One of the best ways to characterise both an individual and the society they come from at the same time is by showing that character acting in the ways which their background expects them to. There are multiple aspects of this: religion, folk beliefs, historical and national narratives, opinions on art, on politics, on material conditions. Each of these will be determined by the place a character comes from, the people who raised and taught them, and their relationships with those mentors and teachers.
But this is all really complicated stuff taken all at once. People in general tend to be complicated. When shaping a character this way, sometimes it’s best to do so in broad categories – to divide a general culture or group of people into various groups, and use those groups to determine what a given member of that category is supposed to be like.
One of the easiest and most intuitive ways to do this – at least for most of us – is through social class.
Class is, for lack of a better term, your rough position within your society which serves as a determination of how you live on a day-to-day basis. It determines the expectations which society demands of you, it determines the power you possess, and it determines a lot of the basic course of your life throughout a day, or a month, or a year. Even within the same society, social class does more to determines your material conditions more than anything else – and it is these conditions which shape how a person thinks, talks, and acts.
What do I mean by this? Let’s take an example from my own work: the Tierran Aristocracy. The class itself is defined almost entirely by birth, but the circumstances of that birth leads to the other assumptions that define that class. A Tierran aristocrat is almost certainly born to comfortable surroundings. They will grow up educated by tutors and waited upon by servants. They will look forward to inheriting an estate or be entitled to a dowry which is supposed to look after their direct monetary needs. They are expected to hold power and make important decisions over those who are supposed to be inferior to them – decisions which are supposed to be obeyed without question. Their most important virtue is their personal honour, which is supposed to represent the quality of their character, and determines whether they are taken at their word and whether they are able to win the support and friendship of other members of their class. This is true for both male and female aristocrats, from the highest levels of the Cortes Nobility, to the humblest untitled member of the landed gentry.
So, let’s break this down bit by bit, and see what it can tell us about how a character from this class behaves – and what it tells us about the society which creates characters like this.
First of all: material comfort. To a Tierran aristocrat, money is supposed to be no object. An income, from some independent source, is taken for granted. There is no need to work for a living, which means doing so is seen as unfit for a member of that class. This tells us a lot of things already: that a Tierran aristocrat is not familiar with and is not expected to respect manual labour, that they are not expected to worry or think about their finances, and that they see the maintenance of their standard of living as more important than financial security – which means a lot of them are in debt, giving them more reason not to ever talk about their finances.
That ties into the second aspect of the class character of the Tierran Aristocracy: the sense of personal honour and reputation, of how other people in their class see them. If this is so valuable, that means the defence of it must be a top priority for any upstanding member of this class. Every admission of failure or weakness must be avoided. Anyone who insinuates any form of failure of weakness – be it moral or physical – must be answered with massive and drastic retaliation. That’s why Tierra has a dueling culture – and before that, a culture of blood feuds. As a result, Tierran aristocrats speak in a very circumspect, precise way, often using four words to say what others could say in one – just to prevent themselves from accidentally (or intentionally) insulting one of their peers in a way which leads to a potentially fatal conflict.
But why is honour so important? That’s where the need to wield power comes from. The Tierran Aristocracy, as a class, are the political elites of the Unified Kingdom. But because of the way the Cortes functions, with each noble house possessing only a single vote, the most powerful form of political power is influence over others who also possess votes. While money and favours and the normal backroom carrots and sticks are all available, there is also the matter of how much a given aristocrat can be trusted to uphold their bargains, to act wisely, and to do what they promise. This is where personal honour comes in. When that honour is seen as proof of whether a given aristocrat is trustworthy, that makes it the most important thing a politically active aristocrat can have.
-and all Tierran aristocrats are politically active to some extent. Because they are expected to give orders and to command those considered their lesser – and because they rely primarily on the income which those “lessers” pay them in the form of rent, they are required to possess the personal credibility – the honour – to be respected in their decisions and their leadership, which means they have to carefully protect their personal honour, which means they have to never talk about their finances or anything else which might show weakness – or inadvertently reveal the weakness of a potential enemy. It also means they have to show “strength” in a way, because if everyone else in their class is living a certain way, then they have to do the same or else inadvertently reveal weakness, damage their own honour, and thus destroy their own credibility as a leader.
So, from all this, you can see how a basic set of material conditions create a whole code of behaviours and a whole way of thinking which doesn’t necessarily make sense to us (we would probably consider your average Tierran aristocrat to be an extravagant spendthrift with a hair-trigger temper whose words circle around each other like a spirograph), but absolutely makes sense in their own heads – which goes on to inform everything else they do.
This gives us an archetype – a “certain type of guy”, as some people would put it – who is acts a certain way because they are expected to act a certain way. At the same time, you can also play with this archetype by having individual characters subvert, or even take these class markers to extremes. The Duke of Warburton does willingly and casually admit weakness, but that shows he’s so rich and so sure of himself it almost becomes a form of bravado. Baron Meran’s obsession with honour clashes with his love of gambling, to the degree that it digs him deeper and deeper into a hole he can’t get out of by himself. Davis d’al Elson is so afraid of dishonour that he sacrifices literally everything to avoid it. All of them are iterations on the same theme, and all of them play with it in their own way to make them characters in their own right – but still unquestionably members of their class.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to characters who exist comfortably within the boundaries of that class. Social categories are messy things. Caius d’al Cazarosta isn’t an aristocrat – but he was educated like one – so he combines an aristocrat’s sense of command, appearance, and register of speech with a sense of cynical bluntness which makes it clear that he is not one. Cedric Lewes will never be mistaken for an aristocrat, but is required to fight alongside them, which makes him wary and touchy in his own way when it comes to those he no longer quite sees as his superiors.
All these characters exist in relation to the same arrangement of behaviours, interests, and mindsets which serve as the norms for a particular class of people in a particular society. It’s only because of the existence of that archetype that all of these characters can seem like individuals within the same part of society. As a result, I can use those characters to examine in turn how – for example – the extremely wealthy and powerful can simply flout social norms, or how those same norms can trap less powerful members into self-destructive behaviour, or how those outside that class relate to it. This is a huge part of what makes a fictional society come alive, this interlocking set of dynamics which determines how characters interact with each other as both characters and products of those same dynamics and the behaviours they adhere to for the sake of trying to keep within the bounds of those dynamics.
That being said, this is just one example, from my own work no less. You will obviously have your own ideas on how to create the social classes for your fictional society, not just copy mine, so I’m going to finish this off with some general tips – which are also caveats.
First of all, remember that different societies have different social classes and different ways of delineating social class, and that this is also a form of worldbuilding. For example, in Britain, the “Middle Class” is determined by profession, whereas in North America, it’s determined by income and possessions. This tells us not only that the UK and North America are different societies, but also that the former might value the prestige of an occupation than the material conditions derived from it. Notably, the British class system traditionally puts landowners at the top, whereas most parts of North America have long-since elevated industrialists, corporate executives, and other occupations that make lots of money regardless of method to the apex. The way a society demarcates class also shows what that society values.
Secondly, it’s important to remember that just because a social class exists, doesn’t mean everyone in it is going to think exactly the same, especially because there are going to internal ranks within that class as well. To go back to my own Dragoon Saga, you can see how the Tierran Aristocracy is itself divided into low and high (or Cortes) nobility, and how the level of wealth and influence within those subcategories also affect behaviour. In general, those who feel more likely to fall out of a class tend to be more anxious about their status. We can see this with – for example – the so-called “nouveau riche” spending extravagantly to advertise their newly gained position as members of an economic upper class, or (for a historical example), how poor whites were often the strongest defenders of slavery and segregation, because it was what kept them within a privileged class.
Of course, privilege in one sense doesn’t mean privilege in all senses. Other factors of culture like wealth, religion, gender, and political power also affect how classes relate to each other. While we in modern capitalist societies are used to the idea of seeing money as the primary indicator of social class, this was not always the case. For example, in early modern and medieval Europe, the clergy as a class often possessed certain privileges, from the wealthiest Prince-Archbishops to the poorest parish priests. In early modern (and to some extent, even after) Japan, the military aristocracy – the Samurai – possessed certain privileges based on their ability to commit violence, even when extended periods of peace made them poorer even than some peasants.
Of course, this works the other way as well. When a formerly humble or low-status class is somehow able to gain power or prestige, their position also changes, as does their behaviour and material culture. The Janissaries and Mamluks of the Middle East began as slave-soldiers, but because they were able to use their positions as reliable and effective military forces in a time of conflict to amass prestige and power, they rose in status until they were able to dictate terms to the Ottoman Sultans and rule early modern Egypt respectively. Changing cultural mores and outside conditions can cause shifts in class status. Over the past few centuries, we’ve seen industrialists and merchants reach the apex of our society, while large landowners have either ceased to exist, or have been subsumed into those same merchant classes (in the form of agribusinesses). Money has become a force multiplier, reducing the importance of individual farmers and professional soldiers. The lords and knights of the medieval become members of the middle class in our own society, where money has taken the place of food and naked violence as the currency of power.
This has, once again, sort of degenerated into something more like a collection of thoughts rather than a coherent essay. Perhaps that’s really the only way to talk about a topic this complicated without spinning it out a thousand ways. Once again, all the normal caveats apply: I’m mostly talking from my own experience and knowledge. That base of understanding is biased! It has blind spots! And it probably won’t necessarily match with your own experiences or readings, especially on a topic this complicated. However, I hope that despite that, you’ve been able to gain some insight in how I, as a writer and worldbuilder, think about social class in fictional and historical societies.
Maybe I should write about something simpler next month?
Paul Wang 