The New Literary Middlebrow
Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century
Driscoll Beth
ISBN: 9781137402929
DOI: 10.1057/9781137402929
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2
Alberta: So, what did everybody think?
Lynette: I thought the character of Madame Bovary
was . . . very inspirational.
Alberta: Inspirational? She poisons herself with arsenic.
Lynette: Really?
Alberta: You didn’t read until the end?
Lynette: I stopped after page 50.
Alberta: Am I the only one who read the book?
Susan:
I saw the movie. It was really good.
Alberta: Ladies! I’m sorry, but what is the point of
having a book club if we don’t read the book?
Bree:
More wine?
Desperate Housewives
Season 1 episode 7, 2004.
The book club is a paradigmatic instance of the new literary middlebrow, and a popular target of disdain across twenty-first century culture. A biting example of critique comes in an early scene of Desperate
Housewives, a camp blockbuster TV comedy that won multiple awards
and gathered a global audience of millions. Centred on the turbulent
lives of four residents of Wisteria Lane and archly narrated by their dead
neighbour, Mary Alice, the show juxtaposed dark melodrama with a
glossy façade. Marc Cherry’s script gleefully inhabited suburban clichés
from competitive lawn growing to spying from behind curtains, and in
one brief scene in Season 1, he skewers the book club. This scene open
with a close-up of Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary on a dark wooden
table, next to a platter of biscuits and a glass of red wine. Mary Alice’s
voiceover announces, ‘When I was alive, my friends and I came together
45
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once a month for the meeting of the Wisteria Lane Book Club’, and the
camera pans to an interior shot of five women: three seated around a
dining table, one perched on a window sill, and one pushing a pram
around the room. The room is warmly lit by lamps and decorated with
heavy curtains, oil paintings and large floral arrangements.
Alberta’s attempts to generate discussion of Madame Bovary fall miserably flat. Alberta is not a major character in the series – in fact, she never
appears again – and the main characters of the show are non-readers.
Lynette pushes her pram with evident exhaustion, Susan riffles through
the pages looking slightly guilty, and Gabrielle sits on a windowsill eating cheese. The scene ends when the minor characters are sent into the
kitchen and the real business of gossip can begin. The book club is not
mentioned again in the program.
This scene, like much of Cherry’s scriptwriting in Desperate Housewives, is
ironic and layered. Most obviously, it plays out the stereotype of the book
club as a pretext for chitchat and drinking. For viewers who know the plot
of Madame Bovary, its presence is a sly nod to further associations with
women’s shallow reading and dissolute lives. In another meta-level flourish, embedding the book club in a television script and mentioning film
demonstrates the multimedia environment of the contemporary (non-)
reading group. As this scene demonstrates, book clubs are placeholders for
a host of cultural judgments about women, reading and the media.
The purpose of this chapter is to offer a detailed, contextualized
account of the book club as an exemplary phenomenon of the new literary middlebrow. This chapter has a particular interest in the ways in
which women’s reading has been dismissed and degraded as part of elite
responses to the middlebrow, and explores these by taking a deliberately
long historical view of reading groups. I draw together a number of pretwentieth century examples that demonstrate the formative elements
of book clubs: not only their association with women, but also their
structural opposition to academia and their promises of class mobility.
Moving to the twentieth century, I consider the opposition to women’s
reading that became prominent with the emergence of Modernism. This
found strong articulation in condemnations of feminized, entrepreneurial middlebrow institutions such as the Book-of-the-Month Club. These
historical conditions continue to characterize informal book clubs – the
formation represented in Desperate Housewives – and I consider the contemporary middlebrow practices of these face-to-face groups by reviewing
scholarship from the turn of the twenty first century.
The second half of the chapter considers the changes wrought to
the book club model by the mass media. Oprah’s Book Club was a
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groundbreaking television project that formed a locus for attention on
women’s reading at the turn of the twenty-first century and which readily attracted the label of middlebrow. Oprah’s Book Club began in 1996
as part of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Syndicated to over 120 countries
and with a daily audience of over 7.3 million viewers (Wyatt 2008),
Oprah’s Book Club influenced the choices and practices of hundreds of
thousands of readers. The show ceased production in 2011, but Oprah’s
Book Club was reconfigured as a digital institution in 2012, operating
through Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads and the Oprah.com website and
promoting special enhanced digital editions of selected books. Oprah’s
Book Club manifests the features of the literary middlebrow: it has a classbased drive towards increased status, it reveres elite culture while being
embedded in a commercial context, it is non-professional, emotional and
earnest, and it is very clearly feminized. What is new about Oprah’s Book
Club as a middlebrow institution is its participation in the globalized, late
capitalist networks of the mass media, which affects how its middlebrow
features are received and subtly alters the status of women’s reading.
The historical degradation of women’s reading
To situate book clubs in their historical context, I want to begin with
a story from the seventeenth century that rivals the sensationalism of
any contemporary melodrama. The Puritan settler Anne Hutchinson is
a significant figure in the history of the United States and an ancestor
of Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Bush. Her dramatic life experiences
demonstrate a deep, historic hostility to women’s reading groups. As
one of her descendants Eve LaPlante recounts in American Jezebel: The
Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, Who Defied the Puritans (2004),
Hutchinson founded a popular women’s Bible study and sermon discussion circle in 1635. Because she added her own interpretations to
sermons, rather than merely repeating them, she was charged with fostering ‘abominable wickedness’ (LaPlante 2004, 2). The court case that
followed strongly condemned women’s active engagement in reading.
As LaPlante recounts, one minister reported that Hutchinson’s group
members would ask her questions and ‘she (sitting gravely in her chair)
did make answers hereunto’ – an especially offensive practice at a time
when the single chair in each house was reserved for the use of the man
(2004, 2). Hutchinson was found guilty of heresy and expelled from the
Boston colony, and went on to help found the Rhode Island colony
before moving to Split Rock, where she was killed along with most of
her family in an attack by the native Siwanoy.
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In Boston, as part of the immediate aftermath of Hutchinson’s trial,
colonial leaders established Harvard College precisely to neutralize the
threat of charismatic radicals such as Hutchinson (LaPlante 2004, 133).
That is, Harvard College – one of the world’s most prestigious universities –
established its identity by defining itself against reading groups for
women. The structural opposition between women’s reading and legitimate higher education institutions has rarely been so clear. The dramatic
tensions created by Hutchinson’s reading project in the seventeenth
century reveal features of women’s shared reading that endure: the opprobrium it attracts, and its differentiation from legitimate, male culture and
education.
The emergence of the novel in the late eighteenth century was
another occasion when the opposition between authorized male reading and suspect female reading came sharply into view. One of the most
striking features of the early novel was that its readers and almost all
of its writers were female. The novel’s birth coincided with the rise of
the middle class and the withdrawal of some women from the world
of work to the domestic sphere, where they had the opportunity to
become literate and to read for leisure.
Female readership and authorship of early novels was explored by a
number of scholars in the 1980s and 1990s, including Nancy Armstrong
(1987), Terry Lovell (1987), Gaye Tuchman (1989), Lyn Pykett (1992),
Teresa Mangum (1998), Kate Flint (1993) and Jacqueline Pearson (1999).
Many of these studies found that women’s reading attracted negative
cultural commentary. In Consuming Fiction, Terry Lovell suggests that
nineteenth century novel reading by women was seen as an ‘easy,
seductive’ pleasure that would drive out good, difficult literature; novels
were a time-wasting addiction and a misdirection of ‘young women’s
ideas and hopes’ through their false depictions of romantic love (1987,
10). In tandem with this stringent criticism of female readers, novels
themselves were gendered as feminine and disparaged. Those who
attacked the novel as poor literature saw it as light, inconsequential and
inherently female: in Lovell’s phrase, ‘the novel was popularly regarded
as something that could be dashed off as a pastime, or to divert attention from toothache’ (Lovell 1987, 9).
In addition to being feminized, the novel was perceived as a commodity, a mass-produced output of the new industrial structures of
modernity. In this new commercial system, the traditional role of aristocratic patrons was superseded by a network of cultural workers, from
publishers and printers to booksellers and reviewers (Lovell 1987, 22).
The novel’s double taint as commercial and female was a dominant
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theme of criticism during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For example, circulating libraries with paying subscribers were
cast as female spaces in contrast to the masculine site of the private
library, which was figured as a sign of gender, class and economic privilege (Pearson 1999, 152). In Bourdieusian terms, the emergence of the
novel in the late eighteenth century prompted a struggle over literary
legitimacy. In this struggle, the culturally dominant figures were men
writing under the existing system of patronage, and this legitimacy was
confirmed through the construction of an oppositional relationship
with female readers and the new commercial landscape.
This process is described in Andreas Huyssen’s influential essay, ‘Mass
Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other’ in After the Great Divide (1986).
Huyssen argues that, through his character Emma Bovary, the protoModernist writer Flaubert creates a dichotomy between woman as the
emotional, passive reader of inferior literature and man as the objective,
ironic and active writer of authentic literature. In Huyssen’s view, the
exclusion of women from high art, while not new to the nineteenth
century, took on particular urgency with the anxieties of the industrial
revolution and cultural modernization, including emergent socialism
and the first significant women’s movement in Europe (1986, 47).
Gender tensions were evident in the literary societies that proliferated
in the United States in the nineteenth century, which were precursors to
contemporary book clubs. These literary societies were forums for discussion and debate, often with grand mission statements. As Elizabeth
Long observes in her study Book Clubs: The Uses of Reading in Everyday
Life, the seriousness of literary societies was signaled by ‘meticulous
attention to organization and parliamentary procedure and by their
stated purposes and their programs of study’ (2003, 39). Given the disparagement of the novel described above, it is unsurprising that such
groups avoided novels, focusing instead on religious or political texts.
While some well known societies involved men, most often literary
groups were organized by women. Often, these groups were disparaged as women’s culture. Husbands of members of the Rhode Island
Woman’s club ‘nicknamed it the society for the prevention of home
industry’ (Long 2003, 39).
Literary societies provided a formal structure for women to exchange
books and reading recommendations and to discuss literary and social
issues, creating a female reading culture. Long’s analysis of the reading
practices established in nineteenth century book club culture highlights
two further qualities of such groups that have become constitutive
elements of book clubs. Literary societies provided lifelong learning
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opportunities at a time when women were usually excluded from tertiary education, and they embraced a progressive social reform role in
early settler America, taking on projects including the establishment of
75 percent of the nation’s public libraries and support for kindergartens
and vocational education (2003, 26, 52).
In general, it was white women from the middle class who created
literary societies: as Kathleen Brown explains, enslaved women, free
African American women and poor women had low levels of literacy
into the nineteenth century (Brown 2007, 260). However, some free
African Americans in the 1820s and 1830s formed literary societies that
developed from fraternal and mutual aid societies. For these groups,
literacy was a key route to forming durable communities and asserting American citizenship. As noted in Chapter 1, Elizabeth McHenry’s
study of African American reading groups places particular importance
on their social and political functions, suggesting that appreciation of
literature was only one aim of these groups; members also ‘sought effective avenues of public access as well as ways to voice their demands for
full citizenship and equal participation in the life of the nation’ (2002,
18). These reading groups, then, had a strong sense of social purpose.
Literacy as a route to social and personal progress is also at the heart
of another kind of reading group. In the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, Mutual Improvement Societies and Mechanics’ Institutes
formed a significant site of non-academic reading. In The Intellectual Life
of the British Working Classes (2001, 58), Jonathan Rose explains that the
typical mutual improvement society consisted of anywhere from half a
dozen to a hundred people and involved a paper on a subject followed
by a general discussion. Mutual Improvement Societies had a workingclass constituency that distinguished them from Mechanics’ Institutes,
which were often ‘founded and governed by paternalistic middle-class
reformers’ (Rose 2001, 65). Both types of groups, however, provided
literacy education and sometimes operated as early book clubs, particularly through their subscription libraries. Mechanics’ Institutes also
flourished in Australia: the Melbourne Mechanics’ Institute was established in 1839, renamed the Melbourne Athenaeum in 1873, and still
operates as a library in its original building.
Both Mechanics’ Institutes and Mutual Improvement Societies were
generally only available to men. While there were a small number of
mixed and women-only groups, the 1851 census reported that only
9.4 percent of all Mechanics’ Institutes students were female (Rose
2001, 76). The women who did attend were often from a higher class
bracket: Rose’s book includes an anecdote where a woman dismisses
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her daughter’s Mutual Improvement Society activities as ‘long-curtain
talk’ – to replace short by long curtains was a sign of moving up on
the social scale, and the women who attended were more likely to be
shopclerks and office workers than factory workers (Rose 2001, 77). The
dominant constituency of these societies – working class men – changed
dramatically in the twentieth century, as non-formal locations for the
acquisition of literary culture became part of the middlebrow, and
accordingly feminized.
The twentieth century and middlebrow book clubs
The feminizing of the middlebrow is evident in the development of these
adult education initiatives. In English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement
(2012), Christopher Hilliard investigates the United Kingdom’s Workers’
Educational Association (WEA) groups of the mid twentieth century
which were heirs to the adult education initiatives of the nineteenth
century, drawing additional energy from the cultural developments
spurred by World War II and its aftermath. In this text, Hilliard looks
closely at the tutors of these groups and argues that they often employed
Leavisite ideals of close reading literary works (2012). Indeed, the WEA
groups were sometimes linked with universities. However, this academic
mode sometimes clashed with tutors’ perceptions of their students, who
were increasingly middle-class women – ‘ “housewives” and members of
the “lower professions”, especially school teachers, predominated in the
literature tutorial classes of the 1950s’ (2012, 145). Hilliard notes that
one tutor’s complaint about classes turning into ‘a socialite occasion’
carried ‘a palpable undertow of sexism’ (2012, 146). By the mid twentieth century, then, adult education embodied more firmly many of the
qualities of the middlebrow: recreational yet earnest, reverential towards
literature, feminized and middle class.
The Leavisite practices of the WEA tutors reveal the role of Modernism
in naming and shaping the reading cultures of the twentieth century.
By this time, the novel was no longer necessarily despised. Literary
culture had moved from a situation of hierarchy between genres –
with the novel opposed to, say, poetry as it was in the late eighteenth
century – to hierarchy within the genre, as certain forms of the novel
were constructed as more legitimate than others. This was most evident
in the practices of the Modernist writers. Gender was one of the main
instruments through which the emerging movement of Modernism
distinguished its texts as legitimate: Modernism was aggressively male.
As Janice Radway writes, critics such as Ezra Pound and Waldo Frank
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‘maintained and shored up the difference of that individuated subject
[the “author”] by constantly marking off his distance from the culturally devalued feminine’ (1997, 218). The category of the middlebrow
was a mechanism for achieving this.
As discussed in Chapter 1, middlebrow literary culture is gendered
as feminine. Scholars including Bridget Fowler (1997), Nicola Humble
(2001) and Melissa Sullivan (2011) have drawn attention to the link
between women’s writing and the middlebrow, and the consequent
critical disregard for these works. Radway’s seminal work argues that
middlebrow methods of production, as well as middlebrow texts, were
feminized. She observes a ‘gender anxiety’ at work in book publishing
and distribution during the 1920s, describing a ‘form of deep distaste for
the purported feminization of culture and the emasculation of otherwise
assertive artists and aggressively discriminating reader’ (1997, 189).
The historical link between women and commercialized literature
was revived in the mid twentieth century, when a new kind of book
club emerged which more fully participated in the entrepreneurialism
of the middlebrow. These clubs promoted the mail-order sale of books,
and they were particularly prominent in the United States. Lon Jones,
Hollywood correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote of distributive book clubs as an American phenomenon in 1945, informing
his readers that there were ‘no fewer than 20 of these clubs flourishing
in the United States, with a combined membership of close to three million’ and that the giants of the scene were the Book-of-the-Month Club
and the Literary Guild, both of which claimed to have 600,000 members
(1945, 2).
The Book-of-the-Month Club has been extensively analyzed by Janice
Radway in one of the foundational texts for middlebrow studies, A
Feeling for Books: the Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middleclass Desire (1997). The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926,
just before its competitor The Literary Guild in 1927. The founder
of the Book-of-the-Month Club was Harry Scherman, an advertising
copywriter. He began his career in publishing through the creation of
the highly successful Little Leather Library, miniature reprints of classics sold cheaply through outlets such as Woolworths or packaged with
Whitman’s Candy. His larger venture, the Book-of-the-Month Club, used
mass production methods such as cheap printing and postal distribution to supply individual consumers with selected books at a discount
price. Members were required to order a certain number of books each
year. They could exercise a ‘negative response’, specifying when they did
not want to receive the title of the month, and were given incentives
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to order multiple books. Radway is attentive to the selection process
for the Book-of-the-Month Club (see 1997, 86). The books were chosen
by a committee whose members included academics as well as publishers, and discussions about what books to select incorporated a range of
desirable qualities including broad appeal, social importance and literary merit. The canon created by the Book-of-the-Month Club included
many approachable works but also some more challenging ones: as
Jones wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald, the club featured books by Leo
Tolstoy, Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte (1945).
Radway is clear on the gendered status of the Book-of-the-Month
Club. She argues that book clubs conceived of as distributive mechanisms reaching the middle-class home were ‘greeted by their critics
as a profound threat to independent American writers and readers,
individuals gendered always as male’ (1997, 190). As in the nineteenth
century, commodified literary culture was linked with women: the
large-scale commercial ambitions of the Book-of-the-Month Club led to
its feminization. These mail-order clubs persisted into the late-twentieth
century. I remember ordering books from one such club, The Softback
Preview, as a teenager, and I still have the sets of Jane Austen and Arthur
Conan Doyle that I bought on subscription. However, the most striking
development in book clubs in the late-twentieth century was a revival
of reading groups.
Informal book groups at the turn of the twenty-first century
Contemporary book clubs are heir to the practices of historical, nonformal reading groups, but achieved a new level of visibility with the
launch of Oprah Winfrey’s high-profile book club in 1996. Book clubs
are a widespread, grassroots phenomenon. My own membership in
book clubs has shaped my reading practices. I am currently a member of
three: a standard book club that discusses a different book each month,
a Jane Austen themed, slow-reading book club (we read chapters out
loud during our meetings) and an email-based book club that reads the
Man Booker Prize longlist each year. I also belonged to a book club of
new mothers, which collapsed due to our combined sleep deprivation.
Each of these clubs has led me to books I would not have otherwise
read and introduced me to new perspectives on authors and texts. My
analysis of contemporary book clubs, then, incorporates self-reflection
as well as drawing on significant recent scholarship.
A number of scholars writing in the early twenty-first century examined the phenomenon of the contemporary informal book club. Jenny
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Hartley’s Reading Groups reports on a 1999 survey of 350 reading groups
in the United Kingdom (2001), Long’s study interviews participants of
book clubs in Houston, Texas (2003), and Marilyn Poole’s investigation
of book groups organized through the Council of Adult Education in
Australia focused on four groups in Melbourne, distributing fifty surveys, recording eight separate book discussions and interviewing fourteen participants (2003). Together, these studies demonstrate features
of informal reading groups that resonate strongly with the middlebrow.
Contemporary book clubs are a female phenomenon. The survey
discussed by Hartley found that 69 percent of the groups were allfemale and she describes this preponderance of women as ‘obvious and
unsurprising’ (2001, 25). Another estimate around the same time suggested that up to 85 percent of American book groups were comprised
solely of women (Blewster 1998, 28). Poole’s investigation into reading
groups in Victoria, Australia, found that of the 988 groups facilitated
by the Council of Adult Education, 95 percent were all-female (2003,
264). The predominance of women prompts the disparagement of book
clubs. Poole observes that book groups are ‘often undervalued as “chat
and chew” sessions or the “equivalent of stitch and bitch sewing bees’’ ’
(2003, 1). The truth of this is evident nearly every time book clubs
appear in the media, from Desperate Housewives to the newspapers to the
internet. For example, in a feature article for Texas Monthly the novelist
Sarah Bird quipped, ‘Above all else, it is essential to go with the allfemale group. Introduce one straight man and Book Club will turn into,
well, a book club’ (2005, 1). Just like the script for Desperate Housewives,
this quote from a female novelist positions women as non-readers.
A lightly sarcastic tone dominates critiques of book clubs in the
media. A recent example links their feminization and their class status.
In 2012, the satirical website The Middle Class Handbook published an
article on book clubs that began:
The middle class woman’s essential ‘must have’ is membership of
a book club. Book clubs make us feel all is right with the world.
They’re a chance to see friends, talk about something else other than
kids, schools and work, and – crucially – to feel a bit superior to the
TOWIE [reality TV show The Only Way is Essex] watching masses.
(Middle Class Handbook 2012)
This comment is mocking, but its force comes from its partial accuracy:
book clubs are a middle-class phenomenon as well as a female one.
Long notes that ‘overall, despite variations of income and education
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both between and within groups, reading groups are by and large
a middle- to upper-middle-class phenomenon’ (2003, 91), while in
Australia, as Chapter 1 noted, Poole writes, ‘the groups see themselves as
middle-class, professional, native English-speaking, and perhaps rather
exclusive’ (2003, 278). Book clubs are middle-class institutions, part of
a package of values that includes education and self-improvement. They
offer a middle-class route to cultural capital; for these women, ‘literature
becomes a cultural marker for distinction’ (Long 2003, 61).
As a mechanism for building the cultural competencies of members,
book clubs show reverence for literature. This is evident in the research
done on their book selections, which tend to avoid popular fiction. The
lowbrow persists as a category to be rejected. As Poole finds, ‘The readers in
this study only read what might be termed “good” books in their reading
groups – that is, not mass marketed romances, formulaic fiction, detective
novels, and the like’ (2003, 273). Long finds that bestseller lists have ‘lost
some authority [with book clubs] as genre books have become increasingly
popular’ (2003, 122). Book clubs shun the experimental avant-garde, too:
Poole suggests that when group members looked for book recommendations, they ‘distanced themselves from reviews that tended to the literary
and esoteric’ (2003, 277). The bulk of texts selected by book clubs are
middle-of-the-road literary fiction, with a particular emphasis on realistic
novels (Long 2003, 45; Hartley 2001, 62; Poole 2003, 277).
Book clubs rely on the recommendations of mainstream literary
authorities, including reviewers, booksellers, libraries and adult education institutes such as the College of Advanced Education. These mediators play an important role in guiding and certifying clubs’ reading
choices. Prizes, the subject of the case study in Chapter 4 of this book,
seem to be particularly significant mediators. Poole identifies literary
prizes such as the Man Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize and the Miles
Franklin Literary Award as guiding Australian book club choices (2003,
273), and the influence of prizes is also acknowledged by Hartley (2001,
62). As I noted above, one of my own book clubs reads the Man Booker
Prize longlist each year – the discussion is often critical of the judges’
choices, but the club nonetheless trusts the judges to choose a dozen
or so books worth reading each year. A reliance on cultural authority
effectively legitimates book clubs’ reading material.
Book clubs have some overlap with universities in terms of their reading material. Hartley suggests that reading groups ‘are often reading the
same serious literary fiction (for example Atwood, McEwan, Morrison)
as those literature departments which show so little interest in their
activities’ and concludes that “middlebrow” is not a helpful label to
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describe this reading’ (2001, 62–3). However, reading groups are still
defined as outside the academy. Even when the texts of book clubs and
universities overlap, as Hartley goes on to note, the label of middlebrow is a mechanism through which academic figures can distinguish
themselves in the relational literary field, and the trivialization of book
clubs by the academy shapes their identity as alternative reading spaces.
Rather than reject the persistent middlebrow label, this book advocates
understanding it in a broad, nuanced context. Reading groups are middlebrow; their interactions with legitimate literature tend to be reverent
rather than confident, and are inflected by other middlebrow features,
including a commercial context.
Alongside their respect for elite literary authorities, book clubs are
integrated with the commerce of book publishing. While they are not
as overtly entrepreneurial as the Book-of-the-Month Club, contemporary informal reading groups are vehicles for disseminating books.
Book clubs create what a publisher once described to me as ‘that
ever-fucking-elusive word of mouth’, the hidden network of personal
recommendations that can have a dramatic effect on sales. Publishers’
attempts to specifically court the book club market are increasingly visible. Most major publishers have webpages dedicated to informal book
clubs. Penguin offers free reading group guides for selected books on
its website, and currently offers a chance to win ‘a call with Elizabeth
Gilbert for your book club’ (us.penguingroup.com 2013). Random
House Australia has a webpage titled ‘Book of the Month’:
Each month we pick a new book for you and your book club, supply
a sneak peek free chapter, reading group questions and the chance
to win 1 of 10 copies of the book. Also keep an eye out for Random
Book Talk, our monthly interview series hosted on Random House
Australia’s YouTube channel featuring the authors from each book
chosen. Have you read them all? (randomhouse.com.au, 2013)
This website, with its links to video content and ebooks, situates book
clubs firmly in the digital environment, which is a phenomenon
explored later in this chapter. The salient point here is the publisher’s
efforts to form a stable relationship with book club members, a relationship that recalls that between distributive mail-order clubs and their
subscribers. Informal face-to-face book clubs may not always be experienced by members as commercial formations, but they are nonetheless
the focus of industry marketing strategies. Just as literary authorities,
from prizes to reviewers, mediate book clubs’ choices, so do publishers
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and their sales and marketing teams as they package literary texts for
groups. There is a structure of mediation for the informal book club that
bypasses academia.
Book clubs are explicitly not academic formations. Book clubs are
recreational and model an alternative reading practice to the university. As Long suggests, the professionalization of literary studies ‘has
isolated academic literary discourse from a broader middle-class audience’ creating space for informal reading groups (2003, 71). Book clubs
demonstrate middlebrow practices by modeling a personal, emotional
system of reading. Poole suggests that clubs look for ‘good reads’ that
are relatable, with vivid characters and relevance to contemporary life
and discussion of the books often involves members’ opinions about
the characters: ‘In a sense, they gossip about them’ (2003, 273). Long
finds that reading groups look for books that ‘bring them pleasure and
illuminate (in the sense of enlighten or inform) their experience’; they
see books as equipment for living (2003, 131).
Book clubs play a recognized role in members’ personal development.
Poole observes a high degree of self-disclosure in both the book discussions and social chat of the reading groups she observes, concluding
that ‘there is an element of “group therapy” in reading groups’ (2003,
279). Long suggests that reading groups provide a safe site to negotiate
the fluid and contested identities of women in contemporary society
(2003, 64). The therapeutic effect of reading groups is heightened
because they tend to remain stable for years. My own Jane Austen book
club, which does include a token man amongst its five members, has
met for nearly ten years. Over that time we have celebrated the births
of three babies, a new business, a PhD, and an engagement and supported each other through serious illness and other challenges – the
group has observed major life transitions as we have worked our way
(slowly) through Austen’s work. In general, reading groups achieve their
therapeutic effects not only through the opportunities for social interaction, but also through their model of reading, by allowing participants
to discuss characters and their choices in ways that reflect their own
dilemmas (Long 2003, 72).
Book clubs, then, display the features of the literary middlebrow. Their
members are female and middle class. As readers, they are interested in
literary books and their choices are mediated, including through the
commercial strategies of publishers. Their practices are recreational and
distinct from academia, prioritizing emotional, personal connections
with books; practices that have historically marginalized women’s reading. However, the value of these practices has been transformed by the
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Book Clubs, Oprah, Women and the Middlebrow
The New Literary Middlebrow
mass media book club, which has dramatically altered the visibility of
book clubs. The globalized twenty-first century mass media puts the
‘new’ into ‘new literary middlebrow’.
New mass media book clubs adopt some of the practices of informal
reading groups, while amplifying their commercial effects through their
enhanced visibility. Oprah’s Book Club is the most well-known, but televised book clubs have also been launched by The Richard & Judy Show
in the United Kingdom, Morning Joe and the Today Show in the United
States and the First Tuesday Book Club in Australia, to name just some
examples. Mass media book clubs have expanded the reading group
model in the twenty-first century, an attenuation which is also evident
in online literary culture and in mass reading events, such as the One
Book One City programs (Fuller and Rehberg Sedo 2013). In the new
book club formations, large groups of people read the same book and
can discuss it in a number of public forums. These developments in
shared reading owe their origins to the transformational phenomenon
of Oprah’s Book Club, to which this chapter now turns. Oprah’s Book
Club is a quintessential expression of the new literary middlebrow,
exemplifying historically subordinated reading practices while simultaneously renovating them through Winfrey’s media profile.
Oprah’s Book Club as a middlebrow institution
Writing in The New York Times, the critic A. O. Scott announced that ‘The
Oprah Book Club, like the Book-of-the-Month club before it, represents a
triumph of the middlebrow’ (2001). The basic model of Oprah’s Book Club
involved the selection of a new title every month or so, and the release
of an print edition branded with an Oprah sticker. Winfrey would host
an informal discussion of the book with selected readers – often a dinner
at her house – and conduct an interview with the author. An edited version of this material would then be broadcast as a segment of The Oprah
Winfrey Show. Scott’s description of this initiative as middlebrow, like all
uses of the word, encompasses a judgment about the type of people who
participate in Oprah’s Book Club and a critique of its reading practices.
Winfrey’s audience has been described as ranging across middle class
and lower middle class (Long 2003, 216) and it is undoubtedly, overwhelmingly female. Oprah’s Book Club is named for and headed by a
woman and the vast majority of the contributors to the book club episodes and the website are women. Oprah’s Book Club has a particular
appeal for African American women (see McHenry 2002, 307). Winfrey
also tends to favour female authors and protagonists. Janice Wolff
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