All 50 Uses of
bourgeois
in
Steppenwolf
- Don't you smell it too, a fragrance given off by the odor of floor polish and a faint whiff of turpentine together with the mahogany and the washed leaves of the plants—the very essence of bourgeois cleanliness, of neatness and meticulousness, of duty and devotion shown in little things.†
- My dear sir, I would not for the world laugh at the bourgeois life.†
- But I came to see more and more that from the empty spaces of his lone wolfishness he actually really admired and loved our little bourgeois world as something solid and secure, as the home and peace which must ever remain far and unattainable, with no road leading from him to them.†
- So I went down the stairs from my room in the attic, those difficult stairs of this alien world, those thoroughly bourgeois, well-swept and scoured stairs of a very respectable three-family apartment house under whose roof I have my refuge.†
- It still remains to elucidate the Steppenwolf as an isolated phenomenon, in his relation, for example, to the bourgeois world, so that his symptoms may be traced to their source.†
- Let us take as a starting point, since it offers itself, his relation to the bourgeoisie.†
- Besides this, he was secretly and persistently attracted to the little bourgeois world, to those quiet and respectable homes with tidy gardens ... and their whole modest air of order and comfort.
*bourgeois = typical of the middle class
- It pleased him to set himself outside it, with his little vices and extravagances, as a queer fellow or a genius, but he never had his domicile in those provinces of life where the bourgeoisie had ceased to exist.†
- He was capable of loving the political criminal, the revolutionary or intellectual seducer, the outlaw of state and society, as his brother, but as for theft and robbery, murder and rape, be would not have known how to deplore them otherwise than in a thoroughly bourgeois manner.†
- Now what we call "bourgeois," when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance.†
- Now it is between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk.†
- Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be).†
- The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule.†
- Yet we see that, though in times when commanding natures are uppermost, the bourgeois goes at once to the wall, he never goes under; indeed at times he even appears to rule the world.†
- Nevertheless the bourgeoisie prospers.†
- In fact, the vital force of the bourgeoisie resides by no means in the qualities of its normal members, but in those of its extremely numerous "outsiders" who by virtue of the extensiveness and elasticity of its ideals it can embrace.†
- He who is developed far beyond the level possible to the bourgeois, he who knows the bliss of meditation no less than the gloomy joys of hatred and self-hatred, he who despises law, virtue and common sense, is nevertheless captive to the bourgeoisie and cannot escape it.†
- He who is developed far beyond the level possible to the bourgeois, he who knows the bliss of meditation no less than the gloomy joys of hatred and self-hatred, he who despises law, virtue and common sense, is nevertheless captive to the bourgeoisie and cannot escape it.†
- And so all through the mass of the real bourgeoisie are interposed numerous layers of humanity, many thousands of lives and minds, every one of whom, it is true, would have outgrown it and have obeyed the call to unconditioned life, were they not fastened to it by sentiments of their childhood and infected for the most part with its less intense life; and so they are kept lingering, obedient and bound by obligation and service.†
- For with the bourgeoisie the opposite of the formula for the great is true: He who is not against me is with me.†
- If we now pause to test the soul of the Steppenwolf, we find him distinct from the bourgeois in the higher development of his individuality—for all extreme individuation turns against itself, intent upon its own destruction.†
- The parent constellation of the bourgeoisie binds him with its spell.†
- Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic.†
- Despising the bourgeoisie, and yet belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live.†
- The others, however, who remain in the fold and from whose talents the bourgeoisie reaps much gain, have a third kingdom left open to them, an imaginary and yet a sovereign world, humor.†
- Humor has always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois is incapable of understanding it.†
- Humor has always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois is incapable of understanding it.†
- Here it is possible not only to extol the saint and the profligate in one breath and to make the poles meet, but to include the bourgeois, too, in the same affirmation.†
- Now it is possible to be possessed by God and to affirm the sinner, and vice versa, but it is not possible for either saint or sinner (or for any other of the unconditioned) to affirm as well that lukewarm mean, the bourgeois.†
- It would, it is true, keep him forever tied to the bourgeois world, but his suffering would be bearable and productive.†
- His relation to the bourgeois world would lose its sentimentality both in its love and in its hatred, and his bondage to it would cease to cause him the continual torture of shame.†
- His fate brings them on, leaving him no choice; for those outside of the bourgeoisie live in the atmosphere of these magic possibilities.†
- "Man," whatever people think of him, is never anything more than a temporary bourgeois compromise.†
- The "man" of this concordat, like every other bourgeois ideal, is a compromise, a timid and artlessly sly experiment, with the aim of cheating both the angry primal mother Nature and the troublesome primal father Spirit of their pressing claims, and of living in a temperate zone between the two of them.†
- For this reason the bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.†
- What, however, he calls the "man" in himself, as opposed to the wolf, is to a great extent nothing else than this very same average man of the bourgeois convention.†
- Though the goal of manhood is better known to him than to the bourgeois, still he shuts his eyes.†
- When he worships his favorites among the immortals, Mozart, perchance, he always looks at him in the long run through bourgeois eyes.†
- His tendency is to explain Mozart's perfected being, just as a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the Garden of Gethsemane.†
- His tendency is to explain Mozart's perfected being, just as a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the Garden of Gethsemane.†
- It is as much a matter for surprise and sorrow that men of such possibilities should fall back on Steppenwolves and "Two souls, alas!" as that they reveal so often that pitiful love for the bourgeoisie.†
- A man who can understand Buddha and has an intuition of the heaven and hell of humanity ought not to live in a world ruled by "common sense" and democracy and bourgeois standards.†
- It is only from cowardice that he lives in it; and when its dimensions are too cramping for him and the bourgeois parlor too confining, he lays it at the wolf's door, and refuses to see that the wolf is as often as not the best part of him.†
- And he cannot see that this whole world, this Eden and its manifestations of beauty and terror, of greatness and meanness, of strength and tenderness is crushed and imprisoned by the wolf legend just as the real man in him is crushed and imprisoned by that sham existence, the bourgeois.†
- Looked at with the bourgeois eye, my life had been a continuous descent from one shattering to the next that left me more remote at every step from all that was normal, permissible and healthful.†
- I stood outside all social circles, alone, beloved by none, mistrusted by many, in unceasing and bitter conflict with public opinion and morality; and though I lived in a bourgeois setting, I was all the same an utter stranger to this world in all I thought and felt.†
- At bottom, however, he was a bourgeois who took exception to a life like Hermine's and was much annoyed over the nights thrown away in a restaurant and the money squandered there, and had them on his conscience.†
- And yet I clung to him all the same, or to the mask of him that was already falling away, clung to his coquetting with the spiritual, to his bourgeois horror of the disorderly and accidental (to which death, too, belonged) and compared the new Harry—the somewhat timid and ludicrous dilettante of the dance rooms—scornfully and enviously with the old one in whose ideal and lying portrait he had since discovered all those fatal characteristics which had upset him that night so grievously…†
- He himself, the old Harry, had been just such a bourgeois idealization of Goethe, a spiritual champion whose all-too-noble gaze shone with the unction of elevated thought and humanity, until he was almost overcome by his own nobleness of mind!†
- Assiduous and busy, care-ridden and light-hearted, intelligent and yet thoughtless, these butterflies lived a life at once childlike and raffine; independent, not to be bought by every one, finding their account in good luck and fine weather, in love with life and yet clinging to it far less than the bourgeois, always ready to follow a fairy prince to his castle, always certain, though scarcely conscious of it, that a difficult and sad end was in store for them.†
Definition:
-
(bourgeois) typical of the middle class or their values and habits - typically used disapprovingly
or (in Marxist theory):
typical of the property-owning classeditor's notes: Bourgeois is often used to refer to the values of the upper middle class. You may also see the term petit bourgeois to describe very small business owners.
Note that bourgeois, bourgeoisie, and bourgeoise are often interchanged.
Bourgeois is most common and can be used as an adjective or a noun. Bourgeoisie is typically used only as a noun, and bourgeoise is occasionally used as an alternate spelling of bourgeois.