The Lady or the Dame: Class and Contradiction in Vera Caspary's Laura

Abstract: Vera Caspary's 1942 novel Laura is uniquely positioned to illuminate the complexities of class in US literature during WWII. Scholarship on Laura tends to be written with a focus on gender, but I supplement those studies with attention to class. Caspary's own disenchantment with Communism while writing Laura infuses the novel with a knowing sense of contradiction and intertextual hybridity. Multiple narrators interweave highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow style, leaving us wondering whether one or another is the primary voice of the novel. Caspary employs class types only to unravel any stable sense of what class is.