Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars

Conclusion

Conclusion In 2002 and 2004, the BBC series Before the Booker asked which novels would have won the Booker prize if it had existed before 1969. Each program focused on one particular year, ranging from 1818 to 1966, identifying four contenders for each supposed prize. American authors were permitted, although they would not have been eligible for the real Booker prize. The books selected for 1925 were Kafka’s The Trial, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. For 1932, they were Huxley’s Brave New World, Waugh’s Black Mischief, Faulkner’s Light in August , and Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. In each case, three “classics ” are pitted against one female-authored best seller occupying a marginal position in the canon. The classics, and the male authors, were victorious: the winners were The Great Gatsby and Light in August . Nevertheless, the selection of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Cold Comfort Farm for the contest suggests that their significance to earlytwentieth -century literature and their continuing interest for contemporary readers are finally beginning to be acknowledged. Raymond Williams describes Cold Comfort Farm as an “odd work” (253), and Susan J. Leonardi applies the same word to Kennedy ’s The Constant Nymph, noting: “Genius in women this odd text will not allow” (153). The books analyzed in this study are frequently considered as odd, because they disrupt the usual categories of interwar literary history. Reasons for this include the generic instability of the novels, their achievement of both critical acclaim and commercial success, and their unusual cross-audience appeal (variously, to intelT4194 .indb 207 T4194.indb 207 5/2/07 6:46:18 AM 5/2/07 6:46:18 AM 208 | Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture lectuals and mass readerships; men and women; children and adults). These factors are compounded by their uneasy relationship with the (male) literary establishment and their complex attitudes to modernist and experimental art. Also, the largely humorous, nonpolitical content and broadly realist style of these authors’ work are discontinuous with the literary trends of an era remembered primarily in terms of the later phases of high modernism together with the politically engaged literature of the Thirties. It seems that literary-historical accounts of the interwar years have largely left these authors out because they do not fit with the broad paradigms used by critics. Assumptions about gender, popularity, and literary value are also part of the explanation for the marginalization of all the writers considered in this book. The separation between high and popular culture that became entrenched during the heyday of literary modernism continues to inform our judgments about the literature of the 1920s and 1930s, as does the association of the popular and middlebrow with the feminine. This study has sought to detach the middlebrow from its pejorative associations, redefining it as a productive and deliberately chosen standpoint, an intermediate area of cultural production with significant relationships to both high and popular culture. What is needed is a concept of the middlebrow which allows for the slipperiness , complexity, and multiple satiric targets of texts such as The Diary of a Provincial Lady or The Constant Nymph, or journals such as Time and Tide or Vanity Fair, which dramatize their own cultural status by reflecting on and satirizing not only highbrow pretension and lowbrow entertainment but also the more limiting formations of middlebrow culture itself. Broadly speaking, the authors I chose, and the journals they published in, found the middlebrow an effective position from which to negotiate their relationship to contemporary culture , both elite and popular. At the same time, middlebrow texts seek in various ways to avoid classification in terms of cultural hierarchy, and in so doing, challenge the separation between high-, middle-, and low-brow which remains entrenched in critical discourse. While the books considered here are accessible, comic, and often lighthearted, they nevertheless make significant demands on readers . Narrators are untrustworthy; perspectives shift; multiple parodic styles combine and clash; literary and cultural allusions abound and are sometimes rather specialized; the targets of satire are difficult to identify; and the meanings of terms such as “civilized,” “vulgar,” “refined ,” and “educational” are systematically destabilized. On the one T4194.indb 208 T4194.indb 208 5/2/07 6:46:18 AM 5/2/07 6:46:18 AM Conclusion | 209 hand, the texts tend to offer readers positions of superiority, flatteringly constructing them as intelligent...