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Louise Brooks and Josephine Baker In the 1920 s, a new and popular model of modern womanhood dominated the American cultural scene. Although not all American women of the early twentieth century would emulate the flapper model, that model quickly came to represent the youthful exuberance of the post-World War I period. According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author whose novels set a tone for the 1920 s, the ideal flapper, representing the ideal modern woman, was lovely, expensive, and about nineteen.
Originally, merely a symbol of young and daring female chic, the flapper came to embody the radically modern spirit of the 1920 s. Not merely a fashion trend, flapper hood came to represent an entire new set of American values. According to some historians of dance, the moves that we call the Charleston have its roots as far back as the sixteenth century, in an obscure French dance called the Branle, which means, to shake. Others trace the origins of these moves to the Asante people of western Africa (a region of the contemporary nation of Ghana).
There are several suggestions of flapper origin. One is that it came from the sound the young women made when they danced -- the fringe, the beads, the jewelry -- when they danced the Charleston. Other is that these girls flapped all their limbs clumsily as they walked and moved; sort of an independent swagger of the new woman. This reflected the contrast between Victorian women and their reserve, and the women of the 1920 s who wore no corsets, whose clothing was unfitted (no waist) and revealed legs and arms. The flapper image is associated with the swinging images of the roaring twenties but, in fact, the word dates from before the First World War. In the 1890 s, it had meant a young prostitute, but had come to mean, just before the war, any girl with a young boyish figure.
The flapper craze for skinny, young, almost transsexual, women had first caught on in Germany, where she was called a blackfish. It reached England about 1912, and the word flapper at that point had jolly and friendly connotations. It was used to describe the comradely sort of girl who would ride pillion on the flapper bracket of a motorcycle. The Charleston is believed to have originated on a small island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, through the fancy footwork of African-American dancers. As far as we know, the Charleston was first performed in 1903, and already by 1913, the dance had made its way north to Harlem where it was performed on stage. Another decade later, the Charleston was boosted to a higher orbit of popularity when it was performed at other theatres in New York City.
However, perhaps the women of New York did the most to promote the dance. Throughout the 1920 s, women who danced the Charleston were known as flappers because of the characteristic way of flapping their arms and strutting like birds during the dance. Nevertheless, because the end of the decade was steeped in social disorder and economic chaos, social critics saw the flappers as the epitome of moral decay. In one unhappy event, the Pickwick club collapsed, killing over fifty dancers. Some argued that the vibrations of the flappers had caused the building to collapse. The term flapper originated in England primarily was used simply to describe girls of an awkward age.
American authors like Fitzgerald transformed the term into an iconic phrase that glorified the fun-loving youthful spirit of the post-war decade. The flapper ideal, along with the look, became popular, first with chic young moderns, then with a larger body of American women. The flapper was remarkably identifiable. With her bobbed hair, short skirts, and penchant for lipstick, the starlet who had it, Clara Bow, embodied the look. Other celebrity women, from the film star Louise Brook to the author Dorothy Parker, cultivated and popularized the devil-may-care attitude and fashion of the flapper. Americas young women rushed to emulate the flapper aesthetic.
They flattened their chests with tight bands of cloth in order to look as young and boyish as possible. They shortened the skirts on their increasingly plain frocks, and they bought more cosmetics than American women ever had before. However, flapper hood was more than mere fashion. To an older generation of Americans the flapper symbolized a revolution in manners and morals. Flappers did not just look daring, they were daring. In the 1920 s growing numbers of young American women began to smoke, drink, and talk slang.
In addition, they danced. Not in the old style, but in the new mode inspired by jazz music. The popularity of jazz and dancing hinted at new attitudes toward sexuality. The image of the giddy flapper, rouged and clipped, careening in a drunken stupor to the lewd strains of a jazz quartet, gave license to new ideas about female sexuality. As F.
Scott Fitzgerald claimed, none of the Victorian mothers... had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to being kissed. Flappers presented themselves as sexual creatures, radically different to the stable maternal women who epitomized the ideal of the previous generation. Yet, the popularity of the flapper did not, as one might suppose, signal the triumph of feminism in the early twentieth century.
For the flapper, for all her sexual sophistication and her rejection of her mothers Victorian values, did not pose any real threat to the gender status quo. Although the flapper presented a positive image for modern women, with her athleticism and her adventurous spirit, the flapper remained a soft creature that demurred to men. Indeed, it was precisely the flappers combination of daring spirit and youthful innocence that made her attractive to men. The flapper was a highly serialized creature, but that sexuality retained an innocent, youthful, romantic quality.
Ultimately, flappers married and became the mothers of the 1930 s. Although flappers presented a new model of single womanhood that would have positive ramifications because it gave license to women to work and play alongside men, that model had its limits. The transformative cultural promise of the flapper moment would recede just like the fashion for short skirts and short hair. In the long years of the Depression, the desire to emulate reckless rich girls faded along with the working girls ability to afford even the cheapest imitation of flapper chic. Remnants of the flapper lifestyle, however, remained popular -- a youthful taste for music and dancing, smoking and swearing, sex and sexiness. Besides, the market for goods that had emerged to meet the consuming passions of flapper women gained in strength and power.
Even after the flapper disappeared from the American scene the feminine ideal that she had popularized lingered -- along with a culture of consumption designed to help women pursue that impossibly impermanent idea. For the ideal modern woman of Americas imagination, although no longer officially a flapper, was to remain infuriatingly lovely... and about nineteen. Therefore, flappers presented young women of the 1920 s that ultimately served as an icon for the era. The stereotypical flapper was in her late teens or twenties, burned the social candle at both ends and participated in the new trends of the decade. Flappers wore ear-hugging cloth hats, an abundance of fake jewelry, open galoshes, heavy cosmetics and skirts short enough to show her exposed, powdered knees.
They bobbed their hair and dared to smoke cigarettes in public. Their social motto: I have kissed dozens of boys and I will kiss dozens more if I please! Fast dance music presented by flappers was called flapper music that associated with Jazz Age. In the late 1920 s and early 1930 s, American culture had been becoming more homogeneous than in the previous several decades, in part because mass culture industries like radio and the motion picture had transformed the country from a production- to a consumption-based economy.
Because entertainment entrepreneurs perceived a need to attract a mass audience that crossed class, sex, and ethnic boundaries, they looked for ways to unify and assimilate different groups. This mixing of cultures, sexes, sexualities, and classes disturbed moral watchdogs, who watched with consternation as the white urban middle class began to shift away from normative values and pursue more transgressive pleasures. Black and ethnic music, jazz dancing, cabaret performance, and gay pansy culture were intensely popular with urban audiences, and all became part of the fabric of urban life in the late 1920 s. Urban entertainment producers were interested in adapting black culture to serve white tastes in a way that would not be too threatening to social standards.
Sweet jazz leaders, typified by Josephine Baker, saw black jazz music as providing the crude material from which a new and higher type of music could be developed which would be distinctly American, a new democratic art form. In order to be properly labeled American, however, sweet jazz needed to be properly masculinized, distanced from its black roots by emphasizing the good work ethic, technical training, discipline, and productivity of white jazz musicians as opposed to black musicians lack of training, spontaneity (instinct), and sense of play. Yet, clearly there were elements of even sweet jazz music that did not fit the masculine norm, most especially the emotionalism of both musicians and audience members. This emotionalism came to characterize solo sweet jazz performances by the female singers who became the crooning stars of the radio in the late 1920 s. In the pre- and post-World War I era, a number of African-American entertainers found excellent opportunities for themselves on European stages and in the theater.
Achieving fame and fortune abroad, they cultivated the black aesthetic and transported it to foreign shores. European audiences craved such formulations, in part because of their difference and in part because of a desire to seek the unknown or engage in the trope of blackness. Literary figures, musicians, dancers, and singers -- as long as they were African American and talented, they appealed to the European. Their American-ness coupled with their blackness created a cultural fusion that was unique and irresistible to a European populace eager to fill a cultural void.
Karen Dalton and Henry Louis Gates are among those who postulate that Parisians found in African-American music and dance a degree of mirth and hedonistic and voyeuristic pleasure they had not known for some time (Harrison, 1994, p. 907). As African Americans increasingly made their way to European shores in a veritable cultural explosion, Josephine Baker emerged as one of the most popular and highest paid entertainers in theatrical history. Baker, although originally better known for her dancing than for her singing, positioned herself multiply, assuming a variety of roles. Like many other African-American performers in this period, she had to demonstrate excellence as a dancer, singer, and comedienne to attract the attention and support of those who wielded power and influence in the theater world. The American-born Baker was catapulted into stardom when she initially toured European stages in the mid- 1920 s. This essay will examine her public profile as the African-American press, the mainstream press, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) constructed it to demonstrate that while these three mediated sources constructed Baker's public profile, they similarly deconstructed Baker as a star.
Baker, already well known for her unique dancing style, soon discovered that she had to nurture her singing ability as well. Bakers struggles to perfect her singing talent become symbolic of the struggles that she endured as an entertainer polemicized because of her racial and political views. As early as 1926, Baker landed a recording contract with the Odeon label and reconstructed American jazz rhythms with such songs as Breezing along with the Breeze, Bye Bye Blackbird, and After I Say Im Sorry (Haviland, 1935, p. 139). In his biography of Baker, Ted Haviland describes these early recordings, noting that she had a good Dixieland backup group called Jacobs Jazz.
She was peppy, bouncy, upbeat, and made up in energy and attack what she lacked in finesse. Sometimes, as in Then Ill Be Happy, she scat-sang, imitating a trumpet, to good effect (Haviland, 1935, p. 150). Yet, Haviland concluded, at this point in her career she could not sustain a note, and the singing was not impressive (Haviland, 1935, p. 150). Another critic, Lynn Haney, observed that Baker lacked singing talent in the early years of her career: There was a genuine problem with the voice. The range and expressiveness were fine, but she lacked the power of projection needed to fill larger theatrical spaces in the days before microphones (Haney, 1981, p. 44).
Critics of the early period at least recognized that Baker was much more comfortable interacting with a live audience than facing the coldness that a recording studio offered. Acknowledging her own imperfections and attempting to elevate her career, Baker worked at and succeeded in improving her singing voice, on stage and in the studio. In 1930, she recorded songs for Columbia Records that she had popularized in a Parisian revue entitled Paris qui Remote, in which Baker sang in French (Harrison, 1994, p. 14). In time, she was able to demonstrate not only a perfected voice, but also the ability to master the songs in several other foreign languages (German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese), just as she had done with French. Commenting on Bakers recordings at this stage in her career, Rose offered what was perhaps reluctant praise: She can hold a note, and while her voice is not as rich and interesting as it would become later in her life, she can be listened to without a wince (Haviland, 1935, p. 150). Music critics at large, however, now loved her (Haviland, 1935, p. 150).
One critic even declared that her voice was as pure as a childs voice, that accent, that sincerity, that confidence, that wildness, that musical virtuosity which seems so natural (Haviland, 1935, p. 151). Perfecting her singing talent, Bakers stage performances began to garner attention as she was accompanied by orchestras, including one led by her own spouse, Jo Bouillon, arranger and conductor. In 1933, performing on stage in London, she yet again received faint praise: She sang sentimental little songs in a voice that constantly suggested the flute. She sang these songs with feeling and it was as a singer that she disappointed expectation least (New York Times, 28 Feb. 1932).
One year later, Baker was recruited to appear in the French film Zou Zou (1934), a film that allowed her to demonstrate her singing talent. Mesmerizing audiences with her partial nudity (with only a few feathers covering her breasts) and tantalizing audiences with her exoticism (sitting perched on a swing while enclosed in a birdcage), Baker sings in a high-pitched voice that at times resembles a deep throttle and that almost seems deliberately contrived to resemble sounds that emanate from a bird. Kariamu Welsh Asante comments on the sociopolitical implications of this scene and asserts that, while at the end of the film Zou Zou remains in France, she remains caged. According to Asante, ...
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Research essay sample on Early Twentieth Century F Scott Fitzgerald
