The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Women’s Novels of the 1930s by Jennifer Haytock (review)

Cultural legacies of the Great Depression tend to take one of two forms: fantasy or protest, the glittering luxury of 1930s Hollywood and screwball comedies or the gritty penury of proletariat literature and documentary photography. Jennifer Haytock’s refreshing study addresses literature from that period that evades both categories. Haytock considers works of literary realism that, through attention to social class, domesticity, marriage, and the professions, purport to depict the everyday life of the middle classes. As she carefully argues, though, these works actually constitute the middle class and its values through their narratives.

Each chapter, combining analyses of multiple novels, highlights a combination of characterization and plot that encapsulates a particular tension in middle-class life of the 1930s: the first, a woman or family striving to attain or maintain a domestic ideal; the second, a sexualized woman transgressing class boundaries; the third, middle-class families cutting back during the Great Depression; the fourth, upper-class women facing the erosion of class boundaries; and the last, professional women recasting the home in order to embrace independence and achievement. Within these novels, dreams of luxury and woes of poverty serve as psychological poles in the anxious maintenance of middle-class identity and lifestyles. As Haytock observes, “Stories of courtship and marriage, often in their very un-exceptionality, delineate the ordinary and blur it into the category of the middle class” (8). Her study adumbrates the ideologies (class-based, gendered, sexual, and racial) undergirding “the ordinary” in these sentimental fictions; it also troubles the idea that these novels themselves are in some way “ordinary,” humdrum, beneath notice, or of a kind.

It is this final contention that offers the most compelling direction for the study of women writers. In her introduction, Haytock points out that studies of the middlebrow often “examine these texts collectively” (6). While this sociological approach can pay great dividends, it obscures the idea that texts which fall outside of the aesthetic standards of literary modernism (or, indeed, outside of the political standards of leftist fiction) might reward close scrutiny. Haytock defends the ideological value of such attention: “[B]ecause it attempts to present itself as transparent, realist fiction often richly rewards careful examination; its writers, intentionally or not, build their narratives on assumptions about their society that close reading can uncover” (6). Paradoxically, women writers have often fallen into obscurity because of the popularity of their fiction. I had never heard of several of the writers whose work Haytock examines (and knew little about others), and it was a delight to learn about their personal and publication histories. Recuperation continues to be important historical and feminist work.

Another strength of Haytock’s approach lies in its attention to idiosyncrasy; it does not dissolve the weirdness of these novels into general trends of representation. In Josephine Johnson’s Now in November (1934), a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about a struggling farm family, the eldest daughter slits her wrists, letting her blood run into their animals’ trough: “In death, Kerrin reveals the extent to which the farm drains the life out of human bodies and, given the drought, her attack on the animals’ water is doubly problematic: Will the family throw out the bloodied water? Or will they let animals drink it and in the process literally feed on the family’s blood?” (90–91). In Josephine Lawrence’s If I Have Four Apples (1935), middle-class mother Rose, hoping to save her children from demeaning forms of employment, works as a department store model, inserting and removing her dentures for a gaping audience. In spite of their sentimentalism and moralizing (or perhaps because of the affective pressures mobilized by sentiment and morality), these novels are more unsettling and unsettled, less transparently didactic, than a casual reader might at first assume.

Haytock draws nuanced conclusions about the interactions of feminine characterization, power...