Sunday, November 17, 2024

Puritanism and flirting: American women rock the world

 

It became a commonplace in the American culture of the 20s to decry “puritanism”.

Twenties culture was heavily influenced by Mencken, who played a role similar to Emerson’s (a writer he despised) in the 1840s and 1850s – he somehow became the impresario of American culture. The anti-puritan note came from Mencken. Puritanism was associated with democracy, socialism, progressivism, and all the things that Mencken found laughable.

In the Smart Set essays of 1913-15, collected by S.T. Joshi, Mencken made his most extensive attack on the products of puritanism. In considering what makes the American different, Mencken bumps into puritanism:

“That further explanation is to be found, I believe, in the continued survival of a dominating taint of Puritanism in the American character—a survival no less real and corrupting because many of its outward evidences have been concealed by time. Since the very dawn of his separate history, the American has been ruled by what may be called a moral conception of life. He has thought of all things as either right or wrong, and of the greater number of them, perhaps, as wrong. He has ever tended, apparently irresistibly, to reduce all questions of politics, of industrial organization, of art, of education, and even of fashion and social etiquette, to questions of ethics. Every one of his great political movements has been a moral movement; in almost every line of his literature there is what Nietzsche used to call moralic acid; he never thinks of great men and common men, of valuable men and useless men, but only of good men and bad men. And to this moral way of thinking he adds a moral way of acting. That is to say, he feels that he is bound to make an active war upon whatever is bad, that his silence is equivalent to his consent, that he will be held personally responsible, by a sharp-eyed, long-nosed God, for all the deviltry that goes on around him. The result, on the one hand, is a ceaseless buzzing and slobbering over moral issues, many of them wholly artificial and ridiculous, and on the other hand, an incessant snouting into private conduct, in the hope of bringing new issues to light. In brief, the result is Puritanism.”

This is both Mencken at his best and Mencken at his worst. We recognize our American cultural politics here – from puritanism to political correctness. But we also notice elements that are treated as given – right and wrong, bad and good – that point to something Mencken always lacked: any sense of dialectic. He could see that the American was, as he put it, a mongrel, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the basics on which he was brought up in urban America: hence, the racism, the mistaken idea that traits are immutable, the misconceived Darwinism.  This, too, is recognizable today. We see it all around us and label it “fascism”, when it precedes fascism in the Mussolini sense and was “American common sense” among the movers, shakers and thinkers, from the halls of Harvard to the pages of the Baltimore Sun.

In 1915, as Mencken was creating his vision of American cultural politics, Freud published an essay, Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod – Contemporary observations about war and death, to give an awkward translation. In this essay about the pleasure principle gone mad, so to speak, there is a throwaway observation around which has grown a little subliterature, It occurs in a passage in which Freud is talking about the way death, the fact of death

Our stance with relation to death has a strong effect on our life. Life is impoverished, it loses interest, when the highest stake in the game of life – life itself – cannot be wagered. It becomes as shallow, as without substance, as an American flirt, with which it is presupposed that nothing will come of it in distinction from a continental love affair, with which both partners must continually remain aware of the serious consequences.”

This is quite the comparison.

I see Mencken as primarily operating as a misogynist. A sexist, by cliché and convention, sees a woman as an object – a misogynist sees a woman as an enemy. The identification of women with puritanism was one of the presupposed syntheses in the modernist struggle against puritanism. In that struggle, I think, there is a long misinterpretation of the uniqueness of American female culture, of what that creole, mongrel crisscrossing was all about. Freud, I think, was also writing here as a misogynist, but with a vision of that crisscross culture that helps us understand both the misogyny and the sexism.

That women’s place in the great national division of emotional labor was to come at the world ethically was a programmatic truth for Mencken; in this, he was reflecting a long and even trans-Atlantic tradition. His own contribution was to given this a name, puritanism, and a carnivalesque role: the joykiller. Freud, though, saw something else – saw the joy in the realm of flirting that posed a true threat to the mandarin thinker, to the thinker’s prestige in general. For without the thinker, what is life worth? By succedaneum (for the thinker is usually elsewhere when the battle is waged), the thinker thinks about life and death issues and thus puts into the balance his own life.

I myself have played the role, here, of seeing through Mencken and Freud; that’s a bit of impudence on my part. I read both Mencken and Freud with pleasure, with my hat off, in admiration. But I think they cast up screens that make it hard to see one of the truly unique contributions of American culture to world culture, which was a very different form of women’s culture that was neither the joykiller nor the serious thinker’s muse. From Daisy Miller to Josephine Baker, there was a different set of co-ordinates, a different orientation that made the “flirt” possible.

 

 

 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

To follow up on the Freud quote. I love that you called it a throwaway observation as who more than Freud would have insisted that seemingly trivial throwaway observations are telling. And love that you call your post impudent as that is in my book the best way to approach the great ones we admire. ( You can guess who taught me that.)
So for the quote. The Standard Edition in English has "American flirtation" rather than American flirt. In either case why should one conclude that flirt/flirtation refers to women? Isn't that an assumption that begs the question? The flirt/flirtation in which nothing happens is contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners must bear its serious consequences in mind. What is happening with the Continental love-affair is WWI. While Freud's text names America it does not name any of the nations and peoples involved in the Continental love-affair that is WWI by their name. The passage about American flirts/flirtation begins with a reference to Asra ("we behave as if we were a kind of Asra, who die when those they love die.") via Heine and Stendhal, and goes on to reference the Hanseatic league via its motto: Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse. Where's the quote or indication to American flirts/flirtation, to what it might mean or why it's even mentioned? Freud's text are often woven with quotations, this being no exception. Which brings me to your other question about mandarins and thinkers. Mandarins are mentioned in the text, via quotes. China along with America being the only nations called by name in the text, and Paris the only city along with Peking. "In Le Pere Goirot, Balzac alludes to a passage in the works of J.J. Rousseau where that author asks the reader what he would do if - without leaving Paris and of course without being discovered - he could kill, with great profit to himself an old mandarin in Peking by a mere act of will. Rousseau implies that he would not give much for the life of that dignitary. Tuer son mandarin has become a proverbial phrase for this secret readiness, present even in modern man."
And earlier in the text. "People really die; and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of thousands, in a single day.(...) Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content."
-Sophie

Roger Gathmann said...

Sophie, what an amazing and generous comment! So much there. I'll just talk about a little thing, the American flirt. ... gehaltlos wie etwa ein amerikanischer Flirt ... true, the term's turn is not necessarily female. And if we are talking about flirtation among Americans, well given the heterosexual frequency that Freud is probs in, it will take two to tango. However, my intuition is - that is, I haven't researched this enough to nail it down but I do have my impression - that the flirt is attributed much more often to women than men. Men being flirtatious is always a possibility, but I believe the coloring, here, is that the flirt expresses something about "america's" female culture. As well, one might think, in 1915, as the on again off again American response to the war. The flirting with the continent. The not going into war. The innocence/seduction scenario. This, it seems to me, is a very "serious" Continental interpretation of the only two moves in the game - innocence/guilt, seduction/coitus, etc. When the game is opened up, flirtatiously - and though it is a little sociologically whacky to speak of American female culture, black, white, Jewish, Polish, Cherokee, Mexican, etc. - all held in that political entity - I think that there is a certain difference between the rules obtaining in the U.S. vis a vis women and those on the Continent. At this point. Your last quote from Freud designates, I think, a Freudian limit, an inability to see that it can't be that life only "recovers" interest in the face of mass death. Against which we have the flirt, which is without content and without war. These choices are still with us, now, and this is as good a point as any to think them through. Anyway, thanks!

Anonymous said...

Hey thanks for the reply! It did occur to me that the "American flirtation/flirt" probably has, as you point out, something to do with America's response to the war. But then if flirt is primarily the feminine, woman then America, the State and the Pres are somehow under the sign of the feminine and woman! There's something going on with that throwaway observation that you're right to try to unravel. What are the sources or the 'set of co-ordinates' as you put it that Freud is drawing upon to designate America in this very topographically oriented text? This is also the period when Freud starts to elaborate his "second topography". Flirting refers to a kind of movement doesn't it, that doesn't move in a straight line. Freud's texts, including this one, rarely move in a straight line. So the passage about life recovering interest in the face of death is perhaps not straightforward. For instance, along a line that would simply oppose life and death, playing and the serious. Freud in this text is not glorifying war, nor death as the heroic beautiful death (cf. the quotes from the Iliad and Heine), but rather speaks of killing and mass murder, of hypocrisy.
He was to lose his Sunday's Child in 1920 to a return of the 1918 pandemic. And would insist that her death had nothing to do with Jenseits des Lustprinzips. A book that turns around her son playing a game of fort-da.
The unconscious doesn't acknowledge death, it's own death is one of the Freudian dictums one is supposed to accept straightforwardly. Children during the pandemic that took his daughter's life had a song, a sort of nursery rhyme: I had a little bird,/Its name was Enza./I opened the window,/And in-flu-Enza.

A song that is a kind of flirting with death, no?

I do hope you pursue your investigation of the throwaway observation. My hypothesis on the game of fort-da of Freud and America is that it has something to do with song, with American women and American song and dance. Ok, it's not exactly my hypothesis, you know who it's coming from.
- Sophie

- Sophie

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