Cambridge Contributor: Melissa Bradshaw

Melissa Bradshaw, the author of our Cambridge Companion chapter “Performing Greenwich Village Bohemianism,” is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul University. A leading expert on the poetry of Amy Lowell, she is co-editor of Selected Poems of Amy Lowell and Amy Lowell, American Modern, a volume of criticism on her work, as well as the author of Amy Lowell: Diva Poet, forthcoming from Ashgate.

Bradshaw writes: “I write about the iconic woman—the diva—as a powerful and dangerous figure of feminine gendering in a culture of celebrity, that for all its token celebration of some women, remains profoundly sexist. Scholars have seen the diva as a queer figure because she rejects heteronormative femininity in favor of public fame and devotion to her art. My interest in the diva began with my doctoral training in literary modernism, and has grown into a multivalent, interdisciplinary approach to female celebrity, one that is increasingly wary of the sacrifices and indignities required of public women.” She pursues this line of thinking in a recent Camera Obscura article, “Devouring the Diva: Martyrdom as Feminist Backlash in The Rose,” which explores the 1979 film The Rose and its spectacular reimagining of Janis Joplin’s death.

This interest in the diva and the public identity of the poet informs Bradshaw’s chapter for the Companion, which focuses on literary celebrities and the performance of bohemian identity in the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, and others, as well as on Eugene O’Neill and fellow members of the Provincetown Players. The following selection from her chapter deals with tensions between “local people” (the mostly immigrant inhabitants of the area south of Washington Square) and the “Villagers” (the bohemian artists looking to establish an enclave in a low-rent district):

For all their inability, or unwillingness, to integrate with the locals, Village artists found them good artistic fodder, drawing on the disparities between the two groups for dramatic effect in their art. Djuna Barnes wrote local-color sketches for New York daily newspapers, for example, which often romanticized the locals as earthier, more authentic figures than the Villagers. In “Paprika Johnson” (1915) she tells the story of a stenographer who becomes the “first cabaret artist.” Paprika is a beauty, “as good to look upon as a yard of slick taffy, and twice as alluring,” but for the men in Swingerhoger’s Beer Garden, her allure is in her voice, as she sits on her fire escape Saturday evenings, singing and playing on her banjo eight floors above the revelers in the garden below.

Convinced that she is the beer garden’s real draw, Swingerhoger offers her a job as paid entertainment, but Paprika demurs, certain she’ll find a husband and a life away from her fire escape. In the meantime, Paprika uses her lovely voice to help her unlovely best friend, Leah – “thin, pock-marked and colorless” – woo Gus, a blind man. Once Leah is married, Paprika is free to pursue her own interests and eagerly accepts the epistolary courtship of the boy who tends the donkeys at Stroud’s. On the very night that they are to meet face to face, however, Gus’s vision is restored, and Leah begs Paprika to sit at his bedside in order to soften the blow of realizing he has a

homely wife. As Paprika sits at Gus’s bedside, the boy from Stroud’s arrives at her apartment, and seeing Leah, “laugh[s] suddenly, with a hard, disillusioned break,” and leaves. Her dreams of leaving the city for marital happiness in Yonkers, or the Bronx, of trading popular songs for lullabies, crushed, Paprika accepts Swingerhoger’s offer, and as the story ends is still, at thirty, sitting on her fire escape, strumming on her banjo, singing to the men below.

“Paprika Johnson” critiques bourgeois desires as they fester, unattainable and unworthy, in the urban working class. Paprika’s desires are simple: she wants a husband; she wants to move from the eighth floor to the second-floor front apartment. Were it not for her loyalty to her bosom friend, she might have had them. But as Barnes’s narrative makes clear, Paprika’s loss might be for the best. The boy from Stroud’s is no catch, a pampered only child “who had put his hands into his mother’s hair and shaken it free of gold.” His hasty departure after he mistakes the homely Leah for Paprika suggests he
is no spiritual match for the noble heroine.

Ironically, when Paprika Johnson’s trustworthiness and compassion get in the way of her dreams, she accidentally achieves what Villagers like Barnes hunger for by becoming an artist. This dense character study offers an enigmatic moral: Paprika achieves the Village ideal – she escapes the bourgeois institutions of marriage and motherhood, and finds a venue and an adoring audience for her art – precisely because she did not want or try for it. Paprika’s lonely banjo songs, free of symbolic import or political significance, exist only as art. Effortlessly countercultural, Barnes’s heroine represents the authenticity of the proletariat.

Bradshaw notes that her favorite part of writing this chapter was the chance to research the Village feminist club Heterodoxy: “I knew Amy Lowell had lectured to the club at least once,” she says. “Katharine Hepburn was there.”

Monday: Caleb Crain