The novel Last Exit to Brooklyn vividly portrays bohemian culture, its values and traditions, life style and ideals. The bothersome matter of the arts is just one of the problems surrounding any consideration of life style and its new values. This culture was influenced and shaped by ideas of free will and liberations, racial quality and new gender roles.
During the Fifties, public attention was focused on art and freedom to an unprecedented degree in American culture. Even more than in the Twenties, being young was an enviable state. Even more than in the late Forties, when America looked benignly on its bobby-soxers and boys-next-door as embodiments of postwar vitality, teens occupied the fantasies of adults. In the Fifties, those fantasies were more polarized than ever before. Now America looked at its art and freedom with a new mixture of hope and fear, of intense fascination and even, at times, terror. The public constantly looked for something or someone to blame for this perceived epidemic of juvenile delinquency. Parents themselves, especially upper-middle-class parents involved with their jobs and social status, took some of the heat in magazine articles and in sociologists’ opinions; because such parents were emotionally unavailable to their teens, their children turned to the peer group for comfort.
Whatever the cause, and whoever they actually were, the nation saw such “black leather barbarians,” as one pulp fiction author called, as a threat. Rejecting the conservatism and work ethic of the “man in the grey flannel suit,” they seemed to embrace lawlessness, sexuality, and rebellion. purported spies in the government, they were a danger from within, entrusted with the future of the country and working against all it stood for. This image, although a stereotype, did reflect some reality. More of the white populace did live in the suburbs and could indeed afford many of the latest conveniences. Moreover, many families built bomb shelters in their homes, stocked with water and canned goods and, in some wealthier homes, bars and easy chairs. Reflecting the self-conscious morality of the decade, the popular media celebrated religion to a remarkable degree.
Working-class boys of any ethnic group, especially those in the inner city, faced the severest difficulties. If they were labeled delinquent, they found themselves left out of good vocational training and were shunted into correctional situations, without hope of academic success and without the opportunity to get jobs because of child labor laws. Harrison Salisbury pointed out that, fine as it was to insist that a child should not work full-time until age sixteen, such laws made no sense for many boys. The laws were designed to remove boys from competition with adult labor, something that might have been necessary in the past but no longer made sense Even boys who just bided their time until they could join the army might not be accepted there either, given the army’s strictures.
Car was inevitable part of a city life and bohemian culture. Selby portrays: ‘”The doggies saw them they stopped then turned and ran toward the gate to the Base. Freddy ran to his car and the others jumped in and on the fenders or held on to the open doors” (16). The automobile had speeded up city life and put fewer people on the sidewalks and into public transportation. The need for newsies faded, but they had proved that, given the chance, young workers could operate a trade without the degree of supervision most adults wanted to impose on them.
The rapid growth of the automobile industry and the phenomenal rise in automobile ownership during the Twenties offered visible proof of the economic boom being enjoyed by the country. The freedom experienced by teens in their cars was unprecedented, and it frightened adults. Families learned that their teen children would rather go driving or do something else with their friends than join the family in the car, and no longer did parents become as easily or quickly acquainted with their children’s friends, which raised a whole new set of moral problems. Drugs and marijuana was a part of this culture. Selby writes: “ignoring the fighting and screaming, their arms of comradeship around each others shoulders, laughing and smoking marijuana “(255). To many, the automobile represented all the changes in teen moral values–smoking, drinking, sexual experimentation, rejection of the family in favor of peers–that emerged in the Twenties.
In sum, bohemian culture portrayed in this novel depict its as a culture of crime, and drug abuse; but, most of all, car culture and new moral values: bosomy girls in tight sweaters and skirts, pressing against their black-leather-jacketed, cigarette-smoking boyfriends, or sexy girls terrorized by blue-joined tough guys appeal to girls who are just beginning to find their identity in the world. This novel portrays a spirit of independence and free will, freedom of speech and movement, ideas and new ideals created by mass culture and artistic movements. Thus, it was a culture of poor classes affected by poverty and poor education, low values and desires for better life.
Works Cited
Selby, H. Last Exit to Brooklyn. Grove Press, 1994.