Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s.(Book Review)

Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s. Eds. Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003.

Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith's goals for their volume on popular American women writers of the 1920s are ambitious: they seek to "reframe the American modern period in terms of popular women's writing" and to do away with the manner in which modernist literary studies "reinforces hierarchies of culture" and "segregates and separates authors from differing ethnic and racial groups" (5). Thus, while attempting to reposition the modernist lens, Middlebrow Moderns also aims to illustrate the ethnic contributions of popular women's fiction to the literary culture of the era. This latter task is the one best fulfilled by their volume.

This volume contains a number of suggestive essays on authors as diverse as African Americans Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, midwestern German Jews Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber, Chinese Canadian Winnifred Eaton, Polish Jew Anzia Yezierska, and white Hollywood writer Anita Loos. By casting a wide net, the editors reverse the trajectory of modernist scholarship that repeats "the binaries of high/low and male/female" (9). In doing so, they ask some provocative questions.

In her essay on Anita Loos, "'Lost Among the Ads': Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Politics of Imitation," Sarah Churchwell notes that the book not only sold extremely well (it was the second best-selling novel in America in 1926) but also was praised by the literary and intellectual elite of its day. Yet Churchwell asks, "Is Blondes properly understood as low, middle, or high?"--a question that is raised in regard to most of the works in this volume. Even more to the point, Churchwell wants to know, "Why is {Edith Wharton's} The Custom of the Country high and Blondes middle or low (and why don't we know which it is, if these categories are self-evident, or even useful)?" (159). These questions are effective because they force us to meditate on our categories of culture, and indeed, to wonder why Wharton and Sinclair Lewis, to name two, enjoyed best-selling ...