Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published.

Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twenty-five years about cultural hierarchy in America? What perspectives might be useful for the future? I want to consider those questions by bringing to bear both the insights of other scholars who have written since 1988 and the results of my own research.

The first third of Highbrow/Lowbrow directly concerns students of reception because it is about the changing position of Shakespeare in American culture. Levine begins by documenting not only the frequent performance of Shakespeare on the nineteenth-century American stage but also the travesties, soliloquies, afterpieces, and other theatrical presentations that often juxtaposed adaptations of Shakespearean drama and poetry to “magicians, dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels, and comics.”¹ Because “people cannot parody what is not familiar,” Levine concludes, Shakespeare was an integral part of popular culture during the early years of American history (4). For Levine, “popular” referred to “those creations of expressive culture that actually had a large audience” (31) rather than to the traditions produced by ordinary people, as historians such as Peter Burke and David Vincent have used the word.

Filled with exuberant spectators unconstrained by genteel decorum, the theater itself was thoroughly democratic, housing under one roof, as Levine puts it, “a microcosm of American society” (25). But the situation was in flux. As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, separate theaters had emerged to serve more refined audiences as part of a growing “bifurcation” of “serious” and “popular” culture (68, 81). Eventually, Shakespearean drama as a popular possession was a casualty of this process, which Levine labels the “sacralization” of culture; Shakespeare became an “elite” author separated from ordinary people by an “unbridgeable gulf,” and his work receded to the rarefied realm of high art (79).

The middle section of Highbrow/Lowbrow traces other forms of this process of sacralization under way at roughly the same time. Champions of symphonic music such as John Sullivan Dwight and Henry Lee Higginson articulated a vision of the classical concert as a vehicle for the transmission of art, as distinct from lighter fare, which was often segregated in separate “pops” performances. The opera house and the art museum furnish further examples wherein audiences learned, in Levine’s words, to “approach the masters and their works with proper respect and proper seriousness, for aesthetic and spiritual elevation rather than mere entertainment” (146).

In the last third of Highbrow/Lowbrow, Levine attempts to explain those developments, situating what he calls the fragmentation of culture into “high” and “low” in the context of the massive societal changes of the late nineteenth century, as immigration, urbanization, and industrialization proceeded apace. In a phrase that I have always found particularly resonant, he ascribes to figures such as Henry James and other white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants the perception that America had become a “new universe of strangers.” Their way of navigating this “unstable,” threatening...