America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars (review)

The middlebrow has, for the better part of a century, been denigrated as "'effeminate,' 'polluted by commerce,' 'mediocre,' or 'sentimental,'" Jaime Harker explains in America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars. These perceptions appear especially in modernist scholarship, which traditionally has placed a premium on experimental aesthetics and has rejected middle-class ideologies. Harker seeks to recover those texts and authors who have dwindled under the term "middlebrow," in part to "understand more about the range of modern American authorship" (16). Extending the work that was begun by Joan Rubin and Janice Radway in the 1990s, Harker argues that middlebrow novels are not necessarily aesthetically inferior nor politically obtuse—an assertion often levied toward the much-maligned middlebrow—but that middlebrow women authors often believed "in the power of fiction to transform society" (14). Moreover, they intentionally created what Tad Friend calls the "art of the middlebrow" in order to reach particular reading publics with their message (18).

Harker contends that the interwar writers on whom she focuses—Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Jessie Fauset, Pearl S. Buck, and Josephine Herbst—are part of a sociopolitical tradition that was begun by their first-wave feminist sisters and continued by second wavers decades later; they were motivated to write in order to help change the world. Moreover, she effectively shows how these authors tapped into a form of progressivism advocated by John Dewey, who maintained that art could achieve liberal goals: "[R]eading could overcome racial, economic, and gender divides . . . by providing experience to other cultures and peoples" (12). Harker 1links the progressive mandate with middlebrow reading expectations: emphases on characters and plot and plausible identification with the material. The writers in this volume, she asserts, deliberately worked within traditional, recognizable genres during a moment when many of their peers were experimenting with form, not only to achieve commercial success but also to impart left-leaning political positions.

Employing a history-of-the-book approach, combined with close readings of key texts, Harker aptly demonstrates how these women's novels were read and how they reached their reading publics. In her discussion of Canfield Fisher's substantial oeuvre, for example, Harker shows how this popular author negotiated the marketplace with a variety of strategies, including placing her work in women's magazines, which paid extremely well and introduced her writing to "a reading community uniquely suited to Canfield's aesthetic and progressive commitments" (34).

America the Middlebrow is an important intervention in modernist scholarship, the bulk of which continues to ignore the contributions of gifted, politically aware, and popular writers like Canfield Fisher and Buck. Fauset, often read solely in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, and then as a poor relation who preferred to explore the lives of middle-class blacks rather than a more "authentic" folksy type, is presented here in a new context. Harker helps us to understand Fauset as a middle-class activist who saw the middlebrow as convergent with her progressive politics.

The chapter on Josephine Herbst is also especially welcome, given the author's relative invisibility today. Few readers know of Herbst's compelling and ambivalent proletarian fiction, including Pity is Not Enough, The Executioner Waits, and Rope of Gold, and among those who know Herbst, she might seem an unlikely candidate to examine in a study of the middlebrow. This intensely politically committed author—who was connected to many famous moderns, such as H. L. Mencken, Katherine Anne Porter (with whom she had a longstanding correspondence), and Ernest Hemingway—actively criticized the middle class in her writings. But Harker convincingly argues that Herbst was a "closet middlebrow" who deliberately wrote for middle-class readers in order "to persuade [them] of the justice and inevitability of an economic revolution" (122).

Demonstrating how Canfield Fisher, Fauset, Buck, and Herbst believed "[t]hat every novel can and should advocate for a more desirable political...