Guilt - The Beans of Egypt, Maine

After reading The Beans of Egypt, Maine, I am embarrassed to say that I found the book very difficult to finish. I felt isolated from the characters and ultimately, had trouble feeling sympathy for them. Chute’s novel tells the tale of two poverty-stricken families in rural Maine who fight for survival, but the families’ lack of drive and motivation isolate them from the American dream and thus from the middle class reader.

Roberta Rosen’s article “I Hate this Book” resonated with me and other members of the class as well.  In her article, Rosen contemplates why The Beans of Egypt, Maine elicited such a strong, negative reaction from her undergraduate and graduate students. Her thesis reads, “Why was it possible for many of my students to accept cultural disparity when it seemed to be a matter of race, ethnicity or religion, but not when it was a matter of class? Was their previous open-mindedness just political correctness, or are class antagonisms more difficult to identify and accept in an American society which theoretically views itself as "classless?"2 The more I explore these questions, the more I am convinced that American middle-class assumptions and values should become a more prominent topic for critical analysis within multicultural literature.”

The fault in the middle class reading of a poverty portrait like the one Chute writes is that members of middle class America feel that they have earned their place there through hard work and dedication, so they cannot feel sympathy for characters who do not yearn for the same lifestyle. In this novel, the characters are cruel, dirty, aggressive, and lazy. Why do students feel no pity for poor white protagonists? I believe that Rosen highlights one of the most important issues in the education system today – awareness. It is not possible to read novels that deal with social issues of race and class if the reader is not aware of the preconceived notions he or she brings to the text.

It is also very interesting the Chute represents the middle class in her text as more clean and proper than the Beans. Instead of screaming and cursing the middle class represents the bourgeois life as Rosen states, “All of the middle-class characters who inhabit Egypt, Maine are certainly cleaner, as well as more ambitious, socially acceptable and progressive than their impoverished counterparts. However, there is something sinister about the arrival of the J. K. Smiths, a wealthy, enfranchised city family who take up residence across the road from the Beans. Most significantly, these newly established yuppies arrive on Thanksgiving with their "Mayflower" moving van full of furniture and the equipment of bourgeois life.”