A Sordid, Futureless Mess?

Abstract

The first part of the chapter surveys how love fared in the film and literary fiction of the period, including the scandalous pre-Code film Baby Face, John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8, and Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps. In those works, love is a lost cause, mired in a cauldron of selfishness, venereal disease, and general tawdriness that reflected the hard times love had fallen on during the decade. After this survey of 1930s sordidness and lovelessness, the chapter offers a theory as to why so many writers and, for a time, the culture at large may have suddenly lost faith in love. (In short, the economy did it.) Its final take on the decade is that heterosexual love, like the economy with which its fate so closely intertwined, eventually recovered from the Depression that it, too, had been thrown into.