lives, and their oppression by a society obsessed with money as a measure of personal worth.
