everywhere.
The consumer revolution was discovering teenagers. Style was now the official idiom of the marketplace. ‘Look at the style,’ Benny says wistfully in
Circle of Friends
, scanning the UCD campus. Hairstyles for college girls were ‘ponytails, little beat fringes, devil horns on the forehead, kiss curls in front of theears or little chignons on the back of the head, possibly French pleats’. Daywear was jeans and baggy sweaters, previously made as shapeless as possible by your boyfriend, or brightly coloured skirts over suspender belts and nylon stockings (if you could afford the 18 shillings a pair). 29
Of great interest to the mass media, particularly to magazines aimed at women, style was what the consumer society was all about, but Maeve was finding keeping up with anyone else’s style extremely problematic.
Seeing the mass of students milling about St Stephen’s Green, the confidence of the girls with their little ponytails and college scarves laughing and talking with boys as they walked up and down the paths to Earlsfort Terrace, made her feel hopelessly inadequate. Life had begun to seem like a beauty contest she could never win. On campus she felt more desperate than ever before. Since adolescence, she said later, she had been a foot taller than Napoleon and twice the weight of Twiggy. ‘There I was, a fat, insecure young woman who thought that the race was won by the small, the pretty and the slim.’ 30
She clung to her childhood culture for support, stopping off at Westland Row church on the way up to campus from the train each morning and lighting a penny candle. Here she had recourse to Sermon-on-the-Mount theology, which taught that those who are dealt a poor hand in this world will be blessed in the world to come. At Killiney she had embraced this, but it was hard, very hard, to embrace it in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of UCD.
Daywear for Maeve was ‘dreadful Fair Isle jumpers’ not maderoomy by boyfriends, owing to the fact that she didn’t have any, and a beige coat with a brown velvet collar, which was really her old school coat from the Holy Child.
The really cool thing to be in those days was a beatnik – one of that section of the young who had come out against the power-mad consumer ideology. In some quarters a certain cynicism was brewing as to the political motivation and purpose of consumerism . Bernays, it seems, had won government support for his project by persuading politicians that by satisfying the deepest longings of the masses they would have them in the palms of their hands, happy and docile. The vision had evolved of a lobotomised society, tranquil, content, under control, conforming to a model dictated by an elite political body using consumerism as the palliative, the feel-good medication – a vision which came to be satirised in the film
The Stepford Wives
and Ken Kesey’s book
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. Even as consumerism was discovering the new teenage market, the call was out to liberate people from what the playwright Arthur Miller was referring to as ‘the whole ideology of this Age, which is power mad’.
‘Beatnik’ was a word that followed the phrase ‘Beat Generation’, which spoke of the syncopated rhythms of jazz that was so popular then, and which was a reaction against the Establishment and its consumer ideology. It was a word coined by the American writer and spiritual adventurer Jack Kerouac (
On the Road,
1957) and Allen Ginsberg (
Howl & Other Poems
, 1956), who defined the offbeat, non-conformist nature of artistic bohemia in the late 1950s. The movement, following two world wars and 150 years of industrial revolution which had broughtlittle but suffering to the working classes, would be one of disenchantment with the political, social and religious institutions which the Establishment had used to control people, and of strides towards individual freedom, emancipation and personal responsibility.
On campus, the duffel coat
The consumer revolution was discovering teenagers. Style was now the official idiom of the marketplace. ‘Look at the style,’ Benny says wistfully in
Circle of Friends
, scanning the UCD campus. Hairstyles for college girls were ‘ponytails, little beat fringes, devil horns on the forehead, kiss curls in front of theears or little chignons on the back of the head, possibly French pleats’. Daywear was jeans and baggy sweaters, previously made as shapeless as possible by your boyfriend, or brightly coloured skirts over suspender belts and nylon stockings (if you could afford the 18 shillings a pair). 29
Of great interest to the mass media, particularly to magazines aimed at women, style was what the consumer society was all about, but Maeve was finding keeping up with anyone else’s style extremely problematic.
Seeing the mass of students milling about St Stephen’s Green, the confidence of the girls with their little ponytails and college scarves laughing and talking with boys as they walked up and down the paths to Earlsfort Terrace, made her feel hopelessly inadequate. Life had begun to seem like a beauty contest she could never win. On campus she felt more desperate than ever before. Since adolescence, she said later, she had been a foot taller than Napoleon and twice the weight of Twiggy. ‘There I was, a fat, insecure young woman who thought that the race was won by the small, the pretty and the slim.’ 30
She clung to her childhood culture for support, stopping off at Westland Row church on the way up to campus from the train each morning and lighting a penny candle. Here she had recourse to Sermon-on-the-Mount theology, which taught that those who are dealt a poor hand in this world will be blessed in the world to come. At Killiney she had embraced this, but it was hard, very hard, to embrace it in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of UCD.
Daywear for Maeve was ‘dreadful Fair Isle jumpers’ not maderoomy by boyfriends, owing to the fact that she didn’t have any, and a beige coat with a brown velvet collar, which was really her old school coat from the Holy Child.
The really cool thing to be in those days was a beatnik – one of that section of the young who had come out against the power-mad consumer ideology. In some quarters a certain cynicism was brewing as to the political motivation and purpose of consumerism . Bernays, it seems, had won government support for his project by persuading politicians that by satisfying the deepest longings of the masses they would have them in the palms of their hands, happy and docile. The vision had evolved of a lobotomised society, tranquil, content, under control, conforming to a model dictated by an elite political body using consumerism as the palliative, the feel-good medication – a vision which came to be satirised in the film
The Stepford Wives
and Ken Kesey’s book
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. Even as consumerism was discovering the new teenage market, the call was out to liberate people from what the playwright Arthur Miller was referring to as ‘the whole ideology of this Age, which is power mad’.
‘Beatnik’ was a word that followed the phrase ‘Beat Generation’, which spoke of the syncopated rhythms of jazz that was so popular then, and which was a reaction against the Establishment and its consumer ideology. It was a word coined by the American writer and spiritual adventurer Jack Kerouac (
On the Road,
1957) and Allen Ginsberg (
Howl & Other Poems
, 1956), who defined the offbeat, non-conformist nature of artistic bohemia in the late 1950s. The movement, following two world wars and 150 years of industrial revolution which had broughtlittle but suffering to the working classes, would be one of disenchantment with the political, social and religious institutions which the Establishment had used to control people, and of strides towards individual freedom, emancipation and personal responsibility.
On campus, the duffel coat
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