14.09.20// ‘What’s in a Name?’ - Class Assumptions and Social Capital.
Editor’s Note:
We have chosen this week’s spotlight because we love Chloe’s frank and funny approach to this thought provoking topic. Chloe writes from her personal experience to draw attention to the biases which we encounter simply from our names. We think it’s really important to think about the assumptions we make about each other, even before we’ve opened our mouths. Enjoy!
By Chloe de Lullington
5 September 2020
William Shakespeare once asked, via the lovesick musings of the teenage Juliet, ‘what’s in a name?’ It’s a question I’ve often returned to throughout my life, blessed, as I am, with quite a unique one.
When you encounter the name Chloe de Lullington, what or who do you picture? Perhaps she’s a horsey, sunkissed blonde in a Barbour jacket, or a devastatingly high-cheekboned French actress on the shore of Cannes, or, at the very least, a bit of a Tory with some family money behind her. No shade to any of those people (except maybe the last one) but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Raised in a council house on government benefits, I went to a fairly unremarkable comprehensive school and found myself regularly pursued down its corridors by a persistently disagreeable boy with spiky hair and a snotty nose, who shouted “is that your real name? What’s your real name?” at me. I never did quite get to the bottom of his disbelief in my given moniker, but it stuck with me.
Many years later, I started a new job and met the big boss for the first time at a company party. He offered me a drink – beer, red, white, or rosé. I opted for rosé, and he crowed, with not insubstantial smugness, ‘I knew you were a fucking posh bird as soon as I saw your name’. I wasn’t too keen on being any sort of bird, not in a professional context, much less a ‘fucking posh’ one, but I didn’t bother to correct him; I just laughed politely. After all, there’s no shying away from the insidious privilege and social capital that comes with having such a coded ‘respectable’ name – perhaps that helped me reach the interview stage, who knows?
It’s an uncomfortable truth that for all the supposed meritocracy and anonymity of the professional world, people with these so-called ‘respectable’ and particularly white sounding names on their CVs regularly get further along the pipeline when it comes to applications and opportunities. The fact that I, a benefits baby, have slowly clawed my way to precarious middle-class-ness is not solely a triumph of one woman’s spirit, pluck, and thirst for education (much as I’d love to claim that as the tagline for my inevitable memoirs!), but is also a reflection of the tendencies towards positive discrimination that come with my name. None of my achievements have ever arisen through nepotism, or family connections – I have nothing to fall back on, no option but to keep ploughing on off my own steam – but I do suspect my name has helped, provided me with invaluable social capital and currency to wield in those all-important first impression situations. Of course, there’s no way of proving this, but I’ll wager that doors have been opened, and sympathies won, thanks to preconceptions of a nice young lady with a nice young lady’s name.
On the flip side, with a distinctive name comes a certain amount of caution and consequence. My digital footprint, for example, looms large in my mind. I’ll never forget a careers session at university in which I witnessed a beloved lecturer Google my name while we chatted about my post-uni prospects, then witnessed the plethora of perplexities that furrowed her brow as she scrolled through my (since deleted) vitriolic and quite niche feminist pop culture rants on Twitter. Then there was the online article I wrote for a student publication in the wake of Ken Loach’s benefits drama, I, Daniel Blake, detailing my own experiences growing up in a similar context. I umm-ed and ahh-ed over submitting it for quite some time; would people want, I questioned, or even believe, an article like that from someone with such a posh sounding name?
And with the recent A-Level algorithm scandal fresh on the front pages, my name and its uneasy position in the social class stakes weighs ever heavier on my mind. Had I been at the mercy of this prejudiced algorithm and its postcode lottery, I might never have made it to university, my one ticket out of a poverty trap and the endless cycle of living paycheque-to-paycheque that comes with the kind of jobs someone with no degree and no professional family connections can get in a small town. The pickings are slim and the prognosis grim; it’s not exaggerating to say that getting into university changed my life forever. Though not a direct result of my name, my resultant social climbing is most definitely inextricably linked with it.
Overall, there are certainly more benefits than drawbacks. I love my surname. I’m proud of it. And there is a certain mischievously subversive delight to be found in smashing those social stereotypes and reeling off the no-nonsense council house background story to unsuspecting members of the upper middle who have assumed me to be one of their ilk. It allows me a certain chameleon-like status, which, as a writer, is invaluable.
Plus, with a name like mine, it’s easy to mythologise oneself, to construct playfully tongue-in-cheek half-truths and outright lies about heritage and mystery, to blend family anecdotes with the embellishments of pure imagination. I realised at a relatively young age that we were pretty poor, but there was no point dwelling on how galling it was to have a great palatial country house of a name like de Lullington and yet have no money. Instead, it became almost second nature to reconstruct this as a narrative of impoverished aristocrats fallen on hard times, à la Nancy Mitford. So as for Juliet's question of what’s in a name? Well, I’d have to say when it comes to mine, it’s somewhere between a hall of mirrors and a world of potential.
Chloe de Lullington is a writer and lifelong thrifter, interested in the repurposing of clothes and culture in contemporary life. Originally from Kent, she gained a First Class degree in English Literature and Film and Theatre from the University of Reading and now lives in Shropshire.