Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 4 Number 1, April 2003

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Humble, Nicola, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 272, ISBN 0-19-818676-2, HB price £45.00

Reviewed by

Paula Redway

 

Sandwiched between 'high' and 'low' writing, 'middlebrow' literature has typically been disregarded by the critical establishment. Yet, Humble argues, its precarious position between these two extremities is not the primary reason why its importance has been overlooked.  The issue, she contends, is rather that it was largely written and consumed by women.  Previously, critics have attempted to elevate the work of inter-war female writers by alluding to experimental, symbolist, or anti-traditionalist elements in their work.   However, Humble decries the practice of retrospectively labelling of works as ‘modernist’ in order to justify their value, disputing that the contemporary reading public would have been acquainted with the term.  Reminding us that Virginia Woolf herself compared her work to that of Rose Macaulay and Rosamund Lehman - and was particularly jealous of Katherine Mansfield’s talent - she contends that middlebrow literature cannot be judged by such elementary terms as ‘radical’ or ‘institutional’, as it is an essential blend of the two.  Whilst, for instance, it may poke fun at the conventions of upper-class etiquette, she argues that it simultaneously perpetuates them, letting the reader into the ‘secrets of their codes’.

 

Humble is therefore eager to demonstrate that defining the parameters of the ‘middlebrow’ is more problematic, as it largely depends upon the standpoint of the reader and the way in which they interact with the text.  She prefers to consider that books which fit into this category all embrace a positive dynamic quality (that overly-intellectual literature or writing that endorses reading passivity lacks) which allows them to continually remake themselves (and consequently the values of their readers) via a reciprocal interpretative process she describes as a ‘curious symbiosis’.  In a refreshing attempt to draw out the more authentic significance of this popular cross-genre body of writing, she therefore enables us to engage with a quasi-social thematic history of the period from the perspective of the reading public rather than, as is customary, writers and literary critics.  In short, the value of middlebrow writing, for Humble, is that it at once constituted and was constituted by the cultural forces of a growing proportion of the population, by both inspiring and reflecting shifts in middle-class ideologies.

 

Clearly writing as an enthusiastic reader herself, her approach invites us to succumb to the pleasures of ‘pure self-indulgence’ rather than the duties of the ‘spirit of analysis’ when embarking on her voyage of rediscovery of over sixty unearthed ‘middlebrow’ novels written by over thirty-five different (predominantly female) authors during the 1920s-1950s.  Employing a ‘traditional literary-critical focus on the close reading of texts’, she allows fictions to speak for themselves by including numerous lengthy and often humorous quotations, whilst keeping comment to a minimum.  Her thematically organised chapters and unconstrained style are easy to digest and you do not have to have read the books to which she refers in order to appreciate her text.  However, she acts as a inspiring guide and encourages her audience to delve into them in more depth for themselves.

 

Although no great effort is required to grasp Humble’s arguments, she has a stimulating talent for challenging preconceptions.  For example, she questions the accepted viewpoint that women began to wear trousers as a result of post-war masculinisation, declaring instead that they accentuated female physical attributes in a more provocative way than skirts and dresses had done.  Without so much as a mention of Marx, she discusses class and gender roles in an original way, based on changing cultural signification.  With a firm belief that ‘what class you are will always depend on who is judging you’, she escorts the reader through the maze of signs and symbols that were used during the first half of the twentieth century to affirm social standing.  Whilst she accepts that status was previously linked most strongly with income, she argues that the rise of new technologies and economic stability levelled out the pay of the middle and lower classes.  Consequently, the ‘correct’ use of language (knowing, for example, the distinction between the words ‘looking glass’ and ‘mirror’), accent, manners, dress sense and taste (it was much more respectable to have a Setter instead of a Scottie for a pet!) became the greater distinguishing social factors.  People’s identity, Humble argues, was no longer guaranteed by their family background, after the war, but was instead more mutable; class was something you could acquire by appropriating the right gestures.  Whether you agree with her or not is not the point; she encourages us to take an active role when reading by seeking out ‘middlebrow’ subtleties and taking pleasure in their contradictions.

 

This book is well researched and contains interesting and detailed footnotes taken from an extensive collection of non-fiction-based primary sources such as childcare manuals, Mass-observation reports, magazines, cartoons and market research reports. However, it is unfortunate that Humble makes little use of wider comparisons with other literature in order to give further weight to her reasoning.  An examination of the differences in style and form between modernist, middlebrow and lowbrow writings would have made it easier to defend ‘middlebrow’ as a separate, if generic, identity.  It would also have been interesting if she had made room for an explanation about why there wasn’t a ‘masculine’ middlebrow.  Whilst it is commendable that she tries to imagine the perspectives that readers would have taken during the period under consideration, Humble includes very few actual readings from the time (personal diary records may have provided these) and remains uncritical of her own position, which is, for the most part, lacking in a clear theoretical framework and akin to that of an omniscient narrator.  As a result, her assertion that middlebrow literature influenced inter-war ideologies to such a great extent is not entirely convincing.  Even middlebrow fiction retained an element of escapism as it clung to the Victorian themes of the solid bond of marriage and the joy of having large families at a time when the divorce rate was rising steadily and the average family were having just two children!  

 

To her credit, however, Humble’s traditional critical approach does enable the reader to have a more ‘symbiotic’ relation to her text than one which is theory-led and she may well have deliberately omitted some areas of discussion in order to develop them in a future study.  To summarise: this book is well worth taking the time to enjoy and, in so far as it has its own dynamic relation with the reader, it is truly ‘middlebrow’.