‘If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm,’ Virginia Woolf once wrote, ‘dares call me “middlebrow” I will take my pen and stab him, dead.’ With this, in an unsent letter to the New Statesman in 1932, she set the high (and highbrow) standard of contempt for the category. While the decades since have seen titanic growth in middlebrow art across all media, there has been little change in this default impression of ‘middlebrow’ as a term somewhere between a literary expression of dismissal, and an outright slur. Although the ‘lowbrow’ has, in recent years, been reclaimed as a legitimate aesthetic domain, the middlebrow continues to be a denigrated and troublesome category. The highbrow has its defenders (snobs) and the lowbrow its defenders (hipsters), but it is not easy to find defenders of the middlebrow. We thus come not to bury the middlebrow, but to praise it. Middlebrow is a term of appraisal that admits not just of bad, but good, even brilliant, instances.
To do so, however, we must first take up the question of what the middlebrow is. Woolf herself acknowledged that determining this ‘is no easy question to answer’, which is unsurprising since the term is so contested and fraught. The ‘middlebrow’, we propose, should be treated explanatorily: we will identify a range of phenomena associated with the category, then hypothesise what best explains them.
There are four features associated with the middlebrow. The first and most obvious is that the middlebrow is in the middle, juxtaposed between something ‘low’ and something ‘high’. Woolf emphasised the category as ‘betwixt and between’ (setting up a jab at what she saw as the hopelessly middlebrow BBC: the ‘Betwixt and Between Company’). The midcentury cultural critic Dwight Macdonald says something similar about ‘Midcult’, his term for the middlebrow, in his essay ‘Masscult and Midcult’ (1960):
In these more advanced times, the danger to High Culture is not so much from Masscult as from a peculiar hybrid bred from the latter’s unnatural intercourse with the former. A whole middle culture has come into existence and it threatens to absorb both its parents. This intermediate form – let us call it Midcult – has the essential qualities of Masscult – the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity – but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf.
We agree with these anti-mids that the middlebrow should be seen as combining distinct elements that are not typically found together in either the highbrow or lowbrow, though we frame it rather differently. Nonetheless: the middlebrow is in the middle.
Second, it’s clear that the term ‘middlebrow’ has a generally pejorative status. It is often used as a way of criticising or dismissing a work of art, an artist, or a viewer’s tastes, and it’s rare for someone to embrace the term for their own work or tastes. But that status is only a default: it’s possible to cancel the negative implication of the term, as we hope to do here.
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