Week Seven: October 7-13

Week Seven: October 7-13: Topless Cellist: Pages 141-212

This week, we get to what I find to be the best parts of Topless Cellist. Chapters 14 and 15 specifically are interesting for what they say about the opinions of some during this decade that the nude female body playing a cello can be beautiful, but it cannot be “high art.” This reminds me of issues of postwar masculinity. We know from texts like Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s and All Man! that the postwar era endured what historians called “male panic”—a crisis of masculinity—as men returned home from the war to a “confusing new world” of women, children, suburbanization, consumer conformity, and mass consumption. It is the reason we find a prevalence of fifties men’s magazines that look like this:

Television was dominated by bumbling fathers like Ozzie Nelson, who struggled to learn the same lessons each week over and over, and historians claim that men responded by searching for “hyper-masculinized” versions of manhood. Even beyond this, though, popular culture of the era sought to re-connect masculinity with “high art.” In 1956, Auguste Comte Spectorsky accepted the managing editor position for Playboy. Disappointed that postwar culture no longer had a “masculine high culture,” Spectorsky had new goals for Playboy magazine. Going beyond merely bringing sophisticated cultural and artistic tastes to the magazine—for example, by including modernist fiction (Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce), poetry, etc. alongside semi-nude spreads (integrating high and low brow to define masculinity)— he wanted to re-masculinize high culture.

Through examples such as the aforementioned men’s magazines, popular culture of the postwar era regarded conformity, suburban life, and mass culture as feminizing and degrading forces and consequently, constructed and sold a type of masculinity that was sophisticated, culturally-savvy, and of good taste. The recipe for this brand of manliness involved a solid familiarity with the world of “high art.”

I can’t help but think of these masculine/feminine binaries when I read Rothfuss. Charlotte’s version of “high art” didn’t mesh with commonly-held ideas of “high art.” Page 202: “His (Judge Shalleck) opinion makes it clear that he was not offended by toplessness. (Like Mayor Lindsey, he was clearly in favor of that.) Instead, what Shalleck objected to was the defense’s claim that the topless performance in Opera Sextronique was art . . . The judge was an old man with old-fashioned ideas, and Moorman confused him. In his experience, if a woman took her clothes off in front of an audience, a striptease was in progress; alternatively, when a well-groomed young lady appeared on stage in an evening gown with a cello, one could look forward to an artistic experience of the highest order. Moorman didn’t deliver on either promise.”

These are my thoughts. What are yours?