‘Syncopated Nerves’: Jazz and the Pathology of Modern Youth in Noël Coward's 1920s Theatre

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection of jazz culture and popular discourse on nervous disorders in Britain in the 1920s through Noël Coward's plays and revues. In the wake of the First World War, a popular view emerged that the nation was suffering from a form of collective shell-shock – that nervous disorders or ‘nerves’ had never been more rampant and the population never more vulnerable to nervous breakdown. At the same time, anxieties surfaced about American jazz culture and its influence on British youth. The result was a pathologized youth culture that became emblematic of a nation in decline. Several of Coward's early works from the 1920s – specifically, his play The Vortex (1924) and his popular revues On with the Dance (1924–25) and This Year of Grace! (1928) – participate in linking jazz culture with the nervous symptoms of an unhealthy era. However, rather than reinforcing normative judgments that cast jazz or youth culture as the cause of the nation's nervous instability, Coward uses nervous symptoms to characterize a sensitive, vulnerable younger generation that is floundering because the older generation, particularly the leisured Society set, has failed to provide a stable moral foundation at a time of national distress.