A Room of One’s Own and Middlebrow Entertainment

Debating the dead: Virginia Woolf edition

Virginia Woolf, famously and with great perspicacity, imagined Shakespeare’s sister. Without A Room of [Her] Own in which to write, Woolf argues, she is “washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed”. Woolf recognised the powerful pull of labour, income, and duty over the less practical creative arts, and articulated in pithy hypotheticals a truth that spoke to women in particular, but also marginalised people more widely, about what was needed to see more women (and, by extension, marginalised people) creating Great Art. What a shame, then, that she so wholeheartedly writes of her “dislike [of] the correct thing” in her rejection of the middlebrow.

To Woolf, “the middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.” She calls it “betwixt and between,” with seemingly no understanding of the multiple ways one can be between high and low: perhaps it is understanding the songwriting of Barry Manilow, the production of Jeff Lynne, or the vocal stylings of Whitney Houston. One does not always need to innovate to create Great Art, one may simply understand others’ art and synthesise it, with an innately Hegelian understanding, into a product of your own – in this way, art which is respectful, curious, and created with passion may yet be middlebrow. Perhaps you are middlebrow in juxtaposition: your passions include Wagner and The Legend of Zelda, or political analysis and k-pop, and why should your whole existence be in one camp, after all? Even the earliest attempts to define middlebrow culture prompted readers to reject the classification (through letters to the editors of Life magazine) from even the scantest reflection on their own “all around brow” consumption habits. One might equally be middlebrow in execution, taking something frivolous “so seriously,” as Woolf puts it – perhaps somebody like Jenny Nicholson, whose work on theme parks is objectively intense and academic, might be considered ‘middlebrow’ as she enjoys, but also interrogates, her status as a ‘Disney adult’. By definition Lana del Rey, who situates herself aesthetically outside of the mainstream and who reworks outdated popular styles into contemporary work would be middlebrow, as would Taylor Swift, whose music appeals to such a large audience by code-switching between ‘you could’ve been getting down to this sick beat’ (lowbrow) and ‘your touch brought forth an incandescent glow’ (highbrow). ‘The middle’ is, by definition, the greyest of areas.

I am, in all likelihood, middlebrow. You may ask yourself how somebody with (half*) a PhD, whose position in the class structure is predicated entirely on cultural capital, and who is so openly pretentious about her aestheticised life can be middlebrow, and I do claim the title with some trepidation. I over-intellectualise, I pursue the outdated, and I am often interested in things other people find boring, but crucially, I curate and present my interests to “relat[e] to aspirational, socioeconomic status rather than high-culture pretension” – that is, I have a personal ‘brand’, and people are usually right when they assume things of me. There is an aspect of consumption and conspicuity about culture in my life that is fundamentally disconnected from the highbrow (and which needs to be freshly analysed for the Shein age, but I would argue I am disconnected from the newly disposable lowbrow culture). Essentially, it is inherently middle-class to have a Substack. Additionally, I may be white-collar, but I still labour. I work to fund my research, my highbrow predilections, and my conspicuous media consumption, which adds a level of complication to my cultural class. I am, unlike Woolf, unable to detach myself so entirely from my own origins (this rejection of the middlebrow being written when somebody associated her with South Kensington, where she was born and raised) to pursue the “single object… art itself [or] life itself” – that is to say, I need to work to fund the art, Ginny**. I can’t mooch around London witnessing how the other half lives if I want to get shit done, and I can’t stop caring about the things I like just because I have other things to do. This directly influences my consumption of culture: I come home tired, Ginny! I’ve spent nine hours at my job and four hours at the library, and I don’t want to watch something highbrow, however much I’d enjoy it if I had the luxury of time. I don’t want to spend my weekend socially or recreationally appreciating anything. I want to be a vegetable when the working day ends, and my media diet reflects that. I can socially and academically value the middle, I can “cheerfully lay myself down in the dust and kiss the print of the[] feet” of the high, and I would never purport to be above the low, nor is it to be a titillation for me to experience… what, a beer and a comfy chair and the most popular songs on the jukebox? Life situates these as inherently lowbrow, as if we all have the option to go home to our Eames chairs and unwashed salad bowl and it is only choice and comfort that prevents that.

Perhaps the easiest criticism to make of the concept of middlebrow is that it doesn’t work anymore: culture is fundamentally more accessible and cheaper than in Woolf’s day and we cannot be put into simple camps allied by our class. That betrays the complexity of human experience, however: when records were expensive, my MIL was buying the odd classical to listen to alone, and not necessarily the populist or famous ones; there are still people who choose Classic FM over Radio 3 for its accessibility, just as J B Priestley wrote. There has always been an entire market of middlebrow, middle-class cultural artefacts, and that hasn’t gone away in the 21st century, but to presuppose that there is a single ‘how’ or ‘why’ things find popularity or success is to standardise the human experience and diverse interests across a culture. Middlebrow is still a useful marker, then, but it cannot mean something alienated from the wider culture we live in, and must be analysed in tandem with class signifiers even as culture is democratised before our eyes.

There are, of course, opposing academic perspectives, but I feel that it would be unfair to ally myself with Raymond Williams. His analysis of class is based on taking working-class (that is, lowbrow) entertainments seriously, and acknowledging the intelligence and tastes of the working-man. Any pretentious ‘real ale’ drinker, for example, must know the debt they owe to the working man’s sustenance of traditional crafts and demand for high-quality product at affordable prices. I cannot easily fit the way the modern world is industrialised into my own class story, because my labour is not industrialised and I am deeply alienated from my industrial roots. So: I’ve never watched a series of a TV talent show (I find them trite and boring) but can absolutely enjoy the allegedly disposable singers and artists they produce (Diana Vickers keep dropping new music, queen). I go to the ballet once a year, at Christmas. I collect like Hans Sloane and Umberto Eco, but my artefacts are related to pop music and mass-market books. I am writing this in one of the six or so esoteric and exclusive central London libraries I’m a member of, but I’m going to go home and play video games. I am unavoidably betwixt.

I also understand the importance of both aspiring and hating people who aspire: the Cloud Atlas movie took a profound, experimental book and churned it into passable Hollywood product, and I’m genuinely shocked by how many people are satisfied with AI art making imitations of things they previously liked, and I do think it’s an entirely reasonable stance to hate the ars-gratia-middle-of-the-road that solemnly plops itself down there for the sake of profit… but I also don’t think it’s fair to suggest that the people who engage with it are in some way lesser simply because the boom in romantasy schlock is aimed at them. There’s no need to shit on people for enjoying the fashionable things, whether it’s vol-au-vents or matcha, or for only being turned on to something because other people like it, or for aspiring to better. What is missing from the sort of analysis that rejects the middlebrow is the explicit statement that people ought to stay in their lane and that nothing artistic can come when one seeks joy or refinement as one of the motivators for making or experiencing art.

What I am saying is, Woolf uses her signature insight when she says “the Duke of Bedford [… will] raise[] the rent so high that Bloomsbury is safe for middlebrows to live in” as he certainly has, and I now park my middlebrow life around the corner from where she did, in a very unremarkable yet expensive bed-sitting room. She may very well be right as she brandishes me “capable of dealing successfully with what is called real life” as she does indirectly by saying that highbrows can’t, and that she requires a lowbrow to make her dinner, but that she certainly has it the wrong way round when she claims “there must be money in teaching and in writing books about Shakespeare” – there is none, Ginny, and as you noted yourself, I do, “like other people,  have to make money”. Middlebrow is for those of us who have to make money and still want to enjoy the finer things in life – we can want good prose in our genre fiction, deep insight from our video games, and music that we can both dance to and have tattooed on our bodies. Maybe I do want to do life right, Ginny… that desire for middle-class comfort doesn’t make me less of an artist.

*work in progress

** Ginny (derogatory); she says she “distrust[s] people who call both Shakespeare and Wordsworth equally “Bill””

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On This Topic:

• Woolf’s middlebrow letter – though it would be unfair to mention that she never sent it and must on some level have thought better of it. I also quote John Howland a bit, and the Lynes / Life perspective on middlebrow.
• Four hours of analysis on an out-of-business hotel that is really, really compelling. Probably video essays are inherently middlebrow, perhaps excepting Contrapoints.
• Yes it’s very clever and funny to hate the middlebrow.

To-Do:

• Finish chapter first-pass
• Find Zenith Pessoa translation (the Costa one is not doing it for us)
• Read a damn book for pleasure!! I’ve written a whole journal in under two months and done a tonne of PhD work, but I haven’t managed a single book in July.

Today’s Culture:

• For anybody who likes folk or post-rock, I listened to Book On Tape Worm whilst knocking down my ‘listen later’ playlists, and liked it a lot whilst knowing I probably won’t go back to it.
• One of my favourite book youtubers Crow Caller is uploading more, which is always a joy to listen to.
• Updating my StoryGraph to include a lot of books I own to tidy my TBR mess. Is it all of them? Not even close, but given my books are spread across three homes, a storage facility, and (currently) one very large suitcase, it’s what I’ve got. I have the faint hope that if I live a long life I might be able to read all the books I own.