Abstract
When we think of mid-century works of art with metafictional concerns we are likely to think of modernism—perhaps a text like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot (1953). As I argue elsewhere in this book, modernist authors often defined themselves by contrast with a middlebrow culture they thought of as lacking self-awareness, and simplistically adhering to an outmoded realist aesthetics.1 Why, then, is the middlebrow genre of the social problem novel filled with writers thinking about writing? Budd Schulberg’s The Harder They Fall (1947) is narrated by a press agent and an aspiring litté rateur and features a modernist poet and a proletarian playwright among its cast of characters. Nonnie Anderson, protagonist of Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944), is an unpublished writer. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Scout, Dill, and Jem spend summers inventing and acting out elaborate narratives about their town. The narrator of Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) is a journalist writing a series of articles and a book on anti-Semitism. Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) does not feature a writer protagonist, but closes with a version of the question that surely lies behind the appearance of all these other fictional writers: “What possible good has it done to teach people like me to write?”2
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Notes
Ann Petry, The Street (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 436. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as S.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” GLQ 1.1 (1993): 15.
Sianne Ngai, UglyFeelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 2.
Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1977) famously saw its author dyeing his skin dark brown in order to experience antiblack racism firsthand.
The genre of popular sociology had flourished through the success of books like Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York: Harper, 1954)
David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001)
Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (New York: Vintage, 1960)
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).
For bestseller data, see Keith L. Justice, Bestseller Index: All Books, Publishers Weekly and the New York Times through 1990 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998).
See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996)
Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
For an overview of this debate, see Josh Lukin, introduction to Lukin (ed.), Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), pp. ix–xiv.
See, for example, Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith (eds.), Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2003)
Jaime Harker, America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007)
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 27.
Hobson, Gentleman’s Agreement (New York: Dell, 1962), p. 237. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as GA.
Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 605–6.
Ann Petry, “Ann Petry Talks about First Novel,” interview by James W. Ivy, Crisis 53.2 (1946): 49.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 624.
Ira A. Levine, Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 123.
L. Smith, Strange Fruit (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944), p. 296. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as SF.
Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10.2 (1997): 295. “Strange Fruit,” rev. of Strange Fruit, by L. Smith, Atlantic Monthly, May 1944, p. 127, refers to Strange Fruit as “a new Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
L. Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), p. 253.
See Beth Harrison, “Lillian Smith as Author and Activist: The Critical Reception of Strange Fruit,” Southern Quarterly 35.4 (1997): 17–22.
Schulberg, The Harder They Fall (New York: Random House, 1947), p. 147. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as HF.
Gordon Hutner, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009), p. 258.
See, for example, Michael Gold, Jews without Money (New York: International Publishers, 1937). p. 55.
See Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub, Contemporary Jewish -American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 356.
Lee, “Harper Lee,” interview by Roy Newquist, in Newquist (ed.), Counterpoint (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), p. 412.
For another article dealing with Austen’s influence, see Jean Frantz Blackall, “Valorizing the Commonplace: Harper Lee’s Response to Jane Austen,” in Alice Hall Petry (ed.), On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), pp. 19–34.
On this topic see Graeme Dunphy, “Meena’s Mockingbird: From Harper Lee to Meera Syal,” Neophilologus 88 (2004): 643.
On irony and Scout’s narration, see criticism from Hicks, “Literary Horizons,” p. 15, to Alan Lenhoff, “The World According to Scout,” Writing 23 (Feb.–Mar. 2001): 20–3
Theodore R. Hovet and Grace-Ann Hovet, “‘Fine Fancy Gentlemen’ and ‘Yappy Folk’: Contending Voices in To Kill a Mockingbird,” in Don Noble (ed.), Critical Insights: To Kill a Mockingbird (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2010), pp. 187–204.
See D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or, the Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 24–6, 54, 74.
See, for example, the authors quoted in Christopher Metress, “The Rise and Fall of Atticus Finch,” Chattahoochee Review 24.1 (2003): 96, 99. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as “RF.”
On this topic, see Isaac Saney, “Commentary: The Case Against To Kill a Mockingbird,” Race & Class 45.1 (2003): 99–110; “RF”; Alice Petry, introduction to Alice Petry, On Harper Lee, p. xxv
Claudia Durst Johnson, To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), pp. 16–19.
Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1960), p. 36. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as KM.
See Tim Dare, “Lawyers, Ethics, and To Kill a Mockingbird,” Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001): 127–34 for a related view of Atticus as not admirable but tragic.
For examples from throughout the critical history of the text, see, for example, Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 158–9 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as NN)
Addison Gayle Jr., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (Garden City: Anchor, 1975)
Bernard Bell, “Ann Petry’s Demythologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character,” in Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (eds.), Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 105–15.
Orville Prescott, “Outstanding Novels,” rev. of The Street, by Ann Petry, Yale Review 35 (Spring 1946): 574.
Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 37.
Among the many critics who have focused on the question of The Street’s treatment of the American Dream, see Richard Yarborough, “The Quest for the American Dream in Three Afro-American Novels: If He Hollers Let Him Go, The Street, and Invisible Man,” MELUS 8.4 (1981): 33–59
Lindon Barrett, “Figures of Violence: The Street in the American Landscape,” Cultural Critique 25 (Autumn 1993): 205–37
Carol E. Henderson, “The ‘Walking Wounded’: Rethinking Black Women’s Identity in Ann Petry’s The Street,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.4 (2000): 849–67.
For a similar argument, see William Scott, “Material Resistance and the Agency of the Body in Ann Petry’s The Street,” American Literature 78.1 (2006): 89–116.
See, for instance, Bertolt Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John Willett (New York: ill and Wang, 2001), pp. 179–208
Sergei Eisenstein, “Through Theater to Cinema,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1977), pp. 3–17.
Elizabeth Boyle Machlan, “Diseased Properties and Broken Homes in Ann Petry’s The Street,” in Brian Norman and Piper Kendrix Williams (eds.), Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), p. 161.
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© 2015 Tom Perrin
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Perrin, T. (2015). “It Offers No Solutions”: Ambivalence and Aesthetics in the Social Problem Novel. In: The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523952_3
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