Ruth Pirsig Wood - Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and LowBrow Novels of the 1950s

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GARLAND STUDIES IN
AMERICAN POPULAR HISTORY AND CULTURE

edited by
JEROME NADELHAFT
UNIVERSITY OF MAINE

A GARLAND SERIES

Lolita in Peyton Place

HIGHBROW, MIDDLEBROW, AND LOWBROW NOVELS OF THE 1950s

Ruth Pirsig Wood

First published 1995

by Garland Publishing, Inc.

Published 2013

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1995 Ruth Persig Wood

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-315-80542-9 (eISBN)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wood, Ruth Persig, 1945
Lolita in Peyton Place: highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow
novels of the 1950s / Ruth Persig Wood
p. cm. (Garland studies in American popular history
and culture )
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8153-2061-2 (alk. paper)
1. American fiction20th centuryhistory and criticism.
2. Popular literatureUnited StatesHistory20th century.
3. Moral conditions in literature. 4. Ethics in literature.
5. Literature and societyUnited StatesHistory20th century.
6. Best sellersUnited StatesBibliography. 7. Books and read
ingUnited StatesHistory. 8. Social values in literature. 9. Sex
roles in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PS374.P63W66 1995
813'.5409dc20 95-22338

To my husband,
David Wood

Contents

Raising My Brows

Some people look at films like Home Alone II, tune in to MTV, or watch Robert James Waller top the bestseller lists for endless months and worry that Western civilization is about to collapse. I'm not one of them. Some of my best friends are pop culture junkies, and I work with America's youth, so I want better reasons before I blame anything on the television age and, particularly, on "pulp fiction."

My inclination is not well supported by critical inquiry. Even Janice Radway, who set out to support women's reading of romances, couldn't go as far as she wanted in that defense. One can find support of a somewhat sensational kind from the likes of Camille Paglia, Stephen King, and the various defenders of pornography.

But much of the commentary on popular fiction doesn't go far beyond description; that which does is largely censorious. I'm aware that my subtitle may sound like I'm getting ready to fulminate as well. I'm not. Though I agree with C.S. Lewis that "lowbrow," "middlebrow" and "highbrow" are "odious adjectives," I decided to use them because the alternatives I considered sounded equally pejorative, snobbish, and smug. The offensive denotations at least emphasize the need for a reconsideration. Those who see justice in the pejorative "low" and the laudatory "high" are just the ones I want to engage in a reconsideration.

My purpose is to provide sounder theoretical reasons for not only allowing, but even advocating the consumption of popular fiction in schools, by women, in society at large. This study involves an attempt to discern and discuss the redeeming qualities of the nonliterary or popular American fiction of the fifties.

I quickly realized that I needed more than the common two-part division between "pop fiction" and "literature." There is a body of popular fiction ("middlebrow") which focuses on character in relation to society, has the basic structure and function of myth, and often appeals to readers of either sex. Another kind ("lowbrow"), is usually read by members of one sex, focuses on character in relation to a narrow circle (one other individual or a closed group), follows the plot patterns of romance or fairy tale, and implies how to be a "good man" or a "good woman."

These forms have different generic make-up and serve different cultural and readerly functions. To critique them successfully, we need to know more about what they aim for and how they're constructed. So part of my goal is to show how the differences between these subgenres should lead us to apply different standards of critical judgment. The three-part taxonomy seems useful for finding out what lowbrow and middlebrow fictions contribute to culture that highbrow can't, why some lowbrow and middlebrow novels are better than others, and how lowbrow, middlebrow, and highbrow connect variously to history, ideology, and sociology.

Highbrow novels are those distinguished by an author's conscious striving toward artistry and the absence of model characters or moral centers. One surprise for me in this study is that highbrow novels are more like lowbrow novels than like middlebrow. Readers in the last century have tended to be much more aware of the differences than the similarities. Though detached and ironized in tone and relation to audience, highbrow novels are like lowbrow in form and function. I discuss those similarities in I examine reasons why trained readers are easily repelled by lowbrow fiction as well as reasons why we shouldn't be.

explains why a "quintessential" fifties novel has to be "middlebrow."

The taxonomy is derived from American fiction of the fifties and therefore holds true for work from that time and place more than for any other time or place. The appendix, entitled "The Fifties," gives an overview of the dominant social, historical, ideological, and economic features of this decade that I see as influencing the themes and morals of American fifties fiction. This study has made clearer to me that the cultural artifacts that we regard as good and appropriate entertainment influence the way we train ourselves to view each other, the world, and our places in it.

Genres evolve to serve cultural needs; how major historical, economic, and social changes influenced the evolution of fictional genres. In the fifties we made different decisions about human issues than we do now. For that reason, and because of changes in our economy, modes of interaction, and social realities, the novel forms that currently appear on bestseller lists don't exactly match the forms of lowbrow, middlebrow, and highbrow novels I describe here. Lowbrow novels like The Bridges of Madison County have reformulated the definition of "good man" and "good woman" to suit the ethics of the time, and we've evolved hybrids of low-middlebrow (Grisham and Crichton, for example) and low-highbrow (Erdrich and Morrison, for example). But that's the subject of my next book.

All the titles of popular fiction that get discussed at any length in this book appeared on national bestseller lists in the fifties or early sixties. That system of selection pretty much eliminated real "pulp fiction." I also chose to omit less realistic subgenressagas, historical romances, science fiction, and fantasyin order to make more parallel comparisons. For the sake of expediency (since in this age of the VCR it's safer to assume familiarity with popular movies than with popular fiction), I've used some eighties and nineties films for comparative purposes.

I'd like to thank Professor Kent Bales for giving me encouragement to explore this topic in the variety of directions it led me. I'd like to thank my husband, Dave Wood, who has been my primary editor and moral support from beginning to end, and Dick Parker, who has ably steered me through the final stages. I'd also like to thank my editors at Garland who have been very "lowbrow" to deal with. That's a compliment.

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