As femme fatale, cabaret siren, and icon of Camp, the
Christopher Isherwood character Sally Bowles has become this
century's darling of "divine decadence"--a measure of how much we
are attracted by the fiction of the "shocking" British/American
vamp in Weimar Berlin. Originally a character in a short story by
Isherwood, published in 1939, "Sally" has appeared over the years
in John Van Druten's stage play I Am a Camera, Henry Cornelius's
film of the same name, and Joe Masteroff's stage musical and Bob
Fosse's Academy Award-winning musical film, both entitled Cabaret.
Linda Mizejewski shows how each successive repetition of the tale
of the showgirl and the male writer/scholar has linked the young
man's fascination with Sally more closely to the fascination of
fascism. In every version, political difference is read as sexual
difference, fascism is disavowed as secretly female or homosexual,
and the hero eventually renounces both Sally and the corruption of
the coming regime. Mizejewski argues, however, that the historical
and political aspects of this story are too specific--and too
frightening--to explain in purely psychoanalytic terms. Instead,
Divine Decadence examines how each text engages particular cultural
issues and anxieties of its era, from postwar "Momism" to the
Vietnam War. Sally Bowles as the symbol of "wild Weimar" or Nazi
eroticism represents "history" from within the grid of many other
controversial discourses, including changing theories of fascism,
the story of Camp, vicissitudes of male homosexual representations
and discourses, and the relationships of these issues to images of
female sexuality. To Mizejewski, the Sally Bowles adaptations end
up duplicating the fascist politics they strain to condemn,
reproducing the homophobia, misogyny, fascination for spectacle,
and emphasis of sexual difference that characterized German
fascism.
Originally published in 1992.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books
from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these
important books while presenting them in durable paperback
editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly
increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the
thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since
its founding in 1905.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!