highbrow

Cuddy-Keane's conclusion, that Woolf sought to fuse "the two apparently contradictory aims of democracy and highbrowism" (58) is a conclusion I agree with; Woolf both rejected the mandarin elitism which sought to reinforce the borders of culture against the barbarian hordes of the newly literate, and she persisted in believing that "highbrow culture" was ideally the property of all, that its promise would only be fully realized once its gifts, past and present, were gifts in the hands of a common humanity.

But Cuddy-Keane's assessment of Woolf's commitment elides her own critical position, fusing her position with Woolf's to create a normative framework in which "democratic highbrowism" slips from being a specific manifestation of historically located anxieties about culture and class, to being a universally applicable moral ideal: