The New Literary Middlebrow

Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century

B. Driscoll

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349486847, 9781137402912
• eBook ISBN: 9781137402929
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The middlebrow is a dominant cultural force in the twenty-first century. This book defines the new literary middlebrow through eight key features: middle class, feminized, reverential, commercial, emotional, recreational, earnest and mediated. Case studies include Oprah's Book Club, the Man Booker Prize and the Harry Potter phenomenon.

1

Recognizing the Literary Middlebrow

Phrenology, the linking of skull shape with intellectual abilities, has long been discredited as a pseudoscience with racist undertones. Yet the language of brows it inspired – highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow – continues to influence the way we think about literary culture. Despite radical transformations in the publishing industry including globalization and digitization, some of our ideas about books remain stable. We still have an impulse to judge their quality; we still have a sense that books are organized according to some sort of hierarchy. The central point in this hierarchy is the middlebrow and in the twenty-first century it is increasingly visible, with more economic and cultural influence than either elite works or mass-market fiction. The middlebrow today is personalized book recommendations on Amazon, or a café in the middle of an independent bookstore. It is a literary prize’s Twitter feed or a movie star’s sold-out appearance at a writers’ festival. It is online cultural magazines such as Salon.com and Slate.com, or a book club that watches Austen TV adaptations. These practices in today’s book culture are descended from the middlebrow culture of the mid twentieth century, linked by the shared possession of distinctive characteristics.

This chapter provides a detailed definition of the middlebrow and demonstrates the continuity between its historical and contemporary manifestations. It takes seriously the way the word middlebrow has developed as a critical label, examining its origins and its treatment by scholars. To theorize the middlebrow, I adopt a sociological view grounded in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote a number of important books on culture that were translated into English in the 1980s and 1990s. His account of interactions between agents enables the description of a range of patterns in today’s book culture. However, his model requires some modification to fully account for the contemporary literary field. In particular, the chapter reassesses key limitations in his model: its reification of elite culture, its monolithic view of the market, and its neglect of the middle space between them. Developing Bourdieu’s work along these lines provides a richer understanding of middlebrow cultural products, producers and readers.

The bulk of the chapter is a taxonomy of the middlebrow’s eight key features. Not all of these features are strictly necessary requirements. Rather, this kind of definition recalls Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance, where a group is defined by a series of overlapping similarities. In his analysis of language and games, Wittgenstein argues that ‘these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all – but they are related to one another in many different ways’ (1953, para. 66–9). The relative looseness of this form of definition is appropriate for a broad phenomenon such as the middlebrow, allowing for different registers and formations. However, the middlebrow family resemblance is strong. All middlebrow institutions share most of these features: middle-class, reverential towards elite culture, entrepreneurial, mediated, feminized, emotional, recreational and earnest. This chapter illustrates these features with a mosaic of examples of twentieth century and twenty-first century middlebrow texts, institutions and practices. Later chapters in the book develop a selection of these case studies to present in-depth accounts of what I have called the new literary middlebrow, and its central place in contemporary literary culture.

The origins of the middlebrow

In an 1884 journal entry, the young English aristocrat Laura Troubridge charmingly disavows her cultural credentials:

Mr. Hope had suggested that we would be at some highbrow part of the Exhibition – looking at pictures I think, but Jo had said firmly, ‘If I know the Troubridges they will be at the Chocolate Stall’, and we were! (Troubridge 1966, xii. 169)

This early instance of the word highbrow associates it with refined cultural sensibilities: highbrow is looking at art, not eating chocolate. The concept of the highbrow soon generated its opposite: the lowbrow. In 1906, the American writer Sewell Ford wrote in one of his Shorty McCabe stories that ‘The spaghetti works was in full blast, a lot of husky low-brows goin’ in and out, smokin’ cheroots half as long as your arm’ (Ford 2004 [1906], 64). Ford’s lowbrow characters are working-class characters who appear in a work of popular mystery fiction, doubly displaced from high culture through both class and genre. In both America and the United Kingdom, the opposition between highbrow and lowbrow named a sharply perceived divide between elite culture and popular entertainment.

Decades later, as an affluent, leisured suburban middle-class emerged, a third category was introduced to open up the binary: the middlebrow. An early example comes from the Freeman’s Journal in 1924: ‘Ireland’s musical destiny, in spite of what the highbrows or middlebrows may say, is intimately bound up with the festivals’ (6). The middlebrows are here linked with the highbrows in their opposition to the popular culture of the festival. However, the word middlebrow quickly showed its malleability and its capacity to serve different agendas. Perhaps the most famous use of the word pits the middlebrows against the highbrows: in 1925, a columnist in Punch quipped that ‘the BBC claim to have discovered a new type, the “middlebrow”. It consists of people who are hoping that someday they will get used to the stuff they ought to like’ (Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. ‘Middlebrow’). Here, the middlebrows are cut off from the highbrows, desperately trying to emulate their cultural mastery. These two quotes set a pattern in which the middlebrow is provisional and relational, always defined by reference to its neighbours, the popular lowbrow and the elite highbrow.

In these early usages, the tone of brow discussion was often playful. Russell Lynes’ tongue-in-cheek piece on the brows for Harper’s Bazaar was reworked with a pictorial chart by Life magazine in 1949, inviting readers to classify themselves as highbrow, upper middlebrow, lower middlebrow or lowbrow according to their taste in clothes, furniture, salads and drinks (Funk 1949; reprinted in Lynes 1976). The tone is mocking: the highbrow hangs ‘drawings by his friends’ in the bathroom (1976, 150), the lowbrow likes ‘beautiful sunsets, beautiful women’ (1976, 152) and the middlebrow ‘is not above an occasional color reproduction of a van Gogh or a Cezanne’ (1976, 153). This satirical tone has been persistent: nearly fifty years later, the same game was played by Tad Friend in New Republic (1992). Friend offered readers a self-assessment quiz based on categories such as favourite characters from The Simpsons. Lisa? Highbrow. Marge? Middlebrow (Friend 1992). In these cultural treatments, the brow functions as a personality type and classification becomes a game.

Like most jokes, these games have a serious edge. All three of the brow terms have historically been insults, used to include and exclude people from legitimate culture. This was particularly so during the period between the 1920s and the 1960s that became known as the Battle of the Brows. This was a time of cultural uncertainty after the First World War, marked by both the emergence of Modernism and the increased production of mass culture. Virginia Woolf’s attack on the middlebrow is one of the most notorious forays into this cultural battle. In an unposted letter to the editor of The Statesman, published in an essay collection in 1942, her comic tone is combined with violent antipathy: ‘If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me “middlebrow” I will take my pen and stab him, dead’ (1942, 119). Another seminal assault on the middlebrow came two decades later, when American critic Dwight Macdonald published a lengthy attack on ‘Midcult’ (effectively a synonym for middlebrow) in Partisan Review. He was disgusted by the ‘ooze of the Midcult swamp’ (1962, 74); casting it as monstrous, a ‘peculiar hybrid bred from . . . unnatural intercourse’ (1962, 37) between high and low culture.

Despite this hostility, the actual definition of the middlebrow remained elusive. Woolf and Macdonald knew what they didn’t like, but they could not define it precisely. Woolf’s efforts to describe the middlebrow were stymied:

But what, you may ask, is a middlebrow? And that, to tell the truth, is no easy question to answer. They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between. (1942, 115)

Macdonald, too, despite several attempts to describe different Midcult products and institutions, was left frustrated: ‘It is its ambiguity that makes Midcult alarming’ (1962, 37). The problem with a relational framework such as highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow is that knowing what something is not is not the same as knowing what it is. In the case of the middlebrow, this definitional fluidity is compounded by the fact that the term has developed differently across various national cultures. The question becomes whether the provisional definition of the middlebrow has given it an existential vulnerability. Was the term middlebrow merely a rhetorical gesture that named aspects of a particular historical moment? Or was it a deep-rooted, widespread cultural formation, with an influence that extends to the present?

I want to argue for the second option, but there are several contemporary critics who would disagree. A number of scholars and writers discard the term middlebrow and search for other words to describe the space in contemporary literary culture that is neither elite nor popular. John Seabrook prefers the term ‘Nobrow’ in his analysis of culture and marketing (2000), as does Peter Swirski in From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005), which argues that twentieth century American fiction frequently synthesized high and low culture in a kind of ‘artertainment’. ‘Unibrowism’ is Louis Menand’s neologism in The New Yorker, where he argues that there has been ‘a leveling of taste in both directions, down and up’ creating a ‘more relaxed and fluid cultural universe’ (2011, 76–7).

Another strategy has been to distinguish the contemporary middlebrow from new cultural forms. Jim Collins, for example, argues that alongside the persistence of the middlebrow, there is a separate phenomenon of ‘high-pop’, the dissemination of genuinely elite cultural forms such as opera and literary fiction (2002, 7). Yet while there are differences between popularized high culture and mainstream culture, a strict theoretical division between the two is difficult to sustain. There is an argument for keeping the word middlebrow active even in the context of ‘high-pop’. The status of a cultural product is intimately connected with the way it is disseminated in society. A high literary film adaptation has something in common with every other Oscar-nominated film shown at the same cinema: these products are not easily separated into different cultural categories, and both participate in the new middlebrow. The value of a text is always influenced by its dissemination and consumption, and the middlebrow is not located only in products, but also in venues such as cinemas, magazines or television programs that excerpt and distribute elite cultural works.

Even if we were to accept the argument of some critics that the term middlebrow should be discarded as no longer applicable, we would still have to account for its persistence in contemporary cultural discourse. The word middlebrow continues to be wielded by critics. Slate Magazine recently declared that the 2000s and the 2010s could be considered ‘the golden age of middlebrow art’, tentatively hoping that the term may now be used ‘unsnobbishly’ (Haglund 2011). In The Daily Mail, journalist Claire Coleman announced she was ‘Middlebrow and proud!’ (2011). Macy Halford tried to use the word middlebrow positively in The New Yorker, describing author Zadie Smith as re-inventing the middlebrow book review through her devotion to making culture accessible, but had to defend this usage to offended readers (2011). In American Scholar, William Dereseiwicz argued for the middlebrow’s persistence: ‘Midcult, still peddling uplift in the guise of big ideas, is Tree of Life, Steven Spielberg, Jonathan Safran Foer, Middlesex, Freedom – the things that win the Oscars and the Pulitzer Prizes, just like in [Dwight] Macdonald’s day’; he also develops the sub-category of ‘the new upper middlebrow’ (2012). Dereseiwicz highlights the aspirational, social ideals of the middlebrow, but other critics are more straightforwardly snobbish. In the United Kingdom, Robert McCrum referred to Hilary Mantel’s prizewinning novel Bring up the Bodies as a ‘middlebrow triumph’, stimulating ‘a feel-good factor throughout the nation’s book groups’ (2013).

Such engagements illustrate that the middlebrow persists as a cultural label. Despite its specific historical origin, the middlebrow’s relational status within a cultural hierarchy has an inbuilt flexibility that makes it continually available to critics. It is this combination of specificity and fluidity that keeps the term compelling. The Battle of the Brows may have ended, but cultural gatekeeping remains a force. Critics still make judgments, and the provisionality of the middlebrow means the term can be shaped for different purposes while still conveying definite associations. The ongoing power of the term middlebrow makes it important to produce a nuanced, full account of this term, which goes beyond a general indication of a place in a hierarchy and recognizes the middlebrow as a distinctive cultural phenomenon.

Scholarly attention to middlebrow literary culture effectively dates from two groundbreaking studies in the 1990s. Joan Shelley Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992) examined institutions including the Book-of-the-Month Club, book reviews, book programs on commercial radios and the ‘Great Books’ publishing initiative. Her stated purpose was to ‘to redress both the disregard and the oversimplification of middlebrow culture’ (1992, xv–xvi). She characterizes as middlebrow those institutions that include both entrepreneurs and an identifiable critical presence, and that aim to make high cultural forms such as literature available to a wide public (1992, xi). Rubin’s definition of the middlebrow also includes an emphasis on ‘self-culture’, a goal associated with improving character. Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books: the Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-class Desire is a historical analysis of the place of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American literary culture. Her avowed task is ‘to present the middlebrow positively as a culture with its own particular substance and intellectual coherence’ (1997, 5).

Twenty-first century critical work on the historical middlebrow has followed this approach of producing detailed, thoughtful accounts of cultural phenomena. The international Middlebrow Network has been a focal point for some of this research, and has produced a number of significant publications, including Erica Brown and Mary Grover’s edited collection, Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows 1920s–1960s (2011) and a special issue of the journal Modernist Cultures, titled ‘The Middlebrow – within and without Modernism’ edited by Melissa Sullivan and Sophie Blanch (2011). One notable strand of research analyses gender and the middlebrow, and includes work by Nicola Humble (2001), Jaime Harker (2007) and Kate Macdonald (2011).

Some scholarship focuses specifically on the contemporary middlebrow. David Carter, for example, identifies the middlebrow’s resurgence through elements of literary culture such as bookstores with coffee shops, writers’ festivals, literary prizes, lists, and book groups (2004, 195). He notes new mechanisms for the circulation of good books, such as the potential to order books after reading online reviews, and new reader-oriented forums for book culture, which evidence a broad continuity with the middlebrow book cultures of the twentieth century (2004, 195–7). Belinda Edmondson’s study identifies middlebrow practices in Caribbean leisure culture from the nineteenth century to the present (2009), while Timothy Aubry describes the contemporary middlebrow in his work on therapeutic reading, drawing on phenomena including Oprah’s Book Club and Amazon customer reviews (2011).

Each of these scholars grapples with the meaning of the middlebrow: in the absence of a definitive description, the contours of the term are still somewhat fluid. Yet through these works of attentive scholarship, a picture of the middlebrow has emerged. For example, while Brown and Grover acknowledge the instability of the middlebrow, they connect it with the professionalization of literary criticism, self-improvement and female consumers, and the essays in that collection draw out other features such as the middlebrow’s connection to a camp sensibility and its interaction with illustrations and advertisements in magazines. The scholarly object of the middlebrow has sufficient detail to enable comparison between past and present cultural conditions.

Features of the literary middlebrow relate not only to particular cultural products, such as books or magazines, but also to cultural practices. To understand the middlebrow, that is, we must look at how people engage with books as well as the books themselves. Sullivan and Blanch use a tripartite scheme for their understanding of the middlebrow, describing it as an aesthetic mode, dissemination and transmission practices, and consumption practices (2011, 2). Aubry, too, focuses on middlebrow consumption, seeing the middlebrow ‘as a tactical, if sometimes automatic, mode of reading rather than as a fixed identity’ (2006, 353). This book adopts a similar perspective, approaching the new literary middlebrow as constituted in texts, institutions and practices. To analyze this broad range of activity, this book draws on the theoretical work of Bourdieu.

Bourdieu and the theorized middlebrow

Bourdieu wrote extensively on cultural hierarchies, and this aspect of his work is certainly worth exploring in relation to the middlebrow. Beyond this, however, his model of the field of literary production has a broader utility as a powerful, flexible tool for understanding cultural behaviour. The two key texts by Bourdieu that deal with literary culture are The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996). His goal in writing about literature is to demystify literary production: to be realistic, historical and contextual. He employs a number of specific theoretical concepts that work together to build a complex model of literary production. The cornerstone of his literary theory is the notion of the multi-agent, dynamic field. Fields, for Bourdieu, are sociological mappings that depict not only ‘social microcosms, separate and autonomous spaces, in which works are generated’, but also networks of ‘objective relations’ (domination or subordination, complementarity or antagonism) between positions (1996, 181, 231). Society is made up of numerous fields, including the field of economics and the field of politics as well as the field of cultural production and its subset, the literary field. For the purposes of this study, one of the conceptual advantages of the literary field is that it acknowledges the multitude of historically situated agents involved in the production, dissemination and consumption of middlebrow culture.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Recognizing the Literary Middlebrow
• 2 Book Clubs, Oprah, Women and the Middlebrow
• 3 Harry Potter and the Middlebrow Pedagogies of Teachers and Reviewers
• 4 The Man Booker Prize: Money, Glory and Media Spectacle
• 5 The Middlebrow Pleasures of Literary Festivals
• Conclusion: the Future of Reading
• Bibliography
• Index