-
Middlebrow Affective Mapping:Reading Modern Motherhood in Louis Bromfield's Mrs. Parkington (1942)
While New Modernist Studies is growing as it aims at a more inclusive literary modernism, critical interest in middlebrow literature is declining. This article argues that middlebrow literary scholarship is crucially important for understanding nuances in middle-class American culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Engaging with affect theory, this article claims that "affective mapping," as a method of interpretation, an effect of reading, as well as a narrative style, is especially useful for reading seemingly unremarkable texts. Specifically, through an affective reading of motherhood in Louis Bromfield's Mrs. Parkington (1942), the article demonstrates how middlebrow literature can convey reimagined maternal norms of modernity.
Literary criticism within New Modernist Studies of the past decade has aimed at a more inclusive modernism. It has done so by discovering lesser-known authors and texts that align aesthetically with modernist forms, by expanding the temporal and geographical span of modernist literature, and by discussing reader reception and modernism's entanglement with market demands (Boyiopoulus, Patterson, and Sandy 2019; Mao and Walkowitz 2006; 2008). However, at the same time, this turn in modernist studies has somewhat eclipsed critical discussions of "middlebrow" literature and its cultural significance in America in the first half of the twentieth century. As the "not-so-great American novel,"1 widely read by a predominantly white middle-class audience and typically realistic and formally conventional, the middlebrow novel does not meet the aesthetic criteria for modernist literary criticism. Consequently, especially single-text studies of this kind of literature are scarce.2 In this article, I argue for sustaining critical commitment to middlebrow literature since close engagement with such texts is essential for understanding the nuances in middle-class American attitudes to the changes of modernity and, more specifically, to persistent gendered norms curiously reinforced in a culture otherwise ripe for change. [End Page 34]
Through an engagement with affect studies, this article will exemplify middlebrow literature's value in the literary and cultural history of American modernity as texts that engage extensively with white middle-class readers' lived lives and with debates about motherhood at the time. While extensive research has been conducted about middlebrow culture in general,3 analyzing particular texts within a framework of what Jonathan Flatley (2008) calls "affective mapping" unlocks a potential for understanding their subtle call for change. Recognizing affective mapping as a narrative "technique" as well as a suitable critical method for literary interpretation uncovers how middlebrow literature sought to impact attitudes to traditional norms in the first half of the twentieth century. Combining critical conceptions of affect by Flatley, Sara Ahmed, and Sianne Ngai as intricately connected to questions of agency and cultural norms with Raymond Williams's notion that art can reveal "structures of feeling" within dominant ideologies, this article conducts a reading of the affective map of motherhood conveyed in one representative text: Louis Bromfield's Mrs. Parkington (1942).4
Midwestern Louis Bromfield is a good example of an author of middlebrow fiction: while he was associated with the Lost Generation writers and lived in Paris from 1925 to 1930, he was unappreciated among contemporary critics as his novels were not aesthetically inventive or experimental but rather realistic engaging bestsellers.5 Bromfield won a Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for Early Autumn and many of his novels were adapted to popular screen versions. Largely forgotten today, Mrs. Parkington became a bestseller, and the 1944 film version was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe.6 Bromfield and his work, thus, are characterized by middlebrow in-betweenness.
While arguing for reviving criticism of a novel from a white male writer in a privileged position seems counterintuitive when New Modernist Studies is working at including literature previously excluded on account of race,7 gender,8 or sexuality9 into modernist criticism, Quoting Janice Radway (1981, 161), Cecilia Konchar Farr and Tom Perrin (2016) have suggested that "analyzing conservative culture can 'serve as evidence of germinating change in cultural attitudes and beliefs.'" Rita Felski has encouraged a rethinking of literary criticism's methodology to explore what texts make possible rather than only reading it "suspiciously": "the text's status as coactor: as something that makes a difference, that helps make things happen" (2015, 12). Similarly, Toril Moi's (2017) notion of "acknowledgment" [End Page 35] calls for readings that do not necessarily approve or agree with the text but that do try to understand the text's complexity by imagining the situation of its production.10 As Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup have argued, affect theory is especially productive for "widening the analytical scope from masterworks and historical events to the multifarious fabric of everyday life" (2015, 3).
As this article will show, attention to affect in seemingly unremarkable literature can reveal both resistance and attachment to norms for living. Bromfield's open-ended text aligns itself with its readers' lived lives but ultimately encourages an affective remapping of motherhood. By mapping out a familiar background where normative responses to motherhood are nevertheless difficult and by providing shocks of unexpected maternal affects (shame, detachment, and boredom), Mrs. Parkington not only conveys a structure of feeling in the dominant view of motherhood in the 1940s but also illustrates the usefulness of affective mapping as a method for interpreting middlebrow literature.
MIDDLEBROW LITERATURE AND AFFECTIVE MAPPING
The designation "middlebrow" derives from phrenology and was first used in Britain in the 1920s and then in America at the rise of New Criticism in the 1950s in a derogatory manner.11 Since the 1990s, however, scholars have reclaimed the term to designate a field of the study of mainstream middle-class literature and culture. They have shown how middlebrow culture participated in dominant discourses yet also sought to revise and adapt attitudes to the familiar in a modern time of change.12 In general, middlebrow readers aspired to be more cultured and were interested in social and political matters, at the same time as they bought and read books that would engage them emotionally, as Tom Perrin (2011) and Amy Blair (2011), among others, have asserted.
Williams has famously argued that art is especially well-suited for revealing "structures of feeling"—that is, "meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt"—within dominant ideologies (2015, 23). Art can potentially convey complexities that we tend to overlook when we describe and analyze culture by its fixed ideologies. In my view, middlebrow literature and its preoccupation with readers' lives and efforts to make sense of their challenges in a time of change is a potent source for discerning structures of feeling within dominant ideologies of modernity. While they engage with hegemonic [End Page 36] culture, middlebrow narratives do not necessarily reiterate fixed ideologies but may qualify, confuse, and sometimes contradict dominant formations.
Recent notions that connect norms with affect are invaluable for discerning such middlebrow structures of feeling. The impact of shared beliefs and value systems of a distinct historical period and social setting can very well be described in affective terms as a "mood" that impact how we perceive the world. Flatley understands mood "as a concept [that] focuses attention on what kinds of affects and actions are possible within an overall environment" (2008, 26–27). This is particularly useful in literary scholarship for exploring "the way aesthetic practices respond to and represent concrete historical situations" (27). The uncertainties of modernity resulted in an anxious mood, a well-known driver for modernist literature that sought new ways of navigating a changed world. However, this anxious mood also helped cement cultural prescriptions for familiar and comforting gender norms, even when a revision seemed inevitable. While middle-class women had gained the right to vote, increasingly pursued higher education, and were entering the professional work force to a higher degree, children were still expected to be their top priority, and structural measures such as daycare and financial support never caught up with the new reality of many women's lived lives.13
However, Flatley argues that literature can potentially create a "counter-mood" through affective mapping (2008, 23). Fiction may confront readers with their own affective responses to a situation and, ultimately, alter a mood. Such a shift can be accomplished if a text is first "able to attune itself with that audience's mood" (24). Flatley defines affective mapping in art as an "aesthetic technology" that functions as follows: "In mapping out one's affective life and its historicity, a political problem (such as racism or revolution) that may have been previously invisible, opaque, difficult, abstract […] may be transformed into one that is interesting, that solicits and rewards one's attention" (4). Importantly, readers must be compelled to read into a story "their own emotions and fears" (87). Affective "reading into" a story is possible when the text does not provide clear answers to the questions it poses: "There must be just enough noncomprehension to necessitate reading into the text, since it is the breakdown of clear understanding that motivates one to guess at meanings," Flatley argues (88). In this way, the text can "allow one's emotions to lose their invisibility and necessity and become [End Page 37] instead contingent, surprising, relative" (6). Thus, affective mapping can happen where literature narrates familiar situations, yet leaves something textually indeterminable or surprising.
MAPPING THE BACKGROUND IN MRS. PARKINGTON
The narrative in Mrs. Parkington shifts between Susie Parkington's present life in 1942 and her past. Mrs. Parkington is eighty-four years old, a wealthy matriarch born working class in a Western mining town. Here she meets her wealthy husband, Gus, with whom she travels to Europe where she, with time and careful training, grows increasingly sophisticated and knowledgeable. Back in America, Gus and the two sons, Herbert and Eddie, die and Mrs. Parkington is left with her sixty-five-year-old daughter, Alice. Alice's unhappy marriage to a duke has defined her life and left her a disillusioned and bitter alcoholic. While Mrs. Parkington feels she should have provided Alice with a better life, she also recognizes that motherhood has not been her main priority. Rather, her life is described as exciting, a "melodrama" in itself, involving the stormy romantic relationship to her husband, an affair, and the navigation of family scandals (Bromfield 2011, 322). In the present time of the narration, Mrs. Parkington is trying to ward off such a scandal to protect her beloved great-granddaughter, Janie, and her fiancé, Ned. At the same time, she struggles with her obligations as a mother to Alice, who eventually takes an overdose of morphine and dies. This, finally, leaves Mrs. Parkington free to travel back to her hometown with a much younger male acquaintance, "the cowboy" Al.
Mrs. Parkington refers extensively to sociohistorical changes as the setting for its narrative, clearly operating from within the period's mood and aligning with a world familiar to contemporary readers. According to Flatley, we should pay special attention to affective maps created by literature in periods of historical change: "Our affective maps are likely to be especially in need of revision, repair, or invention at moments of rapid social change or upheaval" (2008, 79). Such situations create anxiety and alienation, just as an outdated map of a city would. Mrs. Parkington, born in 1858, has lived through the Civil War, World War I, the Depression, the New Deal, and eventually America's entry into World War II. She even speculates about future outcomes of the war. As such, Mrs. Parkington is posited as a figure of historical authority and the novel as firmly grounded in its time. Yet, the text underlines its own fictional [End Page 38] nature as it, tongue in cheek, has Mrs. Parkington reject a novel in favor of contemplating her own lived life: "The novel lay on the bed beside her, unopened, perhaps because the plot, the characters, the situations were all far less absorbing than the things she had lived through" (Bromfield 2011, 194). At the same time as the text argues for its own relevance on account of its protagonist's life story, it dismisses fiction without grounding in real life as less absorbing, aligning itself with the middlebrow genre.
Insisting, then, on its own relevance, the text contains multiple references to historical events as the background for its narrative present. It specifically refers to World War II, the effects of New Deal legislation, as well as modern technologies and ways of thinking about progress. The mood represented in Mrs. Parkington aligns with the anxious mood of modernity and the early years of World War II, referring to "this modern complicated world" as "a sick world" (Bromfield 2011, 236, 269). The text is skeptical about modern "progress" as is clear from Mrs. Parkington's will meant to help "undo two great American falsities—that making money is distinguished and important and that automobiles and water closets have anything to do with what is called civilization" (328). However, the novel does convey some hope for the future where Ned and Janie represent the possibility of "a great step forward in civilization and the development of democracy. But it was not yet here" (119). Just as it is situated in its historical context, the text also places Mrs. Parkington in a specific social context that signifies middlebrow in-betweenness. Having been born working class and acquired wealth through her marriage, Mrs. Parkington's social position is fluid. Indeed, she states: "I am not aware of belonging to any class. I happen to have a great deal of money, but that is an accident" (257). While Bromfield's middle-class readers can thus relate to the novel, at the same time, the following analysis will show, the text also leaves questions open by its representation of shocking maternal affects that force attention to themselves and hinder conventional affective responses. This, in turn, has the potential to cause estrangement from and revision of normative affective maps of motherhood.
SHAME AND MOTHERHOOD NORMS
While the text ultimately offers a complex representation of motherhood that differs from normative prescriptions, it also underlines Mrs. Parkington's keen awareness of these norms through its [End Page 39] descriptions of shame. In the same way that the text aligns with its sociohistorical context but also pushes for reconsidering the usual state of affairs, shame serves a double function. Mrs. Parkington's shame makes norms for motherhood visible to the reader but also shows that these norms are difficult to live by. Affect theorist Sara Ahmed argues that shame arises at the exposure of one's failure to live up to an ideal. As such, shame reveals one's commitment to that ideal in the first place. Ahmed states that shame is "bound up with self-recognition" when the ideal turns out to be out of reach (2004, 105). Shame, then, is an affect worth noticing as it both exposes an ideal to which one is committed and a failure to live by that ideal.
Mrs. Parkington's shame derives from not feeling conventional "motherlove" for Alice and from failing to raise a productive American citizen. In this way, the text aligns Mrs. Parkington's expectations for motherhood with dominant ideologies yet shows that, because her experience departs from the normative, she is ashamed, which in turn prompts her consciously performed conventional motherhood. Shame here unveils the otherwise naturalized norms for motherhood and, in turn, causes an affective estrangement from these. By forcing readers to recognize and "read into" Mrs. Parkington's failure to live up to normative maternal emotions, the text exposes and unhinges readers' own emotions and fears. As Flatley explains, an affective remapping of motherhood is then possible.
The shame that Mrs. Parkington feels is described as deriving from loving her sons more than Alice. While the two sons who died were vibrant, pretty, and happy, Mrs. Parkington describes Alice as boring, plain, and with no taste for life: "Alice was a nice child, docile and good, but she was sallow and dank without the radiance of her small brother. Susie admitted these things in the darkness, alone, secretly, but in the daylight she always treated Alice as if she were a beauty" (Bromfield 2011, 132). The notion of dark and secret solitary knowledge in contrast to a "daylight" performance not only highlights Mrs. Parkington's shame about her lack of normative maternal emotions for Alice but also the necessity for her to perform motherlove. Such performance serves to uphold a façade of normative maternal identity. Explicitly mentioning shame, the text underlines how the deviation from normative motherlove must be concealed: "Herbert was more to her than any of the children, a fact which she acknowledged to herself but hid away shamefully in the deepest part of her" (175). Norms for the mother's equal and unconditional love for all her children are thus exposed by Mrs. Parkington's attempt to [End Page 40] hide the opposite. Hence, shame prompts Mrs. Parkington to perform normative motherhood and, at the same time, forces attention to the existence and contents of such norms.
The representation of disproportional motherlove and the shame it fosters is taken to a noticeable highpoint when Mrs. Parkington wishes that Alice, instead of her brothers, had died: "Watching [Alice], Susie thought shamefully that it was a strange and bitter world—that if one of her children had to die, why had it not been Alice" (Bromfield 2011, 220). This statement, of course, is shocking in the framework of normative demands. A mother is supposed to love all her children equally and yet Susie Parkington's marked failure to do so forces attention to and resonates with readers' emotions or fears that all mothers do not. Indeed, her lack of love for Alice is stated explicitly in her response to encounters with people who admire Herbert and not Alice on their beach walks: "The awful thing was that Susie herself, in her heart, deep inside her, felt like the people on the beach. At the sight of little Herbert her own heart leapt with delight; at the sight of Alice she felt nothing at all with her heart" (142). Normative unconditional maternal devotion that is supposed to distinguish mothers from random people, then, is markedly missing in this passage. While the narration claims Mrs. Parkington hides her lack of normative emotions "deep inside her," its representation of shame makes readers pointedly aware of this lack and, consequently, enables a reconsideration of this specific requirement in normative motherhood. That Mrs. Parkington is said to feel "nothing at all" about Alice, besides shame, testifies to the text's representation of another nonnormative maternal affect: what I call emotional detachment.
THE DISCOMFORTS OF DETACHMENT
The text repeatedly stresses the emotional detachment between Mrs. Parkington and Alice. Rather than describing a normative symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter, Alice feels like a stranger whose presence makes her mother uncomfortable. Detachment is conventionally perceived as a lack of emotions, but Ahmed theorizes that an affective orientation away from something in fact signifies one's attachment to that something in the first place. Ahmed thus claims that what she calls "hardness" "is not the absence of emotion, but a different emotional orientation toward others" (2004, 2, 4). Antagonistic affects "'give' others meaning and value in the very act [End Page 41] of apparent separation" (28). Mrs. Parkington's emotional detachment from her daughter is a case in point as it makes readers aware of the normative demand for close mother-child bonds.
The text notes the discomfort caused by physical proximity to Alice in an early passage: "She felt ill at ease with her own daughter as if the girl, who was now herself over sixty, were a stranger. And the sight of her was always distressing" (Bromfield 2011, 10). Distress and discomfort are underlined in Mrs. Parkington's sense of Alice as "a stranger" and in her referring to her in a detached manner as "the girl." Ahmed states that discomfort can be "about inhabiting norms differently," and, indeed, this passage suggests that the mother's discomfort is caused by maternal norms (2004, 5). Representations of discomfort might be "generative, rather than simply constraining or negative," Ahmed argues. While not subversive as such, discomfort does point to "a lack of ease with the available scripts for living and loving"—loving here signifying attachments to normative ways of living (155). The text's representation discomfort thus exposes how the conventional script for motherhood does not suffice in her situation.
This departure from norms for maternal devotion saturates the mother-daughter relationship with a sense of "undefeatable strangeness" when Mrs. Parkington finds herself alone with Alice:
she felt between them almost at once that curious undefeatable strangeness which had obscured, like a fog, the relationship between them since the time Alice was old enough to talk. It was as if they were no relation to each other, as if Alice was a foundling of some strange blood. Sinfully and filled with shame, Susie sometimes thought: If she had been pretty and gay and amusing, it would have been different. How much I would have enjoyed that kind of daughter. Because this was not so, Susie had tried all her life to make up for it, conscientiously straining to establish something that could not be established; the effort perversely only heightened the sense of strangeness.
Perceiving Alice as a "foundling of strange blood," Mrs. Parkington's lifelong attempt to form a conventional bond is futile. Motherhood does not provide the pleasure it is supposed to but rather causes the discomfort of constantly being reminded of her failure to inhabit maternal norms in a conventional way. Forcing a performance of absent maternal emotions, the passage above conveys, only serves to reinforce the feeling of failure and of shame. The curious fog-like and undefeatable strangeness not only obscures the mother-daughter [End Page 42] relationship but also necessitates an affective "reading into" it as conventional responses to motherhood are made impossible and instead must be scrutinized for their relevance.
The text also stresses Mrs. Parkington's emotional detachment from her daughter in a passage describing their relationship: "There had never been much open sympathy or understanding between them. Mrs. Parkington could never find any means of keeping up a sustained conversation with her daughter. Their talk was always no more than a series of false starts which led nowhere" (Bromfield 2011, 12). Consequently, she tries to avoid spending time with Alice. Excessively insisting on Alice's unsympathetic nature, her mother describes her as "pretty awful," "insensitive and vulgar," with "sallow skin," "inclined to be pimply," and with "no fire inside her" (55, 99, 169). When Alice makes an insensitive comment, her mother cannot decide whether she is "malicious" or just "stupid and tactless" (57). Her reaction, however, is to "fiercely" rebuke her daughter, "as if suddenly she turned to ice, as if she became a sword of judgment, tempered with contempt": "Sometimes you are a bloody fool," she exclaims (55–57). Hostility, far from normative patient, unconditional motherlove, according to Ahmed's notions, does not mean that there is no attachment but, rather, reveals something about the nature of it. In fact, hostility makes the inescapability of the attachment very visible. The text makes it extremely clear that Alice is hard to love, and her mother's hostility points to the expectations that she is supposed to love her regardless.
The text's representation of emotional detachment becomes especially shocking in its descriptions of Mrs. Parkington's affective response to Alice's death and funeral. Because she wears a veil at the funeral, Mrs. Parkington does not have to pretend to cry: "She was glad of the mourning veil. You could look through it without people being able to see your face. They couldn't see that there were no tears in your eyes; there was no necessity for feigning an air of tragedy and grief" (Bromfield 2011, 260). The meaning of her lack of tears is made perfectly clear as the narrator states: "And now at the funeral of Alice she felt nothing at all, either at the death of Alice or the prospect of her own death which could not be far away" (262). Rather than causing pain, Alice's death and funeral are described as a welcome break in a busy life: "The death and the funeral were a kind of interlude which interrupted the steady busy flow of Mrs. Parkington's life and provided in a curious way a kind of holiday from responsibility" (269). [End Page 43]
This shocking degree of emotional detachment in a character otherwise described as admirable certainly opens up questions about motherhood. The text necessitates emotional engagement and prompts you to consider what kinds of maternal emotions are actually possible rather than turn to well-known affective responses. As Flatley states (albeit about the losses of modernity), such affective attunement between text and reader enables "a state in which one is exceedingly aware of, angry about, and interested in the losses one has suffered" (2008, 6). This awareness is the prerequisite for forming new affective maps.
BOREDOM AND OBSTRUCTED MATERNAL AGENCY
While it seems that feeling nothing at all must be a relief to Mrs. Parkington, who is otherwise painfully distressed by her daughter, Alice's funeral in fact leaves her feeling bored. As Mrs. Parkington fantasizes about her past at the funeral, the text highlights that other aspects of her life have meant more to her than the boring business of being a mother: "How wonderful it is to have had a satisfying life, full of excitement to which one can return at moments of boredom. There was still the dull business of the drive to the cemetery and the brief service at the grave" (Bromfield 2011, 268). The contrast set up in this passage certainly conveys that motherhood is not necessarily central in a woman's life.
Thinking about an extramarital affair she had when she was younger, Mrs. Parkington is reminded of the importance of other life experiences than mothering. While clearly aware of her transgression of maternal norms in this situation, she is certain that this experience is more valuable than her daughter's insignificant life: "'I am a wicked old woman, unrepentant and unregenerate, thinking such things at the funeral of my own daughter.' Yet a voice told her, 'All this is more important than the barrenness of the life of poor Alice'" (Broomfield 2011, 267). Mrs. Parkington's boredom at her daughter's funeral and her sense that Alice's life has been "barren" underline her emotional detachment and cement the text's representation of an alternative motherhood. Yet boredom carries even further critical potential if we consider it an "ugly feeling" with an ability to diagnose situations of obstructed agency.
Required by norms to be physically present at her daughter's funeral, Mrs. Parkington is bored and fantasizes about more interesting things than motherhood. Only after the funeral is she able [End Page 44] to physically mobilize and free herself from this fixed situation. In this way, the novel's representation of Mrs. Parkington's boredom points to its sociohistorical context in which motherhood's agency is obstructed. Boredom figures in affect theorist Sianne Ngai's catalogue of "ugly feelings" as "negative […] minor and generally unprestigious feelings" that "evoke pain and displeasure" and are "saturated with socially stigmatizing meanings and values." Ugly feelings are further marked by "passivity" and lack of "clearly defined objects," which are characteristic for boredom (Ngai 2005, 6–27).
Ngai suggests that boredom hinders action and that, in turn, literary descriptions of boredom point to historical and/or political situations of obstructed agency. Boredom "confront[s] us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in general" and "ask[s] us to ask what ways of responding our culture makes available to us, and under what conditions" (Ngai 2005, 261–62). While Ngai states that boredom signifies "affective lack" and an "absence of affection," boredom simultaneously points to a "dissatisfied" state and "is reflexively felt to be dysphoric—stultifying, tedious, irritating, fatiguing, or dulling" (269). In Mrs. Parkington, then, boredom makes us aware of mothers' obstructed agency in modern times. Only after Alice dies and motherhood ceases to be a premise is Mrs. Parkington able to mobilize and physically and emotionally cut the tie to the futile norms of motherhood.
Bromfield's description of the affective atmosphere of boredom that characterizes Mrs. Parkington's relationship to Alice echoes Ngai's notion that boredom leads to "exhaustion, or fatigue" and "immobilizes and stupefies" (2005, 271, 270). Motherhood is experienced as boring, the text shows, because its purpose is lost in a time where stronger forces are at play. The text makes it very clear that Alice is boring and uninteresting. Mrs. Parkington is described as "tired of her offspring" and she calls Alice "sallow," "listless and dull" (Bromfield 2011, 8, 142, 143). Alice's marriage to the duke is said to end because of her inability to adapt, her "commonness," and because she is "awkward and uneasy" (218). When Mrs. Parkington arrives to prevent an ugly divorce between the two, she is met by what the narrator calls a "rather dreary young woman," "dull and unspectacular" (219, 224). While her mother is able to navigate the divorce situation, Alice, in contrast, is "not clever and resourceful" but "dull and dependent and without initiative" (219). In a rare moment where the otherwise fundamentally "tired" Alice relates some gossip to her mother, her enthusiasm is described as "as if an oyster had suddenly [End Page 45] become animated" (51). Ngai argues that aesthetic representations of boredom have the potential to prompt readers "to look for new strategies of affective engagement" (2005, 262). Textually saturated with boredom, Alice, and motherhood in general, requires altered affective responses from readers.
The boredom Mrs. Parkington feels immobilizes her as Alice is said to "feed off her vitality" (Bromfield 2011, 51). An essential passage reveals the text's focus on norms' stultifying effects:
Mrs. Parkington was aware that many people said she was a wonderful woman and how wonderful it was that at her age she remained so interested and conscientious about so many things, but she had no illusions; she was not wonderful at all. If she had been really strong she would have chucked the whole lot into a wastepaper basket to lie there forgotten and impotent to wear down her vitality […]. She was not wonderful at all; she was simply the victim of a compulsion from which she could not save herself.
The passage sets up a contrast between the agency others perceive Mrs. Parkington to have and her own claim that she is a victim of "compulsion." This compulsion that makes her unable to act, to "chuck the whole lot into the wastepaper basket," signifies the norms that require nurture, attention, interest from a mother—not only to her children but to her entire family. While Mrs. Parkington is indeed described as "wonderful," she is nevertheless incapable of evading norms that refuse to change even in times of substantial change. In this way, the passage conveys Mrs. Parkington's obstructed agency in her role as mother and matriarch.
The immobilizing effect of boredom and the lack of agency it points to is further stressed by Mrs. Parkington's mobilization after Alice has died. No longer bound by motherhood, Mrs. Parkington regains energy and agency: "It seemed to her that somehow all the troubles of the family were being solved, all its tiresomeness eliminated, partly by the inevitable turn of fate, partly by her own efforts," and "once Ned and Janie were out of the way, a trip would be a good thing" (Bromfield 2011, 309). Designating the trip "a good thing," this passage conveys the desirability of freedom from family. Free from the immobilizing boredom of a motherhood that leads only to shame, discomfort, and alienation, Mrs. Parkington can "escape" and start anew with Al, the cowboy, who has "come to help and free her" (316, 322). Besides representing Mrs. Parkington's geographical and social origins and everything that is good about America, the [End Page 46] text suggests that Mrs. Parkington feels a certain attraction to Al: "He's a man and he's hard" is thus her initial reaction to him (13). She also feels "a trifle ashamed that any man should still rouse in her heart a desire to please and attract" (47). Somewhat shocking to readers, an older mother's feelings for a young man require a rethinking of motherhood's centrality in women's lives and allow for Mrs. Parkington to physically mobilize and orient away from family, motherhood, and norms.
"THE FAULT OF THE AGE THEY WERE BROUGHT UP IN": MOTHERHOOD'S MODERN SETTING
The text situates Mrs. Parkington's obstructed agency in a specific modern setting and criticizes the persistent notion that motherhood was crucial to the stability and success of American civilization. From the eighteenth century forward, the notion that child-rearing was of crucial importance for the nation's civic and religious life had been persistent.14 Beginning in the nineteenth century, Protestantism considered children to be born innocent and carry an innate potential that just needed to be brought out by the right upbringing. These notions carried into the twentieth century. From their home, mothers could install morality in their children that would serve as a bulwark against the corrupting changes of modernity. Women were promised agency as mothers: this was their way of contributing to society. However, Bromfield's novel suggests in several ways that Mrs. Parkington lacks any such agency. Her two sons have died young: one in an automobile accident and the other from suicide because he has contracted a venereal disease. Both causes of death are significantly modern and markedly out of Mrs. Parkington's control. Likewise, she is not able to secure a good life for Alice: Alice's marked lack of innate potential in combination with social forces thwart whatever agency mothers may have been thought to hold in earlier times and different social circumstances, as the text conveys. Consequently, the text does not reproach Mrs. Parkington for her nonnormative mothering but, rather, evokes a new affective map of motherhood that is more adequate for complying with the realities of living in a modern changed world.
The text also describes how Alice's lack of innate potential makes Mrs. Parkington's efforts to provide her with a happy and productive life useless. While she, as mentioned above, does feel shame about this, she sees no other way she could have acted: "She reproached [End Page 47] herself for not having made enough effort with Alice, although she could not think what more she could have done. It was difficult to deal with people who were both dull and bitter. Alice had been like that since she was seventeen" (Bromfield 2011, 172). In fact, Alice's potential only reaches so far as, perhaps, a dull marriage or a life as an old maid, the text conveys: "there was no material in Alice from which to make a brilliant career [in marriage]. If Malvina [an upper-class acquaintance of Gus] had only left her in peace she might have been an old maid or had a dull but respectable husband, which very clearly was the fate designed for her by nature." Noticeably alluding to innate potential, the passage uses the expression "the fate designed for her by nature." While Mrs. Parkington thinks Alice might have been trained as a nurse and in that way have been useful, Gus is set on her marrying the duke to retain class privilege. Yet, she explains why this failed to work: "[Alice] had none of the qualities [making a great marital match] demanded—neither the looks, nor the brilliance, nor the hardness. She was only a plain, dull, sentimental girl" (169). In this way, the text creates an effective background for making readers question usual notions of mothers' roles and prompting new affective responses.
The inevitability of Alice's life path as she lies on her deathbed stands out clearly to her mother: "It was as if Alice had been doomed from the beginning," she thinks (Bromfield 2011, 170). In this way, the text conveys the futility of Mrs. Parkington's mothering. Alice is doomed: first from her lack of innate potential and second from social forces that do not allow for her to live a humble life. Specifically, wealth is posited as destructive in the text: "She might have been happy, she might even have been different but for all the money her father had. It spoiled all her chances. It deformed her whole life" (258). Alice's alcoholism underlines her mother's lack of agency as she "had long ago given up on trying to persuade Alice to drink less" (50). As these textual examples demonstrate, Mrs. Parkington's relationship to her daughter conveys a striking lack of the optimism that otherwise characterized dominant discourse about the child. The conventional notion that motherhood is crucially important because it produces productive citizens that enable a better American civilization and happy lives for its citizens is thus utterly abandoned in Bromfield's text. Instead, the text destabilizes the knowledge with which readers approach the theme of motherhood and questions the trust in motherhood's potential and, consequently, the necessity for women to focus their lives only on their children. [End Page 48]
Despite Mrs. Parkington's efforts to follow motherhood norms, her mothering is futile, and she is described as without agency in the face of "forces too strong for her":
filled with self-reproach and a belief that she had failed as a mother […] she tried to discover where she had failed. She had been a good mother, as wise a mother as it was possible for her to be, yet somehow it had come to nothing because outside the realm of her influence, where she herself was powerless, there were forces too strong for her, pulling forever against her.
When Alice accidently takes an overdose of morphine, Mrs. Parkington thinks she should be allowed to take her own life because, she conveys, "Alice was already dead. […] She had really been dead for a long time" (181). While she does to some extent blame herself for not saving Alice and providing her with a good life, the text exonerates her with reference to the social forces that make normative motherhood useless. As Alice lies dying, her mother is haunted by her failure and "the conscience which even now still had the power to torment her with the faint, querulous reproach that somehow, long ago, she could have helped the woman dying there in the room with them" (246). However, Mrs. Parkington is reassured by her psychiatrist friend, an authoritative voice in a middlebrow context, that her mothering is not to blame: "The things which destroyed Alice were beyond your control," he asserts (247). After Alice's death, Mrs. Parkington makes a new will before leaving New York. To her lawyer, she characterizes her family as "useless members of society. I don't say it's their fault. It's partly my fault and the fault of Gus and the fault of the age they were brought up in. It conspired to make them useless" (324). Through these descriptions of destructive forces that eclipse motherhood, the text relieves Mrs. Parkington from responsibility and instead blames social circumstances for Alice's destiny.
As an analogy for the futility of mothering, the nurse's routines when caring for the dying Alice are described as useless and performed only out of respect for norms: "Watching her through half-closed eyes, Mrs. Parkington thought: All she is doing is futile, yet she is going through it because somehow we must go on, making gestures so long as the heart beats, so long as the breast stirs—gestures made in the very face of fate itself." Likewise, Mrs. Parkington makes the expected gestures of motherhood, despite their futility in the face of the social forces that eclipse her efforts. The nurse thus [End Page 49] replicates Mrs. Parkington's futile work as a mother, not exactly pretending that there is hope but "making gestures" because that is what one does. In combination with the comforting words from the psychiatrist, this realization reassures Mrs. Parkington that there was nothing she could have done as a mother to make Alice's life better and the feeling of failure disappears: "the doubts, the fears were dissolved" (Bromfield 2011, 249).
Despite her emotional detachment from her daughter, Mrs. Parkington is lonely when Alice dies: "Mrs. Parkington was not afraid; she was not even troubled […]. But she was lonely. […] Mrs. Parkington was thinking that the last of her children born of her own flesh was dying. When the Duchess was gone, she would be alone, for not even Janie who was so close to her, could take the place of her own child" (Bromfield 2011, 246). While skeptical about normative demands for the degree of affective attachment in motherhood, the text still to a certain extent aligns with traditional notions of the maternal bond. Ultimately, Mrs. Parkington does convey a hope that understanding and positive affective attachment between generations are still possible. This is especially the case in the representation of Mrs. Parkington's relationship with Janie but also in the few passages that describe an emotional connection between her and Alice. One of these moments occurs when Alice is leaving the duke and Mrs. Parkington arrives to help her:
Then suddenly, for the first times in all their lives together, Alice kissed her spontaneously and with feeling, so much feeling that there was in the gesture a sense of hysteria, almost of madness. […] It was the first time there was understanding between them. The first occasion on which the sense of strain between them was broken. It would take a long time for them to understand each other completely.
(223)
While Alice is here described as bordering on insanity and the text underlines the exceptional nature of the situation, the passage also conveys a more conventional maternal bond where Mrs. Parkington is in fact able to help her daughter and where an emotional connection is possible.
This may very well be what an altered affective map of modern motherhood entails: a decentralization of motherhood in women's lives and more relaxed demands for maternal affects. Mrs. Parkington's shame, emotional detachment, and boredom convey a significant gap between her affective experience and normative [End Page 50] expectations for emotional responses to motherhood. Her shocking emotions force attention to naturalized norms, an affective estrangement from oneself, and necessitate "reading into" the text rather than merely replicating familiar emotional responses. This novel makes taken-for-granted normative motherhood interesting, awaking not only Mrs. Parkington but also readers (and this critic) from modernity's anxious mood of stasis. As Flatley states, these qualities in a text enable affective mapping to take place: "In essence, the reader has an affective experience within the space of the text, one that repeats or recalls earlier, other experiences, and then is estranged from that experience, and by way of that estrangement told or taught something about it. This is the moment of affective mapping" (2008, 7).
While Flatley's work focuses on the creation of actual counter-moods through literary modes of affective mapping, middlebrow literature is not revolutionary and, despite its reach, did not actuate major changes in demands for motherhood's affective centrality. However, Mrs. Parkington does make visible otherwise naturalized motherhood norms and points to these norms' obsolescence in a modern world. While this article cannot make claims about the effects of affective mapping on actual readers, critical attention to the way middlebrow texts convey affective maps, as exemplified above, reveals structures of feeling within the dominant culture's ideologies and uncovers the subtle call for change in a type of literature usually considered to reiterate normative discourse.
TINE SOMMER is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, funded by a grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark. Her postdoctoral research considers affects, space, and materiality in interwar American middlebrow literature and residential architecture. She has recently published the article "'I Take Everything Back That I Said': Ambivalence and Motherhood in Mildred Pierce" in American Studies of Scandinavia.
NOTES
1. While referring to late nineteenth-century popular novels, Hugh McIntosh's tongue-in-cheek categorization in Guilty Pleasures: Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century is also very characteristic of middlebrow literature of the first half of the twentieth century (2018, 1).
2. The British/American "Middlebrow Network" was formed in 2008, and in 2016, Post45, a collective of scholars working on postwar American literature and culture, published an essay collection on middlebrow literature, attesting to a peak in scholarly interest in middlebrow studies that has, however, dwindled somewhat since. With a few exceptions, such as Tom Perrin's The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction: Popular U.S. Novels, Modernism, and Form, 1945–75 (2015), American middlebrow literary studies have recently turned toward an interest in publication history and reader reception. See, for example, Lise Jaillant (2017), McIntosh (2018), and Merve Emre (2017).
3. For some of the most important work in this field, see, for example, the studies from the 1990s by Joan Shelley Rubin (1992) and Janice Radway (1997). Additionally, see Amy Blair (2011). Most recently, Merve Emre has nuanced the notion of postwar middlebrow readers as "bad" readers. Instead, she describes these as "paraliterary" and argues that they engaged with popular books through "readerly identification, emotion, action, and interaction" to navigate postwar culture (2017, 3).
4. For another example of an affective analysis of motherhood in a middlebrow text from the 1940s, see Tine Sommer's (2019) article on James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce (1941).
5. Jayne Waterman (2003) states that contemporaneous critics in the 1940s called Louis Bromfield promising but ultimately "second-rate" and cites Bromfield for lamenting: "It is difficult for us [writers] to tread a middle path … standards are either black or white. There are never any soft grays" (76, 73). Waterman suggests that Bromfield argued for embracing the middlebrow's "anti-elitist […] authenticity" and that his texts are "complex, pluralistic, and versatile" and, therefore, should earn greater recognition (82, 83).
6. The February 1943 New York Times article "The Best Selling Books Here and Elsewhere" lists Mrs. Parkington as number two on their list of bestsellers in fourteen American cities.
7. Attesting to this strand of interest, a 2013 issue of Modernism/Modernity was dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance and New Modernist Studies and a 2017 special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language to Modernism and Native America.
8. Anne E. Fernald provides an excellent overview of these efforts in her introduction to a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, "Women's Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism" (2013, 229–40).
9. An illustrative example of this is the critical discussion of Gale Wilhelm's novels. See, for example, Elizabeth Blake (2020).
10. In Revolution of the Ordinary (2017), Toril Moi argues for acknowledgment as an important aspect of understanding texts from a different time and place than that of the literary critic: "acknowledgment […] is also relevant in cases where we are trying to understand works from different times and places. Whether we are trying to understand Euripides, Shakespeare, or Ibsen, we can't acknowledge the characters, their situation, their plight of soul—we can't understand them—unless we attempt to make their present ours, attempt to see what they see" (209). See also Rita Felski (2015) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003).
11. For a good overview of the etymology of the term "middlebrow," see Beth Driscoll (2014, 6–8).
12. In Gordon Hutner's literary history of mainstream American novels of the 1920s to 1940s, he asserts that "such books perform the cultural work of helping to shape the public sphere in modern America" (2006, 2). These novels were preoccupied with navigating life in a time of change and thus show "the dynamics through which the mainstream secures some values, masks some, disowns still others" (5). Focusing on women's middlebrow fiction, Nicola Humble (2001), Jamie Harker (2007), and Birte Christ (2012) have shown how middlebrow fiction appealed to readers' emotions and was concerned with issues such as home and family. However, it was also "a powerful force in establishing and consolidating, but also in resisting, new class and gender identities" (Humble 2001, 3).
13. While this topic is too extensive to deal with in detail here, interested readers will find relevant cultural histories of motherhood norms in the first half of the twentieth century in the following studies: Karen Anderson (1981), Rima D. Apple (2006), Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky (1998), Laura L. Lovett (2007), Melissa A. McEuen (2010), Gwendolyn Mink (1995), Sarah Burke Odland (2010), Elizabeth Rose (1999), and Jodi Vandenberg-Daves (2014).
14. Throughout American history, motherhood has been considered important to the development and stability of the nation. Two important points in time should be noted here, though: first, what Linda K. Kerber (2014) has coined as "Republican Motherhood" cemented the notion that raising children carried political importance around the time of the American Revolution. Later, during the nineteenth century, as historian Glenna Matthews (1987) has argued, a prevalent shift from Calvinism to evangelical Protestantism meant that children were no longer considered to be born as sinners. Rather, they had an innate potential that just needed to be steered in the right direction to produce good citizens.