Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Situated between World War I (1914-1918) and the Great Depression (1929-1939), the Jazz Age was a time of excess in the United States. After the horrors of the Great War, many wished to celebrate life’s joys, as demonstrated by the parties of the Roaring ‘20s. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, traveled often between the American East Coast and France, epicenters of these great social gatherings. At the same time, the postwar age saw a rise in existentialism and concern over what would now be understood as the aftermath of trauma. For the Fitzgeralds, this was evident in F. Scott’s alcohol addiction and Zelda’s declining mental health. The social gatherings in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” with matrons supervising from balconies, align more with the previous generation’s upper-class practices than with the more egalitarian extravaganzas thrown in Fitzgerald’s later novel The Great Gatsby (1925). Regardless, as Marjorie and her mother discuss, ideas of appropriate behavior for young women are already shifting in their circles.

Economic change and consumerism were also hallmarks of the era. Industrialism, leading into the Gilded Age that followed Reconstruction, allowed for more social mobility and a rise in “new money” families who sought legitimacy from their “old money” counterparts.