Status 

Charles McGrath has written about the American novel echoing the British themes of status—position, wealth, or class—focusing on the position of women, for example, or the class ladder or the destructive stratification of class. Status is not just an unfortunate and artificial offshoot of economic development, as most living creatures of any complexity employ it as an element of communication, economy, and survival both among themselves and among other species. Humans are among the most mental and social creatures, with abilities to communicate that are constantly evolving, causing our ideas of status to concern other things besides just class and wealth, including occupational prestige, power, social stratification, dominance, etc.  

American culture traditionally emphasizes economic mobility, a fact that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about in Democracy in America from his travels in the 1830s. He admired aspects of this culture, seeing Americans as venturesome conservatives, yet with too many being strangely cut off from their families and even their own lives. He described Americans as “almost equals,” for whom life was short and uncertain and involved a rootless chase of acquisition and speculation. Our own writer of that period, James Fenimore Cooper deplored the same thing. Dickens did as well in his American Notes when he wrote that in their giddy quest for money, Americans had unlearned playing, reflecting, and resting. All of this was especially evident during the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and his handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren. Despite their populist hatred of the Second Bank of the United States and of rampant capital speculation, they could do little but lament the depression of 1837.