“Disguised beyond any possibility of recognition”: The Seaside and the Subversion of Social Norms at Coney Island

Abstract

This essay directs attention to the original attraction of those amusements outside the city proper: natural landscapes at the edge of cities in which popular amusements were constructed. Here, the heart of subversive possibility was located where the immutable, uncontrollable natural elements interacted with constructed ones. In the case of Coney Island and similar coastal landscapes, this meant the seashore. The beach broke down manufactured limitations, exposing all beachgoers—particularly women—as the same under the sun. I examine the impact that Coney's seashore had on defining class-bound womanhood. I argue that within the island's liminal confines, the beach's natural elements exposed the fallacy that well-off women were naturally cleaner, both physically and morally, than not just men, but also working-class women. Nature trumped the manufactured to sully both the bodies and, metaphorically, the respectability of the women who flocked to Coney. The farther that women ventured toward the ocean, the more the seascape nullified their differences and democratized its allegedly hygienic visitors. This concept normalized in the early twentieth century as city borderlands, primarily the seashore and mountains, introduced possibilities for more porous gender and class identities in urban areas.