Few issues circulated more consistently—or more nervously—within American culture during the 1820–1870 period than those regarding issues of taste and sensibility. Novels and plays, poems and stories in magazines such as Godey's Lady's Book and newspapers such as the New York Tribune and the New York Herald, conduct manuals for men and women, and even the pulpiest dime novels and the most wrenching slave narratives were involved in the dissemination of a seemingly endless series of texts in which characters negotiate the vexed terrain of cultural consumption and sensibility. What modes of conduct or affect best became a woman or man seeking certain forms of class distinction? What were the proper standards of reading and writing? How might leisure activity and aesthetic consumption mark one as tasteful in ways that were either positive or negative? Were there tasteful ways to spend money? And more abstractly, what sort of body came with varying degrees of taste and class? These and myriad similar questions act as the backdrop for a great deal of the literary and cultural production during this period. Indeed in a very real way fiction and theater, in particular, were the space in which American standards of taste were taking shape in relation to categories of class and culture.

TASTE AND THE MIDDLE CLASS

This cultural influence was particularly evident in the forms of taste and awareness taking shape in the emergent middle classes. Though still fragmentary, heterogeneous and contradictory, the middle class saw in the mirrored reflection of these literary narratives an increasingly coherent version of itself and its cultural preferences, especially as these preferences were defined in relation to the polar extremes of "high" and "low" culture. The term that later came to be used to define this sensibility is "middlebrow," and certainly one of the most fascinating dimensions of the literary and cultural production of this era is the way it models a zone of taste and sensibility located—often quite anxiously—somewhere between these two more obvious sites of distinction. Following the magisterial work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, American academics such as Lawrence Levine, Janice Radway, and Jonathan Freedman have shown how the American middlebrow sought increasingly to legitimize itself by invoking the authority of taste, aesthetics, and "culture" even as it struggled with intense feelings of insecurity in the face of "true" or "real" high culture. "The petit bourgeois is filled with reverence for high culture," Bourdieu writes with perhaps a hint of sympathetic irony. "He bows, just in case, to everything which looks as if it might be culture" (p. 323). But Bourdieu suggests, even such reverence is doomed to failure. Lacking the cultural and educational advantages of the aristocratic classes, the middle-brow is forever conscious of the fact that "legitimate culture is not made for him (and is often made against him) so that he is not made for it; and that it ceases to be what it is as soon as he appropriates it" (p. 327).

MIDDLE-CLASS TASTE AND THE THEATER

Bourdieu's analysis is of particular use in examining the forms of taste and sensibility emerging in nineteenth-century America, a period marked by the seemingly tireless efforts of the middlebrow to carve out a space for itself somewhere between the more rarified sphere of highbrow taste and distinction and the cruder, usually sensational, world of working-class (and necessarily low-brow) culture. This is perhaps best exemplified in the fraught cultural transition taking place in American theaters from the 1820s to the 1870s, as operas, symphonies, and even performances of Shakespeare became increasingly rarified and hostile to lower-class audiences. This transition was highlighted by the 1849 Astor Place riot, in which a working-class mob of some five thousand assaulted the Astor Place Opera House in New York City as part of a running feud over its ostensibly elitist and highbrow production of Shakespeare's Macbeth. The actual riot, in which twenty-two people were killed, was sparked by a rivalry between Edwin Forrest (1806–1872), a working-class "Jacksonian" actor championed by the rowdy and voluble crowd of "Bowery b'hoys" who filled the Chatham, Bowery, and other theaters for his melodramas, and William Macready (1793–1873), a British actor who expressed withering distain for such audiences. As Levine explains, Macready described Forrest's audiences as "vulgar," "coarse," "underbred," "disagreeable," and "ignorant" (p. 66)—epithets that became much stronger on 7 May 1849, when Macready was booed and pelted with eggs and rotten vegetables by a crowd filled with Forrest sympathizers. The riot that occurred three nights later was the culmination of tensions between these classes, but it was also a watershed in the shaping of middlebrow taste and culture in America. Indeed Levine reports that by the 1870s audiences had learned to become much more docile and cooperative in their expressing their tastes, agreeing to remain seated until the end of a performance and limiting applause to appropriate moments. As a contemporary of the conductor Theodore Thomas wrote in 1872, "When the audience relapses into barbarism . . . he quietly but firmly controls them. I have seen him . . . leave the stand and quietly take a seat in the corner of the orchestra, remaining there until he has carried his point" (Levine, p. 192).

Even as these transitions were taking place, American culture often displayed a knowing, even playful kind of meta-awareness of the problematic of taste in the mid-century. This can be seen, for example, in the extreme popularity of Anna Mowatt's (1819–1870) hit comedy of manners, Fashion; or, Life in New York. Opening in 1845 to immediate critical and financial success, Mowatt's play is a satire of America's obsession with highbrow taste and cultural distinction. An early line from the culturally insecure Mrs. Tiffany suggests the ways in which Mowatt is staging bad taste for her theater audience: "Ah," she says prior to the social visiting hour she has arranged, "very elegant, very elegant indeed! There is a jenny-says-quoi look about this furniture,—an air of fashion and gentility perfectly bewitching" (p. 7). Obsessed with things European—she complains that even the English language is "decidedly vulgar" (p. 8)—Mrs. Tiffany is clearly offered as one who consumes culture and taste in ways that are overdetermined and indeed comical. Like the taste-anxious petit bourgeois described by Bourdieu, Mrs. Tiffany bows before all that appears to bear the stamp of cultural legitimacy. Nor is this insecurity an isolated cultural condition. As Millinette, Mrs. Tiffany's French lady's maid, puts it in an ironic aside: "De money is all dat is necessaire in dis country to make one [a] lady of fashion. Oh, it is quite anoder ting in la belle France!" (p. 6).

Tellingly Mrs. Tiffany's absurdity is highlighted here by the presence of her new black servant, Zeke, whose dandyish attitudes mirror her own. "Dere's a coat to take de eyes ob all Broadway!" he proclaims in the play's opening lines as he regards his new livery outfit. "It am the fixin's dat make de natural born gemman. A libery forever! Dere's a pair of insuppressibles to 'stonish de colored population" (p. 5). Zeke's extreme ignorance is of course part of antebellum culture's deeply ingrained racism. This racism, however, is in fact a crucial component of the game of culture Mowatt is staging for her audience. For what Zeke provides is a site onto which to displace concerns about bad taste. Far more than Mrs. Tiffany, Zeke's is a body the audience would have understood as inherently vulgar and thus incapable of acquiring the modes of taste and sensibility they themselves were seeking to establish and maintain. In this sense Zeke is an extension of the logic of taste and culture seen in stock "black dandy" minstrel characters such Dandy Jim and Zip Coon. As the cover of an 1843 songbook titled Dandy Jim, from Carolina suggests, such characters are locked in a narcissistic gaze in which surface modes of consumption (clothes, hair, other modes of fashion) are misunderstood as the equivalent of more internal modes of selfhood (delicacy, refinement, whiteness) that were the true markers of taste at mid-century.

Characters such as Zeke and the rowdy audiences at the Astor Place Opera House indicate that, as the term itself implies, taste was a concept that reflected profound awareness of and concern about embodiment—about, that is to say, the kind of body that came with the various standards, preferences, and sensibilities that went into the shaping of the tastes that informed the middlebrow mindset. Another quote from Bourdieu is useful in this context:

Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body. It is an incorporated principle of classification which governs all forms of incorporation, choosing and modifying everything that the body ingests and digests and assimilates, physiologically and psychologically. It follows that the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste. (P. 190)

Bourdieu's emphasis on the reciprocity between the physiological and the psychological is especially crucial here, for what mid-nineteenth-century American literature and culture reflects over and over again is the deeply emotional and psychologized nature of the effort to establish and maintain the kind of taste-sensitive "class body" he describes. And nowhere is this more evident than in the focus of so many mid-nineteenth-century texts on a process one might refer to as middle-class self-fashioning.

TASTE IN ANTEBELLUM FICTION

While the middlebrow aesthetic taking shape at midcentury might be understood as standing in anxious or perhaps even ambivalent relation to "culture," the fiction of this period provided a space in which to work out such unease. Working to provide the legitimation that established culture was withholding and that low-brow culture was threatening to undermine, many of the writers of this period provided in their work a kind of aesthetic chart by which readers could map out the terrain of sensibility and taste that would answer to the anxious needs of the middlebrow.

The career of Jo March in Louisa May Alcott's (1832–1888) best-selling Little Women (1868–1869) marks a didactic high point of this process: Alcott here offers a gradual process of reform in which Jo learns the forms of discipline and restraint—"the sweetness of self-denial and self-control" (p. 82)—necessary to the formation of a tasteful "little woman" in nineteenth-century America. Most telling perhaps is Jo's short career as a writer of lowbrow sensational literature—"bad trash," as Jo's eventual husband, the kindly Professor Bhaer, calls it (p. 355). "She was living in bad society; and imaginary though it was, its influence affected her," readers are told in one of the many moments of direct address provided by Alcott's narrator. "Unconsciously, she was beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a woman's character" (p. 349). Jo's dalliance with lowbrow pulp is an object lesson for Alcott's readers, especially the middle-brow reading audience most likely identify with her as they read Little Women. For what it implies is a connection to the tastes and sensibilities of the lowbrow crowds assaulting the Astor Place Opera House, forms of consumption that must be cast off and repressed in the name of fashioning the kind of taste appropriate to a properly middlebrow sensibility. Indeed Jo's later fiction is praised precisely because it purportedly rejects such sensibilities. "You wrote with no thought of fame or money," Jo's mother tells her, "and put your heart into it" (p. 436).

Jo's lesson here is twofold. In addition to rejecting the debasing and distasteful world of lowbrow sensationalism, she earns the respect of her soon-to-be husband, Professor Bhaer, whose excessively middlebrow sensibilities (he possesses cultural rather than financial currency) are marked as quite different from the high-brow tastes of Jo's other suitor, her wealthy young neighbor Laurie. "You and I are not suited to each other," Jo says in rejecting Laurie's long-delayed overtures to her (p. 364), a comment that has as much (if not more) to do with taste and sensibility than actual temperament or attraction. For the life that awaits Jo—schoolteacher and mother—is one that requires the modest income and modulated tastes of the middle-brow. In an amazing passage late in the novel, Laurie says that he would like to give some of his money to Professor Bhaer and Jo. "Out-and-out beggars get taken care of, but poor gentlefolks fare badly" he says (p. 459). In fact, however, Alcott's novel suggests that "gentlefolks"—represented by Jo and her husband—do perfectly well as residents of the tasteful middlebrow territory Alcott has carved out for them.

A similar logic of middlebrow self-fashioning—one might call it "middlebrow romance"—informs Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804–1864) gothic novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The backdrop for this text is the long and bitter property dispute between the aristocratic Pyncheon family and the working-class Maules, but Hawthorne makes it clear that, as staged in the novel's present, this feud is played out in the arena of taste and cultural production. This is particularly evident in the depiction of the last descendent of the Maule family, a young man named Holgrave. Daguerreotypist, short story writer, and sometimes mesmerist, Holgrave is, like Jo March, a producer of mass culture that is decidedly lowbrow in orientation. As he explains to Phoebe Pyncheon upon learning that she has not read any of the fiction he has published:

Well, such is literary fame! Yes, Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my marvellous gifts, I have that of writing stories; and my name has figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the canonized bead-roll with which it was associated. In the humorous line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion. (P. 186)

Holgrave's stories occupy space alongside more established writers in middlebrow venues such as Graham's magazine and Godey's Lady's Book, but—and ominously—they are also manipulative of their reader's affective states. This is reflected not only in Holgrave's ability to produce tears in his readers but more profoundly when he manages to mesmerize Phoebe by the very act of reading his pulpy and sensational story to her. Here is how Hawthorne describes the moments immediately following Holgrave's reading:

Holgrave gazed at her, as he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that curious psychological condition, which, as he himself had told Phoebe, he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing. A veil was beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him, and live only in his thoughts and emotions. (P. 211)

What better description of the putatively debasing or regressive effects of lowbrow culture at mid-century, effects that have their root in the very notion of "bad taste?" "I consider myself as having been very attentive," Phoebe says (p. 212), but in fact she has been immobilized—mesmerized—by the seductive "magic" of lowbrow sensationalism. Phoebe, it can be said, is on the receiving end of the "bad trash" that threatens to "desecrate" Jo March in Alcott's Little Women.

As critics have suggested, Hawthorne ultimately seems uncomfortable with this scenario. Seeing that Phoebe has been partially mesmerized by listening to his story, Holgrave resists the urge to take advantage of Phoebe's vulnerability. Instead, he suggests that he will burn his short story: "The manuscript must serve to light lamps with," he says (p. 212). More dramatically still, Holgrave and Phoebe become romantically involved, a plot shift that hastens the "developement of emotions" necessary to secure middlebrow distance from the outside world of cultural production (p. 305). An exchange between the two characters late in the novel sums up the dramatic shifts that take place in the wake of Holgrave's reading of his magazine story to Phoebe: "How wonderfully your ideas are changed!" she says, to which Holgrave replies: "You find me a conservative already! Little did I think ever to become one" (p. 315). Holgrave and Phoebe thus take up a posture not at all unlike that modeled by Jo March and Professor Bhaer in Little Women. Here too is a "middlebrow romance," a form structured around the repression of bad taste, lowbrow culture, and its attendant working-class associations; it advocates instead the "developement of emotions" that are tasteful and middlebrow in nature.

"TASTE" IN SENSATIONAL FICTION

Significantly, however, even the lowbrow sensationalism of this period—the "bad trash" offered in penny newspapers such as the New York Herald and the New York Sun and in dime novels such as George Lippard's (1822–1854) best-selling The Quaker City (1845) and George Thompson's (b. 1823) Venus in Boston (1849)—stages scenes of middlebrow self-fashioning, this despite what is often the stated resistance to the kinds of taste offered in narratives such as House of the Seven Gables and Little Women. As the influential editor James Gordon Bennett (1841–1918) put it in his outlandishly sensational (and enormously successful) New York Herald essay titled "Penny Literature versus Loafer Literature" (30 September 1836):

By a singular perversity in the taste of the age, the monthly and weekly periodical literature—the Magazines, the Mirrors, the Knickerbockers, and such like trashy publications, have degenerated into vehicles of mere sickly sentimentalism, fit only for the kitchen or the laundry. The daily press and the cheap periodicals appear to possess the only strength—the only nerve—the only real talent and genius. Conversant in matters of real business—engaged in active life, the mind is taken away from itself, and its egotism and vanity are rubbed over severely by the unfanciful buffetings of the world.

For Bennett, in other words, publications that promote middlebrow taste are themselves guilty of offering "trashy" fare that shies away from the grittier, more unpleasant realities of life at mid-century. Lippard offers a similar posture in The Quaker City, the best-selling novel in America prior to the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. As he puts it in a defensive direct address to the "shallow pated critic" whose "white kid-gloves" suggest his middle- or highbrow sensibility, "Our taste is different from yours. We like to look at nature and at the world, not only as they appear, but as they are!" (p. 305). For Lippard as for Bennett, middlebrow taste, emphasizing as it did an anxiety about the more visceral pleasures of the class body, was silly and out of touch with reality.

Despite such claims, however, much of the period's lowbrow sensationalism stages narratives that turn on the very forms of taste and sensibility favored by Alcott and Hawthorne. A particularly useful example of this is offered in Theodore Winthrop's (1828–1861) popular "urban gothic" novel Cecil Dreeme (1861), seventeen editions of which were published by 1864. Usually offered as pulpy, often silly dime novels devoted to excessive violence, sexual titillation, and extreme racism, urban gothic sensationalism provided audiences with a widely disseminated and inexpensive medium for engaging with and challenging the inequalities of class in America from the 1830s onward. Yet this material also provides some of the most direct and affective commentary on the nation's issues of taste and sensibility, especially as the notion of taste applied to the emerging category of the middlebrow.

The narrative of Cecil Dreeme revolves around a young man named Robert Byng, a twenty-six-year-old professional who is returning to America after ten years of study abroad and who is staged fairly clearly as someone who must negotiate the forms of taste and sensibility that have been taking shape in America during his absence. This is particularly evident in the interactions between Byng and a "Hebrew-ish" (p. 23) and wealthy financier named Densdeth, an older man who wields considerable power over Byng and a number of other characters in the novel. At times the relationship between the two seems fairly one-sided, with Densdeth aggressively pursuing Byng in a manner that suggests the desire for economic and perhaps even sexual domination. At other times the attraction is more reciprocal, suggesting that Byng is himself drawn to Densdeth and the form of submission he demands. As Byng puts it at one point: "'What does it mean,' thought I, this man's strange fascination? When his eyes are upon me, I feel something stir in my heart, saying, 'Be Densdeth's! He knows the mystery of life.' I begin to dread him. Will he master my will? What is this potency of his?" (p. 65).

As Byng's comment about Densdeth's "strange fascination" makes clear, Densdeth is associated here with sensibilities that Byng himself feels with real intensity—he later describes himself as "a youth . . . dragged along by an irresistible attraction" (p. 180). And what this suggests is that Densdeth as exotic Jew embodies a set of pleasures that, though marked as deviant, also seem to stand in for the pleasures and affects of the rarified highbrow culture Densdeth seems intended to represent. "I love luxury for its own sake," Densdeth tells Byng early on. "I mean to have the best for all my senses. I keep myself in perfect health, you see, for perfect sensitiveness and perfect enjoyment" (p. 63). As this and a variety of similar passages suggest, Densdeth represents the kind of sensuous voluptuousness so often associated with the stereotypical figure of the highbrow Jew. But as Densdeth's influence over the various men in the novel suggests, these are desires inherent within all of the male characters in Cecil Dreeme, projected outward onto the excessive, the Jew. Byng's confusion, that is to say, is a thoroughly ambivalent effort to organize the pleasures and tastes of middlebrow sensibility: attracted to but put off by the excesses of Densdeth as highbrow pleasure seeker, Byng embodies the uncertainty and ambivalence of the middlebrow seeking to establish cultural assurance in the uncertain game of taste and cultural consumption.

It is therefore telling that the form of pleasure Densdeth offers is one that Byng comes to understand as slightly vulgar, as if Densdeth fails to understand the nuances of cultural distinction necessary to the formation of middlebrow sensibility. "Densdeth was a little too carefully dressed," Byng observes at one point.

His clothes had a conscious air. His trousers hung as if they felt his eye on them, and dreaded a beating if they bagged. His costume was generally quiet, so severely quiet that it was evident that he desired to be flagrant, and obeyed tact rather than taste. In fact, taste always hung out a diamond stud, or an elaborate chain or eye-glass. (P. 75)

Such moments suggest that Byng's discomfort with Densdeth is negotiated by means of reference to forms of taste and sensibility that are specifically middlebrow and thus inaccessible to one such as Densdeth. Indeed one of the moments in which Byng grows wary of Densdeth is at the opera, which he designates as a problematic cultural space. "It was thoroughly debilitating, effeminate music," he says.

No single strain of manly vigor rose, from end to end of the drama. . . . Emasculated music! Such music as tyranny over mind and spirit calls for, to lull its unmanned subjects into sensual calm. . . . Between the acts, I saw Densdeth moving about, welcome everywhere. . . . All the salable people, and, alas!, that includes all but a mere decimation, threw open their doors to Densdeth. Opera-box and the tenants of the box were free to him. (Pp. 256–257, 259)

Byng's concerns about the unmanning and emasculating effects of the cultural milieu in which Densdeth operates are related to the cultural politics of the Astor Place incident. Though certainly not one of the Jacksonian-style "b'hoys" said to have taken part in the earlier riot, Byng seeks to distance himself from Densdeth by recourse to a language of cultural distinction in which he seeks to understand his own more middlebrow sensibilities as superior to (as well as more masculine than) those of the highbrow elite—this despite the fact that Byng is so clearly drawn to Densdeth and the forms of culture and pleasure he seems to embody.

This ambivalence about the Jew as a register of competing forms of taste and sensibility is something Jonathan Freedman points out in his discussion of du Maurier's infamous Jewish mesmerist, Svengali. Both artistic genius and debased villain, Svengali, like Densdeth, is simultaneously a figure both of high and low culture. And in both instances this ambivalence centers on the interchangeable Otherness of these characters. As Freedman explains in a passage that seems quite useful for understanding the cultural situation Winthrop is staging in Robert Byng:

In the middlebrow imaginary, to be cultured is to be dangerously (or pleasurably) touched with the alien force and sexual energy socially ascribed to the Jew; it is also to be, however temporarily and within reason, to be touched with the aura of specialness, distinction and superiority that is also ascribed to that figure. Yet, at one and the same time, to be middlebrow (rather than highbrow) is to be saved from the fate of being too Jewish, too outré, too extreme, too powerfully connected to this model of identity and response that is so visibly connected with the powers of otherness. (P. 113)

The aspiring middle-class and middlebrow citizen, Byng sees in Densdeth a model of taste and manhood he both desires and disavows. For as culturally sophisticated Jew, Densdeth offers an opportunity both to indulge in the very desires and pleasures of culture that afford one a sense of cultural superiority and, simultaneously, an opportunity to confirm one's status as middling by understanding the Jew as a form of Otherness that makes such indulgence excessive and overwhelming.

In Cecil Dreeme the highbrow Densdeth is eventually killed by one of the men he has persecuted, an event that allows Byng to marry a young woman who has long hidden from an arranged marriage with Densdeth in a small apartment in New York City. Needless to say, perhaps, this woman is an artist; even better, she is uninterested in selling her work, a fact that suggests she is able to resist the potentially debasing lure of a market culture that peddles largely in bad taste. The union thus provides yet another example of the way the period's fiction imagines for its readers a space in which the middlebrow might see himself or herself reflected in narratives that stage dilemmas of class and taste only to resolve them in the form of the middlebrow romance.

This is not to say, however, that the threat of excessive desire embodied in Densdeth no longer has an effect upon Byng. Indeed Densdeth has this power even in death. As Byng puts it in the closing pages, with Densdeth lying prostrate on the ground before him:

The strange fascination of his face became doubly subtle, as he seemed still to gaze at me with closed eyelids, like a statue's. I felt that, if those cold feline eyes should open and again turn their inquisition upon my soul, devilish passions would quicken there anew. I shuddered to perceive the lurking devil in me, slumbering lightly, and ready to stir whenever he knew a comrade was near. (P. 330)

On the one hand, this is urban gothic melodrama at its silliest; it is what Alcott's narrator would, in a moment of taste-anxious middlebrow anxiety, term "bad trash." On the other hand, it also provides a useful example of the game of projection involved in negotiations of middlebrow sensibility. For the dead body of the highbrow Jew is here the embodiment of the desire for cultural attainment that is very much alive within Byng as aspiring middlebrow. In this sense Winthrop's narrative simply extends a sensibility that permeates various other texts produced at mid-century. For although each author seeks to depict the middlebrow (and her tastes) as necessitating a class body drained of excessive passion and desire, each also manages to reveal the way this figure is decidedly ambivalent: knowing what it most desires (access to either high or low culture) but committed to not having it, the middlebrow of mid-nineteenth-century America offers a form of taste that can only be defined in terms of ambivalence and anxiety.

See also Ethnology; The House of the Seven Gables; Jews; Little Women; Periodicals; Sensational Fiction; Sexuality and the Body

David Anthony