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

Introduction: A Genealogy of Political Domestic Fiction

[ 1 ] ss Introduction A Genealogy of Political Domestic Fiction [][][][] In 1942, Sinclair Lewis wrote approving prefatory remarks to Paxton Hibben’s debunking biography of Henry Ward Beecher, the antebellum abolitionist preacher who, Lewis believed, bore a striking resemblance to his own Elmer Gantry. In an aside, Lewis sums up Beecher’s more famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, pithily: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first evidence to America that no hurricane can be so disastrous to a country as a ruthlessly humanitarian woman” (Lewis, Foreword x). “Ruthlessly humanitarian.” The phrase humorously juxtaposes callousness and benevolence, equating firm conviction and literary activism with a natural disaster. It is a blithe dismissal of a figure whom contemporary feminist scholars have shown to be complex, sophisticated, and innovative (Tompkins 125, Hedrick viii). For Lewis, Stowe’s legacy was defined solely by her frank social advocacy in fictional form. Uncle Tom’s Cabin personalizes a complex political and social issue through vivid characterization. Stowe ends her novel with a direct appeal to readers to act upon the emotions her novel inspires: “But, what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do,—they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the 2 ] america the middlebrow great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter!” (512). Stowe’s faith in emotion and in the power of the individual to challenge injustice marks many sentimental women writers of the 1850s. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was credited with inflaming Northern public sentiment against slavery and causing civil war. It is seen, in other words, as one of the most successful political novels ever written. Dig deeper, and Lewis’s breezy dismissal of Harriet Beecher Stowe extends to political activism, socially committed novels, and women. Stowe is both symptom and symbol; women like her, Lewis suggests, have ruined American culture. Debates about the past, of course, are very much about the present. Lewis’s warning about the dangers of women reflects a larger cultural anxiety between the the two World Wars. Numerous feminist critics, from Bonnie Kime Scott and Rachel Blau DuPlessis to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, have critiqued the pervasive gender anxieties of the modern era, anxieties that made “effeminate” so pervasive an insult that women writers used it against other writers, both male and female. American modernist writers blamed women for American standardization, religious intolerance, racism, poor taste, and ineffectual liberal reform (Douglas 6–7). All women writers in the twenties and thirties had to confront this new cultural scapegoating. Some, like Dorothy Parker, proved that they were as unsentimental and ruthless as the men. Those who succeeded within the emerging modernist aesthetic, like Willa Cather, obscured their connections with identifiable networks of women writers (Williams 89). The “ruthlessly humanitarian” were laughed at, vilified, blamed, dismissed. Modern American literary critics have, by and large, maintained these oppositions, elevating the writers they favor from middle-class mediocrity to modern rebellion. Despite her clear sympathy for the modernist enterprise in her germinal book Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the Twenties, Ann Douglas concedes that “the matrophobia of the moderns was not only unfair to the Victorian women it criticized but ambivalent and unresolved , complicated by issues of gender and race difference, and blind to the psychological consequences such resistance entails” (8). Luckily, however, “Victorian matriarchs” spoke for themselves in the twenties and thirties, embracing emotion and activism through the literary marketplace. [ 3 introduction This book investigates women writers of the interwar period who challenged their own generation of Americans to “feel right,” and argues that they represent a heretofore invisible category of American authorship. The 1850s and the 1970s have both been studied extensively as moments when women writers merged activism and literature. First and second wave feminism have been separated, in the critical imagination, by a fallow period in women’s activist writing. America the Middlebrow proposes a link, positing a school of activist fiction embracing four writers who have been considered, when considered at all, as anomalies or flukes. The connections among these four writers—Dorothy Canfield, Jessie Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst—are not obvious. They would not...