Introduction

After the devastation of World War II, there was, inevitably, a great desire and urgency to return to ‘happy,’ everyday life. The post-war era thus presents a rich, temporal venue to consider the economies and institutional and societal dynamics such ambition produces. Indeed, that ‘happiness’ is not innately good, but rather directive orientational – leading us to places, realities, and ideas of ‘the normal’ – has shaped recent scholarship. In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Sara Ahmed draws us toward “the relationship between bodies and space” (Merleau-Ponty in Ahmed 65), and later, in The Promise of Happiness, she asserts that “some bodies more than others will bear the promise of happiness” (45). Recently, in Complaint!, Ahmed argues against the general tendency to dismiss complaint as that which stops oneself and others from being happy (1), and rather argues that by inquiring into individual experiences of complaint we “will learn so much about institutions and about power,” including “what is not being dealt with” (7). Ahmed’s work therefore offers a robust framework by which to contend with ‘happiness.’ Yet it is also a framework that might be further refined through exploration of the relationship between happiness, care work, ‘private’ dwelling places, and racialized and gendered bodies – a set of relationships particularly pronounced in Britain’s reconstructive climate of the 1950s and 1960s.

This paper examines personal repercussions of the aforesaid relationship through the ultimate premise that, as second-wave feminism has asserted, ‘the personal is political,’ and moreover, institutional. As Ahmed notes, a complaint “is a record of what happens to a person, as well as of what happens in institutions” (Complaint! 38). Elizabeth Taylor’s short story, “The Devastating Boys” (1972), and Buchi Emecheta’s novel, Second Class Citizen (1974), provide the source material for this study. These works offer literary animations of Ahmed’s critique of happiness and its stakes, revealing not only the intersectional complexity of happiness, but that, far from providing collective ‘social good,’ happiness and care work can further existing oppressive social structures. In Taylor and Emecheta’s works, ‘happy objects’ – those objects that involve affect, intentionality, and evaluation or judgment (Ahmed, Promise 21) – such as the family home, are not only withheld from racial groups such as the black British (Procter 30), but specific categories of people (black children and subordinates) are expected to bear ‘the burden of happiness’ and the burden of care. Through this economy, these figures become dehumanized tools or ‘objects’ for the white majority’s own self-prioritization of happiness. Although both literary works explore the victimization of ‘the bearers of happiness’ by the white (and usually male) majority, Taylor and Emecheta approach this problem from different perspectives: Taylor’s story is focalized through Laura, a white, upper-class housewife living in the countryside, while Emecheta’s novel centers on Adah, a black, working second-class female citizen living in the suburbs. This paper considers what this comparative reading might reveal about the racial and gendered dynamics of 1950s and 1960s Britain, but also the oppressive social structures that remain today. Indeed, “we are still experiencing the afterlives of slavery and colonialism” (Peña 42) and these effects manifest in the institutional weaponization of happiness today, where “the colonial racial-capitalist regime … pits us [minorities] against each other through the narrative of exceptionalism” (Peña 26). Through this reading, I seek to assume what Ahmed deems “a feminist ear” (i.e., women receiving the complaints of other women) (Complaint! 3) and read attuned to not only the systemic exploitations of happiness, but its generative alternatives – horizons where personal care work, in the form of self-confidence building, empathy, and friendship, is the foundation for the collective survival and transformation of institutions (see 301).

Ironically, post-war Britain’s normalization of a certain kind of happiness produced happiness-preventing anxiety. This manifests in the case of Taylor’s Laura, who, like other white, upper class housewives, ‘should’ have been happy at home but, instead, felt unproductive and isolated. The idea that it was “women’s duty to keep happiness in house” (Ahmed, Promise 55), along with the common belief that “womanhood is tied to morality” (Ezewanebe 351), not only meant that “the orientation toward the good” became “a form of pressure” (or a kind of burden) for housewives, but also that there was an “intimacy between desire and anxiety” (Ahmed, Promise 31). These dynamics manifest acutely in Taylor’s story, where the home becomes an ‘unhappy object’ (see Ahmed, Promise 32) during Laura’s middle-aged years, described as the “empty space” (5) between motherhood and the birth of grandchildren. Laura’s anxiety that she is “frittering away her days” (4) is, moreover, exacerbated when two immigrant boys come to live with her as part of a scheme to offer London children a holiday in the countryside. She is so worried about how to care for the boys, who (as Laura imagines) “could cry for their mothers and want to go home” (6), that her anxious orientation “affects what happens” (Ahmed, Promise 41). As a result, Laura creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: “If she were asked to hold a baby, she was fearful lest it should cry, and often it would, sensing lack of assurance in her clasp” (Taylor 6). Indeed, Laura’s “diffident nature” (Taylor 5) prevents her from seeing the discrepancy between what she feels has happened and what has actually occurred. As the structure of third-person narration makes clear, while Laura is perceptive in terms of reading others (she discerns Harold’s hypocrisy: “Now he was making differences [between people]” [Taylor 4]), she fails to see that most of her self-assessments are unfounded. This discrepancy is stressed by the fact that only once does the narrator acknowledge that Laura’s feelings are correct: “Committees frightened her, and good works made her feel embarrassed and clumsy. [New paragraph] She was a clumsy person – gentle, but clumsy” (Taylor 5). As evident by the discrepancy between Laura’s inner thoughts and the narration, Laura’s reality is refracted through the personal. Thus, after her first day with the boys, the reader can reasonably suspect that Laura merely believes that “her brightness was false and not infectious” (Taylor 10) because, despite her desire to please – Laura is jealous of Helena’s ‘cleverness’ with the boys (see Taylor 19) – she is burdened by a lack of confidence and, ultimately, a fear of unhappiness.

While in Emecheta’s novel Adah similarly seeks happiness at home, there is an important difference between the women’s experiences with the domestic. For Adah, unlike Laura, post-war Britain’s normalization of a certain kind of happiness – one that is tacitly racialized – erases her family’s potential for happiness by depriving her of access to a dwelling, as well as the means to transform a house into a home. Adah is denied the normative role of housewife because she is a black, educated woman. While for women like Laura a comfortable house is a given, for women like Adah, “British racism … flattened out the Nigerian class system,” such that “all postcolonial Africans … [were] thrown together as second-class citizens” (Dawson 102). Not only does Adah have to marry in order to have a home in Nigeria (and, moreover, evade social stigmatization; see Emecheta 122), but, as a married black woman in Britain, she is denied access to white economies of home ownership. Ahmed’s assertion that “the body at home is one that can inhabit whiteness” (Queer 111) finds resonance in Adah’s experience of isolation in Britain (Dawson 102): Adah’s living space is a tiny “half-room” – a place described as so restricted that “one could not have a good family ding-dong in peace” (Emecheta 38, 40). The phrase “ding-dong” is especially telling, as it conjures the sound of a doorbell, suggesting the absence of the “good, quiet atmosphere” Adah desires in a home (Emecheta 23). While living in the half-room, Adah’s landlord and neighbours intimidate her and interfere in family affairs, advocating and advertising for a foster-mother for her children (see Emecheta 47). Thus, Adah never has energy for “the cultural investment in making home” (Procter 30) and is denied access to its associated positive affectivity. We see the material and architectural ways in which the comfort of the white majority is privileged over others’ when Adah states that the houses are “[j]ammed against each other” (Emecheta 37) – an observation animating Michael Peplar’s assertion that in white-majority societies, oftentimes “immigrants would need to be invisible to be acceptable” (20). The white majority, paradoxically, sought both to ‘tame’ the racial ‘other’ through domestication (Webster 54) and to “exile … [her or him from] places to live” (Webster 151). Thus, ‘the promise of happiness’ incited a different kind of tension for black women, as a promise both fought for and imposed.

Such inherent paradoxes come to the fore, and take a different tenor, in Taylor’s portrayal of Laura who, despite her class status, remains subjected to ‘the burden of happiness’ because she is female. As a woman, she is also subordinated, and subjected with the social duty of offering happiness to her husband, Harold. In keeping with traditional, oppressive gender roles, Laura’s positioning affirms Ahmed’s theorization of how “[s]traight orientations for women … mean identifying with the family by taking men as objects of desire” (Queer 74). Throughout the story, Laura ‘orientates’ herself toward Harold by seeking his approval: “She would have agreed anyway, whatever it was, as it was her nature – and his – for her to do so” (Taylor 4). The word ‘anyway’ meaningfully acknowledges that Laura’s agency has been dismissed. Simultaneously, the abrupt “and his” implies, through its sharp interruption of the text, that the white male’s desires take priority over and detract value from the woman’s. Further, Laura’s sense of self is apparently tied to Harold’s happiness; she shyly looks away when she catches a glimpse of his approval (see Taylor 24). These dynamics manifest elsewhere in the text. When Harold, addressing Laura after her long day of tending to the children, inquires, “What’s up, old thing?” (Taylor 12), Harold’s ignorance that Laura has performed “intimate labour” all day not only shows that care work, as “gendered work,” “tends to be undervalued” (Benoit and Hallgrímsdóttir 3, 3, 18), but illuminates the conditions underlying Laura’s own lack of confidence. A few pages later, Laura’s process of internalization is apparent, as Harold’s words echo forth in her own thoughts: “Whistler’s mother. I’m too old, she thought. I’d be too old for my own grandchildren” (Taylor 17). Indeed, the reference to “Whistler’s Mother” (1871), a painting by James Whistler, paints a particular picture: Laura as a woman in mourning, having lost an anticipated and desired form of happiness. Marriage reduces women to second-class citizens by implying that men, or first-class citizens (Seely et al. 431), are “entitled to happiness” (Ahmed, Promise 51), while women are not, innately, but rather, are labourers in the realization of others’ happiness. This problem is stated in the story through hyperbole when, for example, Laura thinks to herself, “Harold was being a great success [with the boys]” (Taylor 11). If Harold is this “great success,” it is only because the boys see him rarely: the “first time they … [are] out alone with him” is on the second Sunday – the last day of the boys’ holiday! – when they ask to go to church (Taylor 22). Laura’s observation, therefore, is laden with subtext and anticipates the dynamics in the family throughout. For example, in contrast to Harold, Laura feels victimized, as a woman, by the boys, who, she imagines, have made her their “slave” (Taylor 23). Taylor relates Laura’s alleged loss of agency through simile: Laura is “treated as a piece of furniture” (23), meaning she must silently and obligingly bear the weight of others’ happiness and become a ‘dehumanized’ object. Again, the discrepancy between what Laura feels is happening and what is really happening is apparent, as is Laura’s tendency towards self-objectification. Perhaps she has internalized Harold’s earlier reference to her as an “old thing” (Taylor 12). Indeed, we know that the boys love Laura, as Septimus “would sit for hours with his eyes fixed on Laura’s face while she read to him,” and Benny “liked her to play the piano” (Taylor 21). So, although Laura is reduced to a second-class citizen, she exacerbates that sense of identity by failing to see her own worth.

In her novel, Emecheta shows the reader what happens when the burdens of happiness and care are not only recognized by the oppressed, but then combatted through creative agential acts. Adah, a working, educated black woman, is cognizant that she does not gain lasting satisfaction from her marriage and is independent enough to opt for loneliness rather than so-called ‘marital happiness.’ While Laura feels obliged to accept her husband’s wishes, Adah faces external pressure to submit to her husband because of “double colonization,” whereby black women are victimized through both marriage and “the institutional structure of social citizenship in Britain” (Dawson 98). In short, Adah’s burden of bearing happiness is substantially different than Laura’s. For example, the law will not protect Adah from her violent husband: “Then the thought struck her that she could be killed and the world would think it was an accident. Just a husband and wife fighting” (Emecheta 154). In the case of Adah, her gendered precarity is exacerbated by and inextricable from her racialized experience: As Francis says to Adah, “You keep forgetting that you are a woman and that you are black. The white man can barely tolerate us men” (Emecheta 167). As seen in the novel, “women’s lives are a continuum of subjugation from the father’s house to the husband’s house” (Ezewanebe 350); they are ‘recycled’ across generations without heed to their own happiness. Thus, Francis “is willing to accept changes that make his life more … comfortable, but unwilling to allow such for his wife” (Ezewanebe 358). Adah, however, discerns that her dreams are, due to her marriage, becoming fantasies: she outsmarts the system, which includes the Law of the Father, by “writ[ing] down the statement that she would not feed him [Francis] any more” (Emecheta 161) and staking claim as a speaking subject by writing a novel (Dawson 106). In addition to subverting the norm that makes women obligated to give care and men entitled to receive it (Meyer et al. 16), Adah reveals that normative happiness is loss for black women. As Adah’s narrative suggests, “happiness” means giving up the fantasy of the perfect marriage and accepting “lonely freedom” instead (Emecheta 140; see also 141).

Intriguingly, in Taylor’s story the ‘cure’ for unhappiness is not acceptance of an alternative kind of happiness but, rather, temporary displacement of ‘the burden of happiness.’ This displacement transpires as Laura projects the burden onto two black, underprivileged immigrant children. Laura and Harold, the middle-aged, upper-class British couple, turn Benny and Septimus into ‘happy objects’ for the renewal of their own happiness as life partners. In doing so, the couple not only prioritizes their personal happiness over the children’s, but push the children’s voices to the margins of the story, ‘dehumanizing’ them through their loss of affectivity. Through this sequence, the reader witnesses Ahmed’s claim that “happiness involves a specific kind of intentionality,” as the children “become happy” for Laura and Harold because, from the first, the couple “imagine[s] … [that the boys] will bring happiness [to them]” (Promise 26): Harold “had made a long speech to Laura about children being the great equalizers, and that we should learn from them” (Taylor 4). Yet this quotation is ironic, as the adults and children pair off: Laura and Harold become ‘first-class citizens,’ while Benny and Septimus are relegated to ‘second-class citizens.’ Near the end of the story, the prioritization of the adults’ happiness is made clear: Evaluating the visit, Laura skeptically notes, “A success for them [the children]?” (Taylor 23). At the start of the story, Harold dismisses Laura’s concern about whether the immigrant children’s visit to the countryside during summer is ‘the right thing to do’ by transferring their accountability to “those people who organize these things” (Taylor 12). Yet the language of the visit – “scheme” and “summer holiday” (Taylor 3) – as well as the games played with the children (snakes-and-ladders; ‘telephone,’ with one child upstairs and another downstairs; and a fishing game), all suggest social hierarchy rather than equality. It is a motif that illuminates broader social dynamics, wherein reward is sought and won without the presence of real virtue. Laura hopes that Harold will see Benny, a half-caste, as “one point up” (Taylor 6), while Helena (as Harold tells Laura with sarcasm) distinguishes herself from some of her friends by “go[ing] out of her way to be extra pleasant to them [black people]” (Taylor 16). This is not the first time that immigrant children have been reduced to a number, either. An authoritative woman herds and distributes the boys like cattle at the train station: “She had a compartment full of little children in her charge to be delivered about Oxfordshire. Only two got out onto this platform, Laura’s two, Septimus Smith and Benny Reece. They wore tickets, too, with their names printed on them” (Taylor 6). Repetition of the number “two” emphasizes that the children are posed as the couple’s profitable livestock, while the third ‘two’ (“too”) draws attention to the fact that Laura and the woman on the train are also wearing labels, which defines them as subordinate also. The comparison between the children and cattle is made explicit when Laura and the children are “held up by the cows from the farm” on their way to the house (Taylor 8). And finally, the narrator and the adults each permit the children affectivity for a single sentence: Septimus sees Harold in pain, while Harold briefly notes Benny’s tears (see Taylor 20, 25).  

An extreme example of immigrant children lacking affectivity is evident in Emecheta’s novel, where Adah’s children bear ‘the burden of happiness’ (essentially spoiling Adah’s every effort to make her children happy in themselves [see Emecheta 141] and, paradoxically, bringing Adah herself great unhappiness). Because the Obis’s landlord and landlady, the white, British majority, and later Francis himself, assume precedence in terms of who is ‘entitled’ to happiness, and their happiness involves certain standards of personal ‘comfort,’ Adah’s children are forced to maintain these various individuals’ happiness by being inconspicuous and silent. In other words, immigrant children bear ‘the burden of happiness’ not by providing happiness directly (i.e., creating ‘good affect’), but by denying their subjectivity for the sake of others’ comfort and happiness (avoiding the creation of ‘bad affect’). Such ‘peacemaking’ silence transforms the children into a version of Ahmed’s “affect alien” (Promise 49), as they are not allowed to be happy, let alone complain when they are sad: the landlady tells Adah to keep the children “lock[ed] … up in their room” and, “[w]hen the children cried, the landlord would stamp upstairs” (Emecheta 71). The children are not even allowed to talk; the narrator reveals that “[t]hey were hushed and bullied into silence so that the landlord and his wife should not be disturbed” (Emecheta 47). Public ‘comfort’ is preserved at the children’s, and their parents’, expense, since the children are forced to “go along with it” (Ahmed, Promise 69). Titi is “past caring” and “accept[s] things” (Emecheta 57), while, for Francis, bad feelings “get stuck” to the children (Ahmed, Promise 69): “the cost, the inconvenience … had all eroded his pride in them” (Emecheta 75). When Titi stops talking, realizing that she does not know English well enough to speak it and will upset Francis by speaking in Yoruba (see Emecheta 50, 53), Adah’s happiness is negatively affected, as she “worried so much about it” (Emecheta 53). While Laura fears unhappiness to the point where she unknowingly creates the emotion she seeks to avoid, bestowing the burden of happiness onto the immigrant boys, the children in Emecheta’s novel fear unhappiness to the extent that they become ‘affect aliens’ and worry their mother, who is determined to become a speaking subject through her writing.

Towards Unhappy Solidarities

The most striking difference between Laura and Adah, that is to say, is their sense of self: Laura lacks self-confidence, while Adah pursues her dreams with determination. These two women could become allies in unhappiness, however, because each possesses what the other needs: Adah could teach Laura to become self-confident as a woman, while Laura’s perception could help Adah expose and traverse (perhaps in her writing) the hypocrisies of British white society in the 1950s and 1960s.

To become allies in unhappiness, the women would firstly need to become invested in the differently contingent and constrained life worlds of the other. One of Adah’s major critiques of the United Kingdom is that it teaches women not to speak to others: “she couldn’t go to her neighbour and babble out troubles as she would have done in Lagos, she had learned not to talk about her unhappiness to those with whom she worked, for this was a society where nobody was interested in the problems of others” (Emecheta 66). We see something similar in Taylor’s story, when Laura’s housekeeper, Mrs. Milner, “could not bring herself to say the name [Laura]” because, though the boys are granted permission to call Laura by name, Laura is “Madam” to Mrs. Milner due to her subordinate status (Taylor 15). Laura has a relationship to (not with) Mrs. Milner – for Laura, Mrs. Milner is “the help” (Taylor 14) – because “[w]hen care ‘goes public,’ worlds clash,” in that “[c]aregivers and the people they care for are pressured by the norms, rules, and policies in the public world” (Stone 90). Adah proceeds to state that the options for women with problems are suicide and “paid listeners” (Emecheta 66). While Adah has good intentions throughout the novel, she shares Laura’s struggle (as we will see) to recognize the pain of others, which is the first step toward an alliance. While in the hospital, Adah laments that “[s]ome people were created with all the good things ready-made for them” (Emecheta 115). Only, the narrator, a mature Adah reflecting on her life, reveals that this is not the case:

All Adah could see at that moment was the sleek girl being kissed and loved, and the woman who had had to wait for seventeen years [for a baby] walking round the ward proudly with her child. She did not think of what life was like for a little girl who was aware she was adopted; that the little girl might sometimes wonder whether her parents ever wanted her? That the little girl could sometimes feel unwanted even by her adoptive parents. As for the woman with her baby son, Adah could not imagine the aches and pains that went with those seventeen years (Emecheta 115).

Young Adah has not yet learned how to imagine herself in the place of another. All she perceives is that the two women possess what she does not: love and pride. Personal desires cloud Adah’s perception, in that she cannot detect the struggles the women endured before their present state of happiness. Another issue is that Adah tends to confide her troubles to men, in part because of her poor experiences with Ma and closeness with Pa. The narrator observes, “Women still made Adah nervous. They had a way of sapping her self-confidence. She did have one or two women friends with whom she discussed the weather, and fashion. But when in real trouble, she would rather look for a man” (Emecheta 12). Laura feels similarly about women, for she “always felt dull and overawed [in Helena’s company]” (Taylor 16). Despite Adah’s reserves about other women, her novel reveals that women, not men, help her the most: Adah’s female boss at the North Finchley Library pays Adah a lump sum for the holidays and delivers toys to Adah’s children for Christmas (Emecheta 120, 131), Miss Stirling “listen[s] patiently to Adah’s story” (Emecheta 67) and offers Adah’s children places in the nursery, and Adah’s landlady calls the police when she fears that Francis will kill Adah (Emecheta 170-1). Though Adah believes that her coworker, Bill, “was the first real friend she had had outside her family” (Emecheta 152), she does not contradict Bill when he tells Peggy and their coworkers that Adah is “happily married to a brilliant husband” (Emecheta 153). Further, Adah “did not tell the man [Mr Okpara] anything” (Emecheta 157), despite the Nigerian man’s attempts to help Adah in her quarrels with Francis. Therefore, in order for Adah and Laura to become allies in unhappiness, both would need to be interested in each other’s problems, able to perceive each other’s pain and eager to understand it, and willing to share deeply (as true friends do) while supporting each other as fellow women.

Taylor’s story also implies that empathy can develop from the recognition of shared unhappiness between the oppressor and the oppressed. Taylor heavily ironizes Laura’s efforts to connect with the boys and failure to see their struggles and anger, presumably so that the reader can learn from her mistakes. For example, Laura fails to unpack Septimus’s language of pain – his speech is “an aggrieved singsong,” “an anguished keening,” and a “dirge” (Taylor 7, 9, 10) – viewing him as merely “babyish” (Taylor 9). Notably, in Complaint!, Ahmed observes, “The word complaint derives from Old French, complaindre, ‘to lament,’ an expression of sorrow and grief. Lament is from Latin, lamentum, ‘wailing, moaning; weeping’” (17). From this definition, we learn that Septimus’s language of pain is actually a complaint since a dirge is a lament. This ostensibly light story is punctuated with interjections concerning serious racial inequalities, such as when Septimus cries, “My Mam don’t like God Save the Queen neither. She say ‘God save me’” (Taylor 21). Septimus, to borrow Ahmed’s phrasing, “pass[es] a complaint on” and thus “keep[s] a history alive” (Complaint! 300). However, since one is retraumatized from “bring[ing] the violence out” (Ahmed, Complaint! 119), there is more than simply history here: to voice a complaint is to suffer in the present. Despite Laura’s failure to receive Septimus’s complaint, there are moments where she and he “are connected by the very jolt of unhappiness” (Ahmed, Promise 72) because they empathize with each other. While Septimus is a ‘minor’ in the legal sense of being a child, both Septimus and Laura are social minorities, and, as Ahmed suggests, “those deemed minorities are often heard as moaning about minor matters” (Complaint! 146). That Septimus and Laura are depicted as minor shows that their complaints are being treated as minor, in the sense of “an irritant in the fabric of institutional life” (Ahmed, Complaint! 146). When Septimus does not receive a lollipop, Laura “wished that Benny hadn’t at once scrambled to his feet [to accept his]” (Taylor 15). Laura feels sorry for Septimus because, as a woman, she has personal experience with the de-prioritizing of her happiness. However, Laura permits what Ahmed refers to as “institutional mechanics” (Complaint! 100), since Benny receives a reward – “[t]he word reward derives from warder, to guard” (Complaint! 100) – but Septimus does not because the former watches what he says and does, while the latter does not. That “[r]ewards are tied … to reproduction,” in that “those who are willing to reproduce the system [are rewarded],” is seen when, after Benny receives his treat, Mrs. Milner ‘steps over’ a crouched Septimus (see Taylor 15). Benny is rewarded for upholding the system, while Septimus is objectified for critiquing it. Meanwhile, Laura possesses a generalized and oversimplified understanding of racial differences, for she (however innocently) stereotypes Septimus by seeing him as “a tribal warrior done up in war paint” and describing his actions as “a tribal dance” (Taylor 10, 19).

Nonetheless, Laura’s unspoken “wish” (Taylor 15) might be a yearning for the strength that could result from commiseration among similarly disadvantaged individuals – an idea that Adah also proposes in Emecheta’s novel. By the end of the story, Laura’s wish seems to have come true: Laura is touched to see the boys “going off into the shrubbery with arms about one another’s shoulders” and “to hear their shared jokes” (Taylor 21). This image of the immigrant boys’ friendship poses a solution to “the real discrimination,” found between fellow countrymen, that Adah describes: “[M]aybe if a West Indian landlord could learn not to look down on the African, and the African learn to boast less of his country’s natural wealth, there would be fewer inferiority feelings among the blacks” (Emecheta 70). We see the problem of one feeling inferior in Taylor’s story, when Septimus feels inferior to Benny in part because Benny boasts so much, and also in Emecheta’s novel, when Francis feels inferior to fellow Nigerians and white people. Only, Emecheta’s novel shows that attitude is everything: one can be like Adah, who “was going to regard herself as the equal of any white” (Emecheta 71), or like Francis, whose “feeling of blackness … was firmly established in his mind,” making it “a fertile ground in which such attitudes could grow and thrive” (Emecheta 58). Indeed, Laura notices that because Septimus is suspicious, Benny is “all the braver” and “show[s] off” (Taylor 12). Benny’s actions, a reaction to Septimus’s, show the “psychological effect” Adah sees in her own response to feeling inferior in England: “she started to act in the way expected of her” (Emecheta 71). However, the suggestion that fellow countrymen can live harmoniously is hinted at earlier in the story, too, when, despite Laura’s conjecture that Benny “took no notice” of Septimus’s ‘theatrics’ about having to sleep in his own bed, and possibly by the window (to which Septimus is opposed) (Taylor 9), that night Laura finds the boys “in separate beds; Benny by the window” (Taylor 11). The boys live harmoniously in the bedroom for a fortnight. Both Taylor’s story and Emecheta’s novel invite commiseration among disadvantaged peoples.

Taken together, Taylor’s story and Emecheta’s novel reveal how, far from generating ‘social good,’ post-war Britain’s normalization of a certain kind of happiness furthered existing oppressive social structures. In particular, ‘happy objects’ are not only denied to racialized and gendered bodies, but racialized and gendered bodies are also expected to bear ‘the burden of happiness’ and the burden of care, on behalf of the white, and often male, majority. As a result, ‘the bearers of happiness’ face ‘dehumanization’ through objectification, and often they are threatened into silence to avoid generating public discomfort and ‘negative affect.’ This silence sustains racial inequalities by reproducing institutions that harm rather than challenge them through complaint. And yet, complaint is, too, a form of care work: it is the “intimate labour” (Benoit and Hallgrímsdóttir 3) of voicing opposition, refusal, and trauma continually in the hope of social change. However, in order to transform systems of oppression into systems of care, disadvantaged individuals need to become allies in unhappiness – a formidable task in today’s capitalist neoliberal systems where individuals have been made to “function as atoms” (Ahmed, Complaint! 180) for the sake of ‘getting ahead.’ Taylor’s Laura and Emecheta’s Adah reveal through their narrative voices (creative practice itself as care work) that personal care work, in the form of self-confidence building, empathy, and friendship, is the foundation for forming the collectives Ahmed calls for (see Complaint! 301). Though Laura feels confined within the home and Adah struggles to enter the domestic space, there is a complex nexus between gender and race to be considered, through their relationship: the oppressor and the oppressed, despite their differences, can share similar needs, desires, and fears.

It is significant that these literary works point specifically toward gendered collectives. Laura fails to receive Septimus’s complaint, and Francis refuses to attend to Adah’s complaint, but Benny and Septimus become friends, and so do Adah and her female boss. This paper similarly showed that Adah and Laura provide what each other needs. However, perhaps the collectives that we need to encourage are not just female or male-identifying (though they might begin there), but collectives that bring together children and adults (e.g., Septimus and Laura) as well as men and women (e.g., Francis and Adah). Indeed, these works strongly suggest that the first kind of collective is required for nurturing the level of self-confidence and empathy needed to form the second kind. It is about time we reclaim agency by speaking about unhappiness, that we, to borrow one of Adah’s metaphors, uncork the bottle and let the gin bubble out in a country of silence.