Middlebrow Matters Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 57 Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool Editorial Board TOM CONLEY JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A. HIGGINS Harvard University University of Melbourne Dartmouth College MIREILLE ROSELLO DAVID WALKER University of Amsterdam University of Sheffield This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contem- porary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture. Recent titles in the series: 41 Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Muslim 49 Colin Davis, Traces of War: Women in French Cinema: Voices Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in of Maghrebi Migrants in France Twentieth-Century French Writing 42 Katelyn E. Knox, Race on Display 50 Alison J. Murray Levine, Vivre Ici: in 20th- and 21st Century France Space, Place and Experience in Contemporary French Documentary 43 Bruno Chaouat, Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the 51 Louise Hardwick, Joseph Zobel: Challenge of the New Antisemitism Négritude and the Novel 44 Denis M. Provencher, Queer Maghrebi 52 Jennifer Solheim, The Performance French: Language, Temporalities, of Listening in Postcolonial Transfiliations Francophone Culture 45 Nicholas Hewitt, Montmartre: A 53 Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod Cultural History Locating Guyane 46 Oana Panaïté, The Colonial Fortune in 54 Adrian May, From Bataille to Badiou: Contemporary Fiction in French Lignes, the preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987–2017 47 Jason Herbeck, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature 55 Charlotte Hammond, Entangled and Literary Identity in the French Otherness: Cross-gender Fabrications Caribbean in the Francophone Caribbean 48 Yasser Elhariry, Pacifist Invasions: 56 Julia Waters, The Francophone Arabic, Translation and the Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging Postfrancophone Lyric DIANA HOLMES Middlebrow Matters Women’s reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque Middlebrow Matters LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2018 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2018 Diana Holmes The right of Diana Holmes to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78694-156-5 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78694-952-3 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Contents Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Reclaiming the Middlebrow 5 2 The Birth of French Middlebrow 32 3 Colette: The Middlebrow Modernist 60 4 Interwar France: The Case of the Missing Middlebrow 91 5 The ‘little world’ of Françoise Sagan 126 6 Literary Prizes, Women and the Middlebrow 150 7 Realism, Romance and Self-reflexivity: Twenty-first-century Middlebrow 178 Conclusion: Marie NDiaye’s femme puissante – a Double Reading 207 Bibliography 223 Index 239 Acknowledgements Acknowledgements This book has taken some years to complete, interspersed as its writing has been with other, shorter projects, with teaching and with what might be summed up as Life. Over that time, I have drawn on parts of it for teaching, and presented papers on elements of my research at conferences and seminars in the UK, France, Spain and the USA. I am grateful to the students and fellow academics who have listened, commented, asked pertinent questions and enriched my thinking with theirs. Thanks too to Anthony Cond and Chloe Johnson at Liverpool University Press for their invaluable support, and to the anonymous readers they enlisted to review the draft manuscript. The readers’ reports were not only hugely encouraging, but also exceptionally detailed and helpful. And, finally, I want to thank the friends and family members who have read and discussed parts of the work in progress – and those who have just provided the support of love, friendship, fun and the belief that it was a book worth writing. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. Earlier, partial versions of some chapters were published in the following books and journals: ‘Mapping modernity: The feminine middlebrow and the belle époque’, French Cultural Studies August/November 2014, 25, pp. 262–70 was based on part of Chapter 2; ‘Literary prizes, women and the middlebrow’, Contemporary French Civilization, 41:3–4, pp. 437–48 used material from Chapter 6; ‘Modernisme et genre à la Belle Époque: Daniel Lesueur, Marcelle Tinayre, Colette’, in Fictions modernistes du masculin-féminin 1900–1940, ed. Andrea Oberhuber, Alexandra Arvisais, Marie-Claude Dugas (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), pp. 49–62, drew on parts of Chapter 2. Introduction Introduction Modern French literature is strongly identified with ‘high’ culture, with complex and challenging philosophies, experimental forms and sophis- ticated eloquence. France has celebrated somewhat less its rich seam of popular literature – from the late nineteenth-century roman-feuilleton to today’s Harlequin romance series – but this too has begun to be studied rather than simply deplored. However, between what Bourdieu termed the ‘restricted’ sphere of the literary field, in which the value of a literary work is essentially symbolic (‘high’ literature), and the commercial sphere of the mass market (‘low’), there lies a wide domain composed of all those hybrid novels read by most readers for a – usually unexamined – mix of reasons. These include the desire to be entertained, the wish to expand one’s own knowledge and understanding, the appeal of venturing, through simulated experience, beyond the confines of the self. The novels that satisfy this demand are beguiling but serious, pleasurable but instructive, singular – not formulaic – but accessible. They constitute the subfield of the middlebrow. So far, the question of what the average regular reader reads has scarcely figured inFrench literary criticism, despite a growing interest in cultural hierarchies. This book, then, represents the first extended study of the middlebrow French novel. My focus is mainly on women writers and readers. Of course men also read and, as we shall see, write fiction that is classified as middlebrow, and men’s middlebrow would be a worthy subject in its own right.1 But as I shall explain, since the beginnings of the middlebrow novel in Belle Époque France, women have formed a majority of the nation’s reading public, and this feminisation of reading has become more rather than less marked in the contemporary era. Once we define the literature of an 1 See Macdonald (2011). 2 Middlebrow Matters age in terms of ‘what did most people choose to read?’, women as readers and as writers immediately assume a more central place. Moreover, if middlebrow as a cultural category is disdained by highbrow critics, this is partly because the ‘brows’ of culture have become implicitly gendered. Across Western cultures, and conspicuously in France, modernism has been the dominant aesthetic of high culture since (at least) the beginning of the twentieth century. This is still the case in the twenty-first, since postmodernism has inherited modernism’s mistrust of mimesis, realism and established (hence easily legible) artistic form. Modernism prizes the demanding, the unexpected and the difficult (on thedifficulty of modernism see Diepeveen, 2003), aligning difficulty with seriousness and a heroic moral stance. Literature that is accessible, because it deploys techniques that have become familiar, is correspondingly downgraded. In the case of narrative fiction, this deprecation of established practice means a disregard for plot and character, and a sceptical view of the mainstream novel’s traditional concern with love, romance, family, the social filtered through domestic dramas. As Suzanne Clark shows, in liberating culture from ‘the banal, the old’, modernism cast an ironic light on emotion or pathos in the novel, and made ‘sentimentality’ a mark of shame (Clark, 1991, 2, 11). The sort of fiction associated with women readers – which, though often itself oppositional and ironic, tends to take seriously both domesticity and romance – became the antithesis of authentic high art, the middlebrow. Middlebrow as a term has no direct equivalent in French, but the word’s dismissive charge is strongly present in the way that literature, and specifically the novel, is evaluated in France. To turn critical attention to the middlebrow constitutes a feminist gesture, for it questions the gendered nature of the assumptions that govern the literary field, whilst also resituating women-authored texts and women as readers in the literary foreground. Chapter One provides a fuller introduction to my subject, examining and accounting for France’s privileging