Hay Fever (Historical Context)

Historical Context

In the 1920s, Great Britain experienced political upheaval resulting from the first global war, as well as social transformations resulting from industrialization. Technological innovations also significantly altered the era’s cultural landscape. Both the optimism and the anxieties induced by such extreme changes were reflected in the period’s art and literature.

Before World War I (1914-1918) there was great optimism in Europe about the future of parliamentary government. After the war, political attitudes were very different. After witnessing both the war’s terrible death toll and the perpetual chaos in Post-war continental legislatures, Europeans were more likely to question government action and demand social justice. For Britain in particular, events early in the century underscored the government’s vulnerability. The Easter Rising in Dublin (1916), the granting of Irish Independence (1921), and the shootings in India that started Mahatma Ghandi’s peace movement (1919), all indicated that the British Empire was no longer invincible.

Meanwhile, unrest on the European continent set in motion events that would culminate in a second world war. The Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia in 1917. Benito Mussolini assumed dictatorial power in Italy in 1922. Germany, struggling under the burden of World War I reparation payments, experienced rapid inflation of its currency in 1923-24, resulting in worthless money and a demoralized populace. Finding support from a dissatisfied German citizenry, Adolf Hitler reorganized the New Socialist or “Nazi” party and published the first volume of his manifesto, Mein Kampf, in 1925; his rise to power in the next decade would set the stage for World War II.

The first World War also altered the international economic order. In 1914, most of Europe’s economies depended on Great Britain and Germany. By the time the fighting stopped in 1918, the United States had become the main economic power. In the period between the wars, England would have to adapt to industrialized modes of production — factories that used assembly lines and electric power — and the resulting loss of jobs. The country suffered severe unemployment, with as many as two million people out of work in 1921-1922 and still a million unemployed in 1925. A lot of these people had lost coal mining jobs, and the miners would go on to lead a massive protest, known as the General Strike in 1926. These events augured the world economic crisis of 1929-1932 (a global event that manifested itself as the Great Depression in America).

Despite its economic difficulties, the British government had to meet the Postwar expectations of its people, who demanded more social services and greater civil rights. In the early-twentieth century, English legislative acts reflected changing perceptions of the rights of workers and the role of women. The 1911 National Insurance Act established some medical coverage and unemployment benefits for workers, while the 1925 Pensions Act set aside retirement funds for them. World War I brought many women into the national workforce, making them less dependent on male wage-earners and more willing to assert their property rights. Although the Divorce Bill (1902) and Female Enfranchisement Bill (1907) had taken some steps to empower women, significant changes only came after the war. It was not until 1918 that British women who met age and property requirements got the vote.

During the following decade women continued to agitate for full suffrage, which was finally won in 1928. Many of those involved in the suffrage debate were dubbed “New Women,” women associated — both positively and negatively — with personal independence, unconventional attitudes, and less-restrictive fashions. The image of the high-spirited “flapper” wearing loose-waisted dresses with skirts above the knee was often equated with this newly liberated female role.

The daily life and attitudes of all British people changed a great deal in the first decades of the twentieth century. Rapid urbanization took the majority of citizens away from the country. By 1911, 80% of the population of England and Wales lived in urban areas. Despite periods of crisis, there was a general rise in the standard of living. This increase in national income allowed people to spend more on luxuries; the demand for non-essential goods went up accordingly. There was also a great increase in literacy as school attendance became mandatory across Europe.

Thanks to innovations in communications media, even those no longer in school had greater access to all kinds of information. Radio and cinema became significant political and cultural influences. Right before the war the British silent film industry was thriving; there were six hundred cinemas in Greater London in 1913. After 1918, Hollywood-left largely unaffected by the fighting — dominated film production. Although Europeans like Sergei Eisenstein made great artistic innovations in the field, the United States industry had the money to produce costly extravaganzas like Ben Hur (1926) and establish world-wide stars such as Charlie Chaplin, who was, ironically, British.

The first American radio broadcast took place in 1920, the first British in 1922, inaugurating an era of mass persuasion. In the years between the two world wars, cinema, radio, and microphones became powerful communication tools manipulated by monolithic fascist and communist parties to incite public responses. Dictators used propaganda films and large public meetings to inspire the same kind of hero-worship elicited by movie stars.

All these developments created great hopes as well as great fears, both of which were articulated by the period’s artists. The modern writers of the 1920s — including Americans F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) and Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and Britons James Joyce (Ulysses) and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse) — broke with traditional novel form, emphasizing individual thought and expressing the alienation felt by the Postwar generation. Visual artists — such as the European painters Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso — also experimented with new techniques, developing the non-representational forms of abstraction and cubism.

At the same time aesthetic movements like Art Deco, a popular style in 1920s furniture, clothing and architecture, optimistically embraced modern materials and designs. A similarly positive tone carried through the music of composers such as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. Although the era Fitzgerald dubbed the “Jazz Age” and W. H. Auden called the “Age of Anxiety” was marked by a loss of faith in society, the incredible creative output of the time shows a continuing faith in the power of art.

Compare & Contrast

• 1925: It is the height of the modernist period in literature, numerous books later considered classics are published. These works include Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The 1925 Pulitzer Prize for fiction goes to Edna Ferber for her novel So Big.

  Today: Recent British and American books that have earned praise include Alice McDermott’s novel about ill-fated romance and family deception, Charming Billy, which won the National Book Award; Ian McEwan’s exploration of personal intrigue and public humiliation, Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; Phillip Roth’s examination of a father-daughter relationship in the turbulent 1960s, American Pastoral, honored with the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; and Rafi Zabor’s uniquely humorous story about a talking saxophone-playing animal, The Bear Comes Home, which received the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.

• 1925: The Charleston — a jittery, kinetic dance performed with a partner to music with a staccato, syncopated 4/4 rhythm gains great popularity. Although originating in Charleston, South Carolina, the dance soon became an international trend and, along with flappers, became emblematic of the “Jazz Age” of the mid-1920s.

  Today: After two decades in which rock and rap music dominated popular music, a revival of swing music and dancing is taking place in many parts of America and Europe. Partner dancing — including the lindy-hop, a variation on the Charleston developed in the 1930s — has made a comeback with American youth, and remakes of big band swing tunes are appearing on the top-ten record charts.

• 1925: American writer Anita Loos publishes Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was made into a film in 1928. This popular novel’s main character, Lorelei Lee, provides the prototype for the caricature of the “dumb blonde” that would resurface in many books, shows, and movies throughout the second half of the century; beginning in the late-1950s, film star Marilyn Monroe would come to epitomize the dumb blonde.

  Today: In the latest variation on this theme, writer/director Tom DiCillo’s 1998 independent film The Real Blonde, starring Matthew Modine, Daryl Hannah, and Catherine Keener, offers a witty critique of the cultural ideal of feminine beauty and the “dumb blonde” stereotype. Modern culture has mostly abandoned the dumb blonde stereotype, though it does occasionally reappear.

• 1925: Nellie Taylor Ross is elected governor of Wyoming, the first woman to be elected to such a post in the United States. Margaret Thatcher, who later became Britain’s first woman Prime Minister (in 1975), is born this same year.

  Today: Although the number of female politicians still does not begin to adequately represent the number of female voters in either America or Europe, women continue to be elected and appointed to high office. In 1993, for example, Janet Reno was appointed the first female Attorney General of the United States, and in 1998 she became the first person in the modern era to hold the post for more than five years; serving in the same Clinton presidential cabinet, Madeleine Allbright becomes the first female secretary of state in 1997.