Middlebrow Culture and Mary Lavin’s Short Stories in The New Yorker

Abstract

This essay, informed by scholarship on middlebrow culture, places Mary Lavin’s stories in the textual space of The New Yorker, reassessing the supposed ‘conservatism’ of her short fiction. Lavin’s literary fame has often been marred by her perceived conservative streaks – in terms of her literary sensibility and her gender politics. Lavin’s literary style is inclined to the realist mode, which appears to be old-fashioned in comparison with the experimentalist work of her modernist predecessors; moreover, her ideas of family and marriage largely adhere to established social mores, disconnecting her from the progressive feminist movement in the post-war years. This essay argues that both aspects of Lavin’s ‘conservatism’ should be radically reassessed by placing her stories in the context of The New Yorker and the magazine’s affiliation with middlebrow culture. Her seemingly conservative literary and gender views in fact register a critical attitude toward urban modernity and domestic ideals, which resonated with The New Yorker’s liberal, albeit complacent, middle-class readers. In particular, the essay reads Lavin’s island story ‘The Bridal Sheets’ as a critique of materialism; it also considers the symbolic currency of the widow figure in ‘In a Café’ vis-à-vis The New Yorker’s tepid gender politics in the mid-twentieth century.