The Goldfinch and the Stewardess

The literary world has been engaged in a hearty dialogue over the merits and deficiencies of Donna Tartt’s massive novel The Goldfinch, which spent more than 30 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. Rave reviews of the book’s range and rich plot have confronted scathing condemnations of its cloying stock characters and overstuffed passages. We won’t rehearse the whole controversy. Let’s home in on a single word usage:

“I was asleep almost before the seat belt light went off—missing drinks, missing dinner, missing the in-flight movies—waking only when the shades were pulled up and light flooded the cabin and the stewardess came pushing her cart through with our pre-packaged breakfasts: chilled twig of grapes; chilled cup of juice; lardy, yolk-yellow, cellophane-wrapped croissant; and our choice of coffee or tea.”

The speaker is Theo Decker, a millennial if there ever was one. In the terrorist explosion that kills his mother when he is 13, there are “cellphones strewn across the floor,” and references abound to a post-9/11 world. The transatlantic plane on which he is traveling, in the passage above, serves a breakfast very much like the one I got on my recent trip home from Italy, and very unlike the ones being served on transatlantic flights in, say, 1970.

The Goldfinch has been universally described as “Dickensian,” and Tartt signals her indebtedness to Boz throughout the book. So despite Theo’s lack of formal education and a formative social milieu inhabited largely by petty thieves, woodworkers, and drug dealers, the reader tends to accept a certain filigreed diction in the first-person narrative:

Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent.

Fine. But back to that airplane cabin. The legal history of airline cabin service is messy and, for several decades, appalling.  Once the major carriers discovered that they could use the images of nubile attendants to promote their transportation services to the businessmen who were their chief clientele, they fought tooth and nail against Equal Employment Opportunity rulings and Title VII legislation to preserve sex, weight, age, and appearance restrictions. “It’s the sex thing,” one airline executive said. “Put a dog on an airplane and 20 businessmen will be sore for a month.” But that was in 1965, when U.S. Representative James H. Scheuer, Democrat of New York, commanded the stewardesses who were suing under Title VII to “stand up, so we can see the dimensions of the problem.”

Theo Decker wasn’t around in 1965. He wasn’t around in 1973, when a federal court ruling finally swept away unequal treatment of flight attendants, opening the gates for the more diverse crews we now see every time we fly.  The term flight attendant began to replace stewardess, not only because of pejorative implications of a label that had come with quips like “Coffee, tea, or me?” and “Fly me to Bermuda,” but also because male flight attendants had begun entering the profession in large numbers.

By the time Theo Decker was born, presumably sometime between 1988 and 1995, at least one-fifth of cabin crews were men; that demographic has grown to more than a quarter, close to half on some airlines. Like my sons, who were born during those years, Theo would have heard only the term flight attendant for the people bringing him breakfast on the airplane.

So where did Tartt get stewardess? Not from Dickens; he never flew on a plane. Earlier mentions in the book (“a crisp stewardessy guide”; a father’s smile “that sometimes made stewardesses bump him up to first class”) could have emerged from the clichéd mid-20^th century image of the stewardess. But not Theo’s contemporary flight encounter. Could it be a simple slip of the tongue? But Tartt herself was born in 1963 and so grew up mostly with  flight attendant as the prevalent term.

My own theory, judging from other aspects of the book’s plot and characterizations, is that Tartt is leaning, not just on Dickens, but also on the male coming-of-age literary heavyweights of the mid-20th century: Bellow, Salinger, Updike, Roth. The picaresque adventures of the male hero, the feathery lightness of the female characters, the indulgences of the dark side, the ennobling effects of art: They all fit those guys as well as Dickens. Stewardess is their word. What exactly, then, is it doing in The Goldfinch?