The Bankruptcy of Marriage -- A 1928 Perspective

The Jazz Age

At nights, in the large cities, life spins itself into melodrama. The mad dance of youth, intoxicated with the swell of its new freedom, has encircled the western world. Jazz has become an accepted institution. It expresses the spirit of the age. Youth has steeped itself in its intoxications. Repressions have been released, and in the abandonments of modern life, exhibitionism has changed from a vice into a virtue.

In the flapper we find a vivid symbol of this change. This new girl, with all her emptiness of ideas and effusiveness of emotions, is a revolutionary outgrowth on the feminine scene. Her speech, her dress, her gesture are outspoken evidences of the nature of her insurrection. The spread of her influence has been infectious.

In this whirling race of Change, all restraints and restrictions have been sacrificed. The inhibitions once indispensable to feminine virtue have become riddled with scorn. The old sanctity of marriage has been ridiculed by sallies of wit and satire fired at it from every side. Sexual excitements and ecstasies have become experiences to crave and not to constrain. The flapper is consumed by them. Life becomes vivid through their repetition. The old conventions that separated the sexes have been shattered. The old waltz has surrendered to the new jazz. In place of the spinster has sprung up the bachelor girl. She undresses her mind as well as her body. Instead of hiding her ankles, she now bares her knees; instead of corseting her bust, she "v’s” her neck. Instead of the old moral literature, she devours the emancipated new.

The old family has decayed. The old home has been replaced by the movie, the club, the dance-hall. Home has become a place to dine and die.

All over the western world it is the same. This new girl, this modern flapper, with her lack of respect for the ideals of her predecessors; and this new masculine youth, with his disregard for the old responsibilities, his disdain for marriage, and contempt for virtue— both were born in the fury of their revolt, in the days of the World War and those that have immediately followed.

The jazz age was born in its tornado of intensity from the vortices of the World War and its aftermath. In recent years its momentum has increased with melodramatic rapidity. Wherever we turn we find its effects scrawled across the face of things. It is part of the chaos of the era.

It is not that the fundamental cause for revolt against the old morals was found in the World War — it had already begun to stir before the War—but that it took but this catastrophe and its aftermath to set it into rapid rotation.

The World War not only annihilated the flower of European youth, but it left its deeper effects on the youth that remained, and the generation that grew up with the War as its noisy sentinel. Careers were wrecked, plans broken, and inspiration converted into a brutal war-cry. The ideals for which men fought became mere traffic in the eyes of profiteer and prostitute.

Youth was disillusioned of purpose and aspiration.

In Paris the orgy of war-madness transformed the stage into a brothel, with words as mere decoration for gesture and action. The psychosis of the last fling predominated. The imminence of death drove men to the last extremities of desire. Nothing mattered! The theatre responded to their needs. Music halls, cabarets, and amusement resorts had catered to this tendency from the very beginning of the war. Now the theater turned to a kind of sexual insanity in its eagerness to entertain and satisfy the soldier.

The European world had been too startled from its equilibrium ever to return to its old routine and ritual. The returning soldiers were not the same men who had once gone to war. They were apprehensive, restless, and disillusioned. The brutalizing terrorism of the war had made these men into maniacs; and it required more than a sudden truce to calm those impulses which this madness of conflict had aroused. The old moral values had lost their influence and power. Bitterness and hatred had become more than occasional emotions in the lives of these men.

The modern dance was an inevitable outgrowth of this war-madness. Modern youth responded to the wild call. What mattered? To live, to live intensely, to live furiously, to seize from life its every thrill. Such became the new motivation.

In Paris, after the war, they danced. It was the mad, delirious dancing of men and women who had to seize upon something as a vicarious outlet for their crazed emotions. They did not want old opiates that induced sleep and the delusion of a sweet stillness of things and silence. They did not seek the escape which an artificial lassitude brings to minds tormented with worry and pain. They wanted an escape that was active, dynamic, electrical. It had to be an escape that exhilarated, that brought restfulness only from exhaustion. The spirit of tranquillity was alien to the trend of the age.

Youth in its revolt has not only turned against the old traditions, but in its search for the new it is dissipating its energies in extravagance and excess. Things serious have too often become greeted with a sneer. Cynicism has become the new faith.

This World War, then, shot into shreds the old ideals, the old morals, the old customs. It is the same in France, the same in England, the same in America. The Age of Innocence is dead.

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