Finding the Flapper: A Historiographical Look at Image and Attitude

Abstract

AbstractIn 1920 with the publication of his first novel This Side of Paradise, the struggling, young, and hopelessly romantic writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, first introduced the American public to the flapper. Though he never used the term ‘flapper’ until his later works, scholars credit Fitzgerald with creating, or at the very least, popularizing her. Stubborn, precocious, beautiful, young, unconventional, and often times dangerous, Fitzgerald’s characterization would become the definition of the flapper – the image the average American conjured up when he or she heard the word. Like a whirlwind, she raced onto the scene and completely changed the landscape of female and male interaction and redefined the feminine ideal. Although successful in her immersion into American culture, the flapper as persona grata was ephemeral. Throughout the 1920s the flapper dominated the tabloids, movies and even serious scholarship. By the 1930s, however, her name and her public appearance dwindled and, prior to the American emergence into the Second World War, finally disappeared altogether.