Looking back at the revolution (3)

Reading Anthony Powell last night I was struck by his handling of marital infidelity during the two World Wars. It's a big theme in Powell and it was something that really did happen and had a huge effect on people.

Betrayal was also a major theme of American movies covering the period. Think of the Blue Dahlia for example. The whole noir genre is haunted by women who get mixed up with seedy men and even when the war is not explicitly referenced that is what is driving it. For what kind of man was still stateside to be pursuing these women.

It seems oddly sexist to us now sometimes because the concern was overwhelmingly with women cheating on men when we know full well that husbands posted elsewhere weren't particularly faithful either. But let's try to see past that and figure out why this vision so haunted people.

The Second World War took place in a world that was urbanized like had never been the case before. The thought that women might exploit the anonymity of the city to have sex while their husbands were away was jolting.

No one was shocked that men would do this; in the past even small towns typically had brothels. No one thought this was a good thing but no one was surprised. You can imagine a movie or novel about a guy who falls for the temptations offered by the anonymity of the city but you can't imagine him being portrayed as some sort of uniquely horrible moral monster for doing so. Women who did so were so portrayed.

The point being that the 1950s, far from the era of conformism we think of it as, was actually an era of social turmoil. Any era that really was dominated by the sort of domestic stability we often associate with the 1950s wouldn't have spent do much time idealizing domestic stability. That so much effort was spent doing so tells you people were terrified of losing it.

The big church attendance of the era tells a similar story. People were trying to get back to an era they were conscious of having lost but they didn't know how to get back because they'd never really lived it. The urbanization of the west and had been going on a long time and the idealized, small community existence that people sought after the war was nothing they had ever experienced. These days you sometimes read liberals accusing conservatives of wanting to go back to a time that never existed but the era that really wanted to go back to a time that never existed was the 1950s.

All that church attendance, the nice new houses in the suburbs, the domestic comedies on television? That was all an attempt to capture something that felt like it was slipping away. At the same time, wealth was exploding. In truth, the real lives people imagined recreating were much, much poorer than what they were creating in the suburbs.

And it all had to fail.