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
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’.