Eula Biss Examines Middle-Class Aspirations and Property Ownership in Essay Collection

Eula Biss explores the psychological and ethical dimensions of middle-class desire in her 2020 essay collection 'Having and Being Had,' published by Riverhead Books. The American writer examines how acquiring a $73,000 university salary enabled her to purchase a brick bungalow in Evanston, Chicago, a historically African-American neighborhood. Biss describes wanting the illusion of permanence through homeownership while acknowledging this as a late-capitalist fantasy. She references David Graeber's critique of meaningless white-collar work and Marx's analysis of the middle class's divided loyalties between workers and capitalist aspirations. The book reveals how middle-class morality connects to invisible labor, citing Virginia Woolf underpaying her chef Nellie Boxall after publishing 'A Room of One's Own' in 1929. Biss pays a 'mother's helper' eight dollars an hour after giving birth and accepts $8,000 from Walmart for a commercial targeting displaced African-American residents. Her husband John, also an artist, strips wallpaper while Biss prunes roses, describing homeownership as husbandry rather than purchase. The collection examines brand preferences like $110-per-gallon white paint and piano ownership as class signifiers of genteel idleness. Biss's friend Dan identifies the Walmart payment as white privilege, highlighting the book's tension between investigating class delusions and renouncing them.