The Middle Class in the Great Depression

Popular Women's Novels of the 1930s

Jennifer Haytock

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349456345, 9781137309167
• eBook ISBN: 9781137347206
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In contrast to most studies of literature from the Great Depression which focus on representations of poverty, labor, and radicalism, this project analyzes popular representations of middle class life.

C H A P T E R 1

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History, Normalcy, and Daily Life: Margaret Ayer Barnes and Jessie Redmon Fauset

Many popular middlebrow novels by and for women invested themselves in the ordinary, the usual, and the expected; this often meant they focused on stories of courtship, marriage, and parenting. While women were participating significantly in work outside the home in the 1930s, as I discuss in chapter 5, many women, particularly those of the middle- and upper-classes, saw themselves primarily as wives and mothers. Thus novels about women pursuing these roles had widespread appeal and spoke to their readers’ most important hopes and fears. As Janice Radway reminds us, middlebrow novels offer “pleasures” (12) that are often those of character and plot—of liking the characters one reads about, about being interested in their decisions and the events that happen to them, of hoping for happy endings for sympathetic characters and unhappy ones for the unlikeable. These characters and plots walk a line of being similar enough to readers and their experiences to create a connection and investment while often differing enough to allow escape from the tedious aspects of readers’ lives. At the same time, authors make certain assumptions that may remain largely invisible to readers precisely because they are the same assumptions that white middle-class readers make about their lives and in their fantasies. In the early part of the twentieth century, such assumptions often grew out of the pseudo-scientific and highly influential concept of the “normal,” which teased themselves into readers’ and characters’ understanding of ordinary material life. In this chapter, I explore three middlebrow novels by and about women published in the early years of the 1930s: Margaret Ayer Barnes’s Years of Grace (1930) and Within This Present (1933), and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Comedy, American Style (1933). I argue that Barnes’s novels, while relating stories of normal women, reveal the assumptions and constructedness of the normal; Fauset’s novel, however, presents characters seeking the “normality” of middle-class life while directly confronting one of the assumptions that Barnes’s novels largely hide: the primacy of whiteness.

As novels about marriage and childrearing, these texts belong to a tradition of women’s writing as old as the novel itself. Sentimental, realist, domestic: these categories of fiction have been vital to female experience since the eighteenth century as they portray and shape women’s experiences of everyday life. By the 1930s, the realist domestic novel was well established as a form, yet the relationships it portrayed changed as social understandings of marriage evolved in the early years of the twentieth century. In Making Marriage Modern, Christina Simmons recounts the historical impetuses toward a new understanding of marriage during this period, including the influences of such leading and disparate social thinkers as Judge Ben Lindsey, Margaret Sanger, Floyd Dell, W. E. B. DuBois, E. Franklin Frazier, and more. She identifies the new marriage, though not identically conceived by all of these figures, as characterized by “sexual intimacy” and “the freedom and privacy of the couple” and as ideologically, if not actually, compatible with “equality for women” (125–34). Facilitated by the increased availability of birth control and divorce, the companionate marriage “made psychological and sexual compatibility fundamental” (124). Sexual intimacy became a prominent part of the definition of love.

While Simmons notes the connection of the companionate marriage to the belief in the “superiority of modern American culture” (134), Julian B. Carter argues that the new marriage ideal equated heterosexuality and whiteness. In The Heart of Whiteness, he insists that in the 1920s, public conversations about heterosexuality reinforced, even created, definitions of whiteness, and definitions of normalcy or normality developed through both. With the rise of the social sciences in the early twentieth century came the impulse to measure human behavior and thus to determine what was normal. The act of measuring, however, became the act of determining. Faced with perceived threats presented by new sets of immigrants and by the economic rise of African Americans, many native-born, white Americans felt pressured to preserve their status and values as normal. Carter suggests that “normality discourse tended to focus on marriage, love, and babies” (11) as part of eugenic visions of the future and as behaviors that created whiteness.

Marriage, love, and babies are subjects endemic to women’s stories. Understanding the ideal, if not the practice, of the companionate marriage and the construction of whiteness and normality illuminates the women’s novels discussed in this chapter; both concepts, arising in the 1920s, continued to influence thinking in the 1930s. Barnes’s and Fauset’s novels reveal the assumptions that middle-class life depends on, particularly those about race, gender, sexuality, and the privileges that come with money and status. Barnes represents the normal explicitly and with minimal challenge; for her, normalcy functioned as a way to define and inhabit identity. In contrast, Fauset portrays characters damaged by and constantly seeking normal lives. I chose these texts because of their popularity at the time and because the middle-class experiences they represent would most likely be obvious to readers then and now. Further, all three novels depict individuals or families over a span of time; consequently, their authors provide a historical context for the normal life they represent. Although in the early years of the Great Depression, Barnes and Fauset could not know the extent of the suffering and the long-term consequences of the decade, they knew enough to recognize the uncertainty of the future. Hence their backward perspectives serve dual purposes: they comfort middle-class readers by reminding them of earlier good times, and they orient readers to darker days ahead.

BARNES’S YEARS OF GRACE: DEFINING THE “NORMAL”

Now a forgotten writer, Margaret Ayer Barnes won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for her first novel, Years of Grace. Born in Chicago in 1886, Margaret Ayer graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1907. She married Cecil Barnes, a Chicago lawyer, in 1910, and they had three sons. Her sister, Janet Ayer Fairbank, was a novelist and leader in the women’s suffrage movement (Taylor 28). According to her biographer, Lloyd C. Taylor Jr., in 1920, Barnes was appointed to a three-year term as Bryn Mawr’s alumna director, and she was part of an advisory board that initiated the Bryn Mawr Working Woman’s College in the summer of 1921. This two-month summer program offered courses for working women, defined to be those who “worked with machinery or on the assembly line” (Taylor 20). The program was a success and continued until 1938 (with the exception of the summer of 1935). Barnes was thus familiar with prominent women and with less privileged women who wished to better themselves. She began her writing career after she broke her skull, back, and three ribs in an automobile accident when she was forty years old, and her friend Edward Sheldon encouraged her to take up writing. She produced short stories and, with Sheldon in 1928, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which was staged successfully and then made into a film. Two years later she published Years of Grace, followed by four more novels in the 1930s. Though a bestseller in its time,¹ Years of Grace is now out of print and neglected.²

The novel focuses on the ordinariness of its main character’s lifetime experiences. It follows Jane Ward Carver from her teenage romance until she settles into middle age, married with grandchildren. As the novel begins in 1891, fourteen-year-old Jane’s world is filled with her family, her friends, and her first love. Jane later attends Bryn Mawr College for two years and then marries the banker Stephen Carver, after which the novel jumps fifteen years, to Jane as a mother of three children. Largely complacent in her comfortable suburban life, she is caught off-guard by her attraction to her friend’s husband but chooses to remain in her marriage. The story then follows Jane’s reactions to the choices of her adult children as she is reduced largely to the role of bystander.

Years of Grace is the kind of book that scholars do not tend to talk about. It is realist in the modernist era; Peter Conn describes it as “a chronicle of ordinary events on ordinary days” (45). The novel sprawls through a woman’s daily life throughout her lifetime rather than slices into a key moment or adventure in a modernist hero’s experience, and it looks without irony at the question of how to live decently. Its narrative strategies indicate its investment in the popular literary marketplace rather than in the modernist literary innovations that tend to alienate readers; that is, it belongs to the category of the middlebrow. Jane Ward Carver is not a radical or an overt feminist. She attends college at a time when educated women are considered an anomaly, but she unquestioningly accepts marriage as her desired fate. She sees the poverty of city life but has no impulse to reform social injustices. As an adult, she lives safely in the suburbs and brings up her children in the comfort of wealth. The twists and turns of the plot are probably not dramatic to readers, though they are to Jane. Rather, the novel immerses the reader in the ordinary experience of friendships, courtships, marriage, and parenting. Barnes emphasizes relationships, but most dominant in the novel is Jane herself—her reactions, her choices, her reflections—at different stages in life. Yet as Taylor notes, Barnes “demonstrated clearly that she believed that social conformity never led to a total satisfaction or complete happiness; at best, she thought it brought ‘peace without victory’” (130). The novel recognizes that many of Jane’s choices are compromises, and Jane’s daily experiences have a persistent underlying thread of loss.

Jane’s life is built upon a definition of normality that depends on assumptions about Americanness, class status, racial identity, and sexual behavior. That is, the ordinariness of her life can be established only through identification of what is not normal. National identity, class, race, and sexual behavior are represented as tied together; according to the primary social arbiters in the novel, “wrongness” in any category functions as a sign of the “not normal.” According to Mrs. Ward and Jane’s older sister Isabel, the two voices who dominate Jane’s world, her four girlhood companions all have something wrong with them. Jane has absorbed enough of her mother’s perspective to recognize that André Duroy, her first love, is not acceptable because he is “French and a Roman Catholic and went to church in the Holy Name Cathedral and lived in a little flat in the Saint James Apartments and had an English mother who wore a funny-looking feather boa and a French father who was a consul, whatever that was, and spoke broken English and didn’t know many people” (8). From the same sources, Jane knows that her friend Agnes Johnson lives on the wrong side of Lincoln Park and suffers from the handicap of having a mother who works as “somebody’s secretary” (4). Even Muriel Lester and Flora Furness, the friends of whom her mother and sister approve, have something “wrong” with them, “subtle things that didn’t seem to make much difference. Nevertheless they caused comment” (5): Muriel’s grandfather is “frankly Hebraic” (6), and Flora’s mother is pretty and “fashionable,” attends lots of parties, and spends too much time with the dashing Bert Lancaster (5). In the novel, being normal means being American, upper class, white, and sexually chaste, and vice versa. Deviations from established norms often do not have practical or visible consequences for characters, yet they are all noted and drilled into Jane’s consciousness as difference.

Years of Grace builds American identity through contrast with “foreignness.” André’s intellectualism and artistic talent are largely attributed to his French and British background. Although fourteen-year-old Jane finds these attributes appealing and exciting, her mother and sister insist on his difference, and when he lends Jane La Dame aux Camellias, he provokes their outrage. As Mrs. Ward says, “It’s not a nice book for a little girl to read” (20). It does not help that the play is associated with Sarah Bernhardt, whom Isabel describes as “immoral” (22). Isabel claims, “French people are different [ . . . ]. They don’t mind things like that” (23). Americans, Isabel implies, do mind “things like that,” and they keep their national character by policing their morals and particularly their sexuality. A visit by Jane and her friends to the Chicago World’s Fair reinforces the problem of foreignness. They see exhibits from various European countries and less orderly displays on the Midway, where the gypsy fortune-tellers appear and where Mrs. Lester must “[shepherd] them safely past the hoochee-couchee dances and the perils of the Dahomey Village to the more adequately clothed Eskimos” (52). Foreignness is consistently associated with sexual impropriety. At the World’s Fair, Mr. Furness comes face-to-face with his wife’s affair with Bert Lancaster as the lovers float down one of the canals of “Venice” in a gondola. National difference and sexual irregularity become metaphors for each other.

In addition to signifying sexual impropriety, immigrants in the novel threaten the national future by disrupting the parenting habits of native-born Americans. When the adult Jane, on her first trip alone, visits her friend Agnes in a poor or at least Bohemian neighborhood in New York City, foreignness is signified by “dark-haired” women (264) and a “little olive-faced girl” (265), who are clearly poor and loud and have intrusive customs. Their presence is heralded by the “odor of cooking cabbage” (266), a common signifier of Eastern Europeans in early twentieth-century literature. Once safely with Agnes and her family, Jane enjoys the Italian restaurant at which they eat dinner, almost as if it were part of the World’s Fair years ago, although she notes the noisiness of the restaurant and the children, including Agnes’s daughter, awake beyond their bedtimes. Jane registers foreign customs as catching and threatening to the proper upbringing of a child and hence dangerous to the future of American life. Indeed, this meeting between Jane and Agnes’s husband Jimmy Trent almost leads to their affair and does inspire Jimmy to abandon his family, leaving Agnes to raise their daughter alone.

Further, the problem of foreignness is tied to the threat of city life. Since Chicago has grown up around her family home, Jane and Stephen move to the suburbs; Agnes and Jimmy, however, live in a flat on a crowded street in Greenwich Village. To Jane, the street offers visual delights:

The fire escapes were festooned with varicoloured washing and all the windows were wide open and the window-sills were hung with bedding [ . . . ]. The street itself was crowded with push carts and fruit stands. Great piles of golden oranges and yellow bananas were displayed for sale. Clothing hung fluttering from improvised frame scaffolds. A fish vendor was crying his wares at her elbow. The front steps of all the houses were crowded with people laughing and talking together and shouting to the purchasers that clustered about the open-air booths. (264–65)

Although she is “enchanted” with the street, she considers it a “funny place to choose in which to bring up a child” (265). In her study At Home in the City, Betsy Klimasmith describes the anxiety provoked by city spaces such as tenements and rented flats during the late nineteenth century:

Observers versed in notions of architectural determinism worried that the uncontrolled spaces of an urban landscape characterized by indeterminate ownership would reproduce themselves in their inhabitants. Chaotic streetscapes would produce an uncontrollable populace; a lack of the recognizable order enforced by the home would produce a disorderly citizenry; crowding and dirt would produce mentally and physically stunted people who were morally unclean. (4–5)

Further, she shows, apartment buildings’ “porosity echoed and was reinforced by their urban surroundings, where streets, stores, restaurants, parks, and taverns increased and extended the possibilities for contact among strangers and for the mixing of classes and genders” (5). For Jane, these possibilities created by the city space provoke anxiety about a threat to children and challenge her understanding of responsible parenting.

Whiteness is taken for granted in Years of Grace, but it becomes visible in the text at moments when it apparently can be taken away or lost. At a dance in the late 1920s, shortly before Jane’s elder daughter, Cicily, announces her intention to divorce and remarry, Jane watches the performance of a “slender quadroon” with “sleek oiled hair” who smiles “hugely, good-humouredly, her white teeth gleaming in the brutal orifice of her thick rouged lips” and who dances to “a barbaric orgy of sound” (492). The stereotypes associated with blackness and jazz are obvious: being black is being not quite human and is associated with promiscuous sexual behavior. Her performance is followed by “two darky comedians” who “tapped their flapping shoes and cracked their age-old jokes” (492), all the while Jane wonders about the whereabouts of her missing daughter and her daughter’s best friend’s husband. They arrive immediately after the African Americans’ performances, a juxtaposition that suggests that their absence has something to do with the lewdness, crudeness, and non-whiteness demonstrated on the dance floor. Cicily, who appears “slim and slinky in the folds of the new white velvet” with her shining blond hair (492), is not safe in her racial identity, since her behavior with Albert threatens to exclude her from the privileges of whiteness.³

Barnes represents Jane’s whiteness, Americanness, class status, and sexual chastity as all bound together. Her whiteness and her nationality are threatened as she approaches the brink of infidelity with Agnes’s husband, Jimmy Trent. On a Thanksgiving Day walk across the fields with Jimmy, Jane declares that her wind-blown hair makes her look like “a wild Indian” (321), metaphorically distancing herself from the pilgrims who, according to the legend of the holiday, settled, civilized, and established a moral standard for the country. Shortly afterward Jimmy kisses her for the first time, as if her self-proclaimed exile from whiteness gives him freedom to treat her as sexually available. Although Jane is horrified and sends him away immediately—essentially banishing him from the safe suburbs and pushing him back into the dangerous city—his later reappearance and their apparently platonic friendship build off this kiss and Jane’s “wild Indianness.” Eventually her friendship with Jimmy takes on inappropriate overtones, and when Jimmy proclaims his love and explains his plan for them to leave their spouses, his choice of places signals a removal from whiteness and its privileges: “We’ll jump over a broomstick together in the dark of the moon to the tinkle of a tambour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction  Popular Women’s Literature, Class, and the Great Depression
• 1  History, Normalcy, and Daily Life: Margaret Ayer Barnes and Jessie Redmon Fauset
• 2  Women Exploring Class: Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber, and Katharine Brush
• 3  Family Life in Depressed America: Josephine Johnson and Josephine Lawrence
• 4  Single Women, Violence, and Class: Mary Roberts Rinehart
• 5  Professional Women, Work, and Romance: Gale Wilhelm, Fannie Cook, and Dawn Powell
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index