ABSTRACT
The turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century saw the emergence of a literary category (or, arguably, the recognition of an already-existing one), the ‘middlebrow’. Virginia Woolf famously disparaged the middlebrow as the ‘pernicious pest who comes between’ (‘Middlebrow’ 202), a hybrid category that not only defies both the highbrow and lowbrow, but is also somehow dangerous to them. The anxiety expressed through the use of the term ‘pernicious’ pervades discussion of the middlebrow, which has almost always been a derided category. Part of the inherent danger of the middlebrow is that it is a feminine structure in a phallogocentric world. As Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith explain, ‘the neglected third term in the interaction between high and popular culture was gendered: the “pernicious pest” that intervened between high and low culture was feminized, and the authors […] were often […] women’ (4). Kate Macdonald’s work has expanded this idea of middlebrow to male authors and characters in the figure of the ‘masculine middlebrow’, a seemingly contradictory position that ‘indicate[s] the changing expectations of masculinity’ by ‘offer[ing] experiences not anchored to a desire to be considered intellectual or fashionable, but to the enjoyment of the individual’ (Macdonald 1, 15, 8). This figure was popularly read and, rather than reinforcing conservative masculine stereotypes of the Victorian era, presented a more flexible understanding of masculinity. Along with an expanded notion of the ideal British male subject, this character type also allowed for movement within and among other categories, such as social class. As Nicola Humble points out, one manifestation of this character is also typified by his bachelor status (‘From Holmes’ 90). Humble’s use of the term ‘bachelor’ describes a basic fact of matrimonial status, but I propose that the bachelor, and specifically the perpetual bachelor, can be understood as a gender category. P.G. Wodehouse’s characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are bachelors who exemplify this gender, specifically in their queer domestic pairing.
