Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [26]
Successful advertising campaigns of the twenties capitalized on popular worries about fat, body odor, constipation and bad breath as well as the desire to be beautiful, using new techniques based on psychology. The idea of consumer sovereignty had been vanquished by research that established that human beings were motivated less by reason than by instinctive drives—vanity, fear, sex, the desires to conform and impress. Increasingly buyers were seen by advertisers as a manipulable mass: admen had realized that selling was no longer about need, but about choice. A 1917 article in Harper’s declared that the advertisers’ object was to “make each reader dissatisfied with himself, until he follows your suggestion.”
“I’m going to make a list of all the things I’ve got to get,” cries Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s overblown mistress, in The Great Gatsby. “A massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow that’ll last all summer for mother’s grave. I got to write down a list so I won’t forget all the things I got to do.”
Recklessness, frivolity and self-indulgence were the Flapper’s watchwords. “I can’t be bothered resisting things I want,” declared Zelda, as Gloria Patch. Adoring being the center of attention, she thought nothing of seizing the limelight by tossing her knickers into somebody’s lap at dinner or stripping off at a party. She boasted of being unfit for anything but “useless pleasure-giving pursuits.” The scriptwriter Anita Loos, bored by her antics, commented tartly that although her face was extraordinary “she really should have kept her bosom under wraps.”
Flaunting herself, as Loos said, because she thought she was “delectable,” was intended as invitation. Zelda drove Scott mad, especially at the start of their marriage, by making passes at his friends (none known to have been successful), kissing them, bursting into their bathrooms and demanding to be given a bath, all the while telling Scott that sleeping with other men wouldn’t affect her feelings for him. Fidelity was just a sign of puritanical repression.
Flappers and their college-boy consorts were the first generation to be on easy terms with the ideas of Sigmund Freud. The psychiatrist had delivered a series of lectures outlining his theories at Clark University in Massachusetts in 1909 and they were published in the United States the following year. A decade later words like repression, taboo and the unconscious rolled casually off co-eds’ lips. All over the country, commented the writer Malcolm Cowley, young women “were reading Freud and attempting to lose their inhibitions.”
It was typical of the younger generation’s impulsiveness, though, that their understanding of Freud’s work was largely superficial. As the commentator Frederick Allen remembered, Freudianism was simply taken to mean, “If you want to be well and happy, you must obey your libido.” Psychology seemed to provide a scientific reason why social convention and personal inhibition ought to be challenged and why self-gratification was the ultimate human endeavor.
Social anthropology, another rapidly developing discipline, provided a further incentive to rebel against the constraints of “civilized” society. In 1925 the young anthropologist Margaret Mead spent several months studying teenage girls in Samoa whom she found to be sexually experimental and unrestrained by Western morals and inhibitions (her research has since been partially discredited). She believed that concepts of celibacy, monogamy and fidelity were “meaningless” to Samoans and had been largely created by modern society.
The conclusion of Mead’s best-selling book of 1928, Coming of Age in Samoa, was that man is shaped more by society than by biology. Implicit in her work was a critique of the repressive tendencies of American society—against which Mead herself would struggle in order to live out the sexually liberated