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

Afterword: Consequences and Transformations

[ 147 ] ss Afterword Consequences and Transformations [][][][] The interwar convergence of women’s novels, middlebrow authorship, and progressivism reached the peak of its influence during the period of the Popular Front. Much has been written about this larger cultural shift to the left in the late 1930s, notably Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, a massive study of cartoons, musicals, photography, theater, poetry, and fiction. The Popular Front was marked by a commitment to social justice, opposition to fascism, and “discovery” of a left-leaning American history . Fascist or imperialist advances in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain led radicals to seek allies in the fight against authoritarianism. Middlebrow authors were crucial participants in the coalition of liberals , socialists, and Communists who made up the Popular Front. Scholars like Denning, for all their brilliance, tend to leave out the middle-class progressives who made the movement possible—not just FDR and the Democrats, but figures like Archibald MacLeish, Pearl Buck, and Dorothy Canfield. Without these formerly hated “liberals,” no Popular Front would have been possible. Indeed, the progressive America that writers like Canfield, Fauset, Buck, and Herbst had created became a touchstone for Popular Front mythology. Radicals moved closer to middlebrow progressives. Vernon Parrington and F. O. Matthiessen read American literature through its 148 ] america the middlebrow democratic impulses; John and Mary Beard’s economic history and Van Wyck Brooks’s celebrated histories of New England established a liberal political and historical tradition. In folklore and ethnography, Constance Rourke examined uniquely American traditions, especially in her most famous book, the 1934 American Humor. The academic disciplines of American studies and American literature grew out of these liberalizing tendencies to tell the real story of “the people.” The New Deal assisted in this embrace of American culture by claiming it as a national treasure. Through its oral history project, it preserved and funded numerous explorations of American culture, including, perhaps most famously, the autobiographies of freed slaves. The Popular Front inspired a new discovery of America, an America that could lay claim to its own unique culture, derived from the folk and unbelievably rich in its diversity. Of course, writers like Dorothy Canfield, Pearl Buck, and Jessie Fauset had been arguing for the importance of American culture and American democracy for a long time, but by the late thirties, increasing numbers of people appeared actually to agree with their views. In the late thirties, left-leaning intellectuals from liberals to Communists were claiming all of American history, folklore, and mythology as their own. This rediscovery of American culture challenged more traditional definitions of culture, especially print culture. The preference for cultural egalitarianianism, however, made pragmatist aesthetics more respectable in literary circles than ever before; exclusive definitions of literature were an inauthentic expression of American culture. The work of librarians and educators to increase literacy and accessibility, which Dorothy Canfield had promoted in her 1927 Why Stop Learning?, continued in the thirties with increased governmental and public support. William Gray, in the 1935 What Makes a Book Readable, and Douglas Waples, in the 1938 People and Print: Social Aspects of Reading in the Depression and the 1940 What Reading Does to People, detailed the requirements of a truly national, accessibleprintcultureandthepositivebenefitsof suchaculture.Though these studies focused on nonfiction, their emphasis on literacy contributed to a larger culture of letters on which middlebrow fiction depended. This renewed interest in fiction’s transformative power may be seen in the critical revival of nineteenth-century reform and the protest novel. By the end of the thirties, the protest novel had become a positive, distinctively American tradition, and its values in literature were no longer dismissed as hysterical dogma but passionate political sympathy. Uncle [ 149 afterword Tom’s Cabin became a touchstone American novel of protest, and terms that had once been used pejoratively—pity, anger, sentiment, compassion , humanity, even propaganda—were now used descriptively, even with respect and praise. It is not that reviewers and critics abandoned the more highbrow modernist aesthetics, but that they respected the intentions and rhetorical strategies of politically inflected protest novels as a tradition to be evaluated on its own terms. By 1939, politically inflected literary criticism had become the norm in reviews, and novels in the liberal tradition were receiving increasing attention. Social protest, if not seen as the highest form of Art, at least possessed its own standards...