Edna Ferber’s America by Eliza McGraw (review)

In his essay “Masscult and Midcult,” which appeared in The Partisan Review in 1960, Dwight Macdonald issued his famous critique of middle-brow writers, stating that their work “really isn’t culture at all” but “a parody of High Culture.”¹ At the top of Macdonald’s list of writers who should not be taken seriously was bestselling author Edna Ferber (1885–1968). Before and after Macdonald’s statement, a chorus of critical voices, most of them male, joined to denounce Ferber’s convoluted, crowd-pleasing plots as well as her hyperbolic, though accessible, writing style. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, would not deign to read her wildly popular stories, derisively labeling her one of the “Yiddish descendents of O. Henry.”² In another unforgettable line, New Yorker critic John Lahr accused her of writing “like a teen-ager on diet pills” while reviewing the controversial 1993 revival of Show Boat, the musical adaptation of the novel that has become Ferber’s greatest legacy.³

In Edna Ferber’s America, Eliza McGraw shows why Ferber should be remembered for much more than Show Boat, providing an important corrective to these judgments. Whatever critics may think of the prose—and McGraw freely admits that some of it is over-the-top—Ferber’s work is worth consideration for the way it grapples with central questions of American cultural identity. While other scholars have suggested that Ferber’s strong heroines should be of interest to feminist critics, McGraw’s analysis centers instead on Ferber’s representations of race and ethnicity. She argues that Ferber’s novels, which take up themes of assimilation, intermixing, and racial ambiguity, “create category-destroying connections [that] enable a broader and more complex vision of America” (p. 5).

Following a concise introduction, McGraw traces the evolution of Ferber’s ethno-racial representations through most of her novels, from the early, autobiographical portrait of a female journalist, Dawn O’Hara (1911), to her late regional epics, Giant (1952) and Ice Palace (1958), which take the states of Texas and Alaska respectively as their subjects. Each chapter in McGraw’s chronological study is devoted to either an individual novel or a pair of linked texts. For example, she discusses American Beauty (1931) and Come and Get It (1935) in a single chapter to illuminate how Ferber depicted white ethnic immigrants, whether Poles in New England or Swedes in Wisconsin, as hybridizing and enlivening the nation’s landscape. The chronological structure allows her to explore how Ferber returns to and re-examines certain themes, as in Show Boat (1926) and Saratoga Trunk (1941), novels that similarly take up the topics of miscegenation, passing, and racial performance. Her argument gains strength from the way each chapter builds upon the next. Even when she examines Ferber’s lengthy generational sagas, McGraw’s analysis of texts is economical.

McGraw, who previously published Two Covenants: Representations of Southern Jewishness (2005), also addresses Ferber’s Jewish background. Beginning with an analysis of Ferber’s most sustained treatment of Jewishness, the autobiographical Fanny Herself (1917), she goes on to show that Jewish characters make strategic appearances throughout the novelist’s work. McGraw’s claims about Jewishness would be stronger, however, if she positioned her argument in relation to other scholarship on Ferber’s ethnoreligious affiliations as a mid-Western Jew living in New York and touring disparate regions of the country. The book would also benefit from greater attention to the large body of American literary scholarship on comparative race and ethnicity as well as the smaller body of research on Jews and middlebrow culture. Although Edna Ferber’s America is written for an academic audience, it is, for the most part, missing traditional scholarly apparatus, such as notes that would help make clearer its interventions in existing conversations.

For scholars who are intrigued by but unfamiliar with Ferber’s fiction, McGraw’s book is a good place to turn for an overview of her career before delving into the novels themselves. McGraw makes...