07 September 2008
hoydens of the twentieth century
Four Saucy Seaside Girls from Dominic, found in a second-hand bookshop in Tenby. The girl in the middle is either describing something in an animated way or she's trying to move away from the yellow straw that the bottom left girl is attempting to tickle her with. The off-the-shoulder look of the bottom right girl is particularly fetching, and the shorts on all four outfits are obviously splendid. Why must today's swimsuits be both horribly revealing and physiologically unflattering? The top of one's thighs should remain covered in public pools. And in general.
THE SUFFRAGETTE - "I will see the Government!' This is a fantastic recent find: one of the many anti-suffragette postcards from around 1910. Most anti-suffragette postcards depict stern-looking battle-axes and women in ties looking to take over the Houses of Parliament, or bulldogs in bonnets (perhaps Palin should have used that line instead). One says 'While in the act of voting, Mrs Jones remembers that she has left a cake in the oven!'. The one of the little girl is unusual, in the sense that the Suffragettes are depicted here as politically immature, rather than aggressively mannish, or unnatural in some other way. The girl has just the right degree of pout, and the posture of the policeman ignoring her is perfect.
There's an argument that says that the saucy seaside postcards of the 1930s and 40s are directly influenced by the the anti-suffragette pictures. George Orwell in his excellent essay on the major artist of saucy postcards, 'The Art of Donald McGill' from 1941, puts it like this:
'Another survival is the Suffragette, one of the big jokes of the pre-1914 period and too valuable to be relinquished. She has reappeared, unchanged in physical appearance, as the Feminist lecturer or Temperance fanatic.'
Orwell uses the postcards of McGill to diagnose the repressed underside of a superficial austere Britishness, and indulges instead in what Rebecca West described as 'extracting as much fun as possible from smacking behinds in basement kitchens'. As Orwell says:
'What you are really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European consciousness.'
According to Orwell, seaside postcards follow precise rules. Take, for example, the conventions of the sex joke:
'(i) Marriage only benefits women. Every man is plotting seduction and every woman is plotting marriage. No woman ever remained unmarried voluntarily.
(ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved and good-looking people beyond their first youth are never represented. The amorous honeymooning couple reappear as the grim-visaged wife and shapeless, moustachioed, red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being allowed for.'
But Orwell ultimately defends the saucy seaside card, pointing to a longer bawdy continuum whose outlets have been sadly curtailed:
'In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them
vanish.'
I wonder what 'worse forms' currently speak for this corner of the human heart.
