Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media

Teenage Dreams

Nick Bentley, Beth Johnson, Andrzej Zieleniec, Nick Bentley, Beth Johnson, Andrzej Zieleniec

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319731896
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This collection explores the representation, articulation and construction of youth subcultures in a range of texts and contexts. It brings together scholars working in literary studies, screen studies, sociology and cultural studies whose research interests lie in the aesthetics and cultural politics of youth. It contributes to, and extends, contemporary theoretical perspectives around youth and youth cultures.
Contributors examine a range of topics, including 'bad girl' fiction of the 1950s, novels by subcultural writers such as Colin MacInnes, Alex Wheatle and Courttia Newland, as well as screen representations of Mods, the 1990s Rave culture, heavy metal, and the Manchester scene. Others explore interventions into subcultural theory with respect to metal, subcultural locations, abjection, graffiti cultures, and the potential of subcultures to resist dominant power frameworks in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Part I‘Subcultural Fictions’

© The Author(s) 2018

N. Bentley et al. (eds.)Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other MediaPalgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Musichttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73189-6_1

Begin Abstract

Girls on the Rampage: ‘Bad Girl’ Fiction in 1950s America

Bill Osgerby¹

(1)

London Metropolitan University, London, UK

End Abstract

‘Bad Girl’ Fiction and the ‘Circuit of Culture’

Billed on its front cover as ‘a shocking novel of teen-age gang life in the slums of Manhattan’, Tomboy was a hit in 1950 for American author Hal Ellson. The previous year Ellson had scooped success with Duke, a hard-hitting bestseller depicting the lifestyle of New York’s violent, teenage gangs. And in Tomboy Ellson’s attention switched to the female of the species; with a narrative that focused on a teenage girl’s life in a street gang and her journey into a world of ruthless turf wars, audacious heists and torrid sleaze. The novel was another Ellson winner, earning plaudits from critics and quickly running to a succession of paperback editions. Other authors soon followed his lead, contributing to a prolific genre of ‘bad girl’ popular fiction that graced American bookstands throughout the 1950s. Albert Quandt’s Zip-Gun Angels (1952), for example, profiled the ‘leader of a new kind of street gang … a gang of tough and beautiful girls’, while Wenzell Brown’s Gang Girl (1954) recounted the exploits of Rita, a fifteen-year-old hellion from New York’s Lower East Side who ‘knew how to fight with her knees, her elbows, her teeth, how to hold a blackjack, how to spot a cop, how to roll marijuana, how to lure a man into a dark hallway’.¹ And, in the same vein, Joseph Hilton’s Angels In The Gutter (1955), Harry Whittington’s Halfway to Hell (1959), Leo Margulies’ short story collection Bad Girls (1958) and Wenzell Brown’s ‘gang girl’ reprise, Girls on the Rampage (1961), all offered gritty tales of young vixens prowling the backstreets of 1950s America.

This ‘bad girl’ fiction was a subgenre in a broader flood of cheap and lurid ‘juvenile delinquency’ novels that traded on contemporary anxieties about youth crime and gang violence.² For the most part, 1950s teen crime was characterised as a male problem—the stock delinquent portrayed as a swaggering, leather-jacketed hoodlum with a duck-tail haircut and a bad attitude. But the belief that girls were becoming ‘tougher’, ‘harder’ and ‘more vicious’ was also widespread; and novels such as Tomboy, Zip-Gun Angels and Gang Girl rode the wave of these concerns. Successfully exploiting contemporary angst surrounding girls, morality and crime, ‘bad girl’ fiction took the febrile newspaper headlines and condensed them into potboilers of sensational sex and violence.

The rise of ‘bad girl’ literature, however, was not solely indebted to contemporary anxieties about miscreant femininity. Like any media configuration of youth subculture, ‘bad girl’ fiction of the 1950s was the product of a confluence of mutually constitutive processes—a ‘circuit of culture’—in which social and cultural influences were important; but also decisive was the way these factors interacted with developments in other realms, especially the fields of production, demand, reception and regulation.

The concept of a ‘circuit of culture’ was originally developed in the mid-1980s by Richard Johnson. According to Johnson, to understand the way media forms develop, circulate and generate meaning, attention must be given to the way they move through a ‘circuit’ consisting of three main stages—production, textuality and reception. Each stage, he argued, was distinct and involved ‘characteristic changes of form’, but were linked together in processes of interdependence and interaction so that ‘[e]ach moment or aspect depends upon the others and is indispensable to the whole’ (Johnson 1997, 83). Analytic perspectives that failed to acknowledge each stage of the circuit and its relation to the others, Johnson contended, could not adequately account for the form and meaning of media texts. In these terms, then, approaches that dwelt exclusively on issues of (for example) authorial intent or textual character were insufficient. Instead, other aspects of the cultural circuit—for instance, the organisation of production and the readings generated by audiences—also demanded attention, along with the dimensions of influence and interplay that invariably existed between the various points of the circuit.

Since Johnson’s original model, various configurations of the cultural circuit have featured in a diversity of studies. Versions of the cultural circuit have, for example, underpinned analyses of product design (Julier 2000) and the development of technologies such as the Sony Walkman (Du Gay et al. 1997) and mobile phones (Goggin 2006), as well as in case studies of textual forms such as the British ‘lads’ magazines of the 1990s (Jackson et al. 2001). And ideas of a cultural circuit can also be usefully applied to media forms associated with youth cultures and subcultures. American ‘bad girl’ fiction of the 1950s is exemplary. The rise of the genre can be seen as the outcome of an interlinked circuit of culture in which the social and cultural controversies of the period undoubtedly played an important role, but crucial was the way these influences interacted with other contemporary developments—most obviously the shifts in business organisation, markets and censorship that transformed US publishing after the Second World War.

The Paperback Boom and a Market for the ‘Three Ss’

Issues of production always play a key role in a circuit of culture, and they were fundamental to the rise of ‘bad girl’ fiction. The success of the 1950s ‘bad girl’ novels was indebted to the wider boom in paperback books. Of course, paperbound books were hardly new. The commercial possibilities of paperbacks had already been demonstrated in Germany during the 1930s, where Albatross Books had successfully produced a range of mass-market paperbacks whose innovations in size, typography and layout became the industry standard. And in Britain the Albatross format was imitated by Allen Lane’s launch of Penguin Books in 1935, which revolutionised British publishing through the introduction of high quality, inexpensive paperbacks. But American talent was also quick to appreciate the paperback’s potential.³

Leading the way, entrepreneur Robert de Graff joined forces with publishers Richard Simon and Max Schuster in 1939 to found Pocket Books, which soon became a market leader with its paperback reprints of classics, light novels and popular non-fiction. The company’s success was partly indebted to its books’ low price (25 cents) and attractive presentation, but it was also indebted to the firm’s innovative distribution. Whereas hardback sales traditionally relied on bookshops, de Graff (a seasoned pressman) saw how a much broader market could be reached via the distribution systems used for newspapers and magazines. Hence Pocket Books were racked-up on newsstands and in drugstores, a strategic masterstroke that, within a year, had clocked up sales of more than 1.5 million.

Following Pocket Books’ success, rivals soon appeared. For instance, Avon Books (publisher of Gang Girl and Halfway to Hell) had started out as a magazine publisher—J.S. Ogilvie Publications—but was bought up by the newspaper distributor American News Company (ANC) and relaunched in 1941 as Avon, a paperback imprint that closely imitated Pocket Books. And more competition quickly followed. Dell was launched in 1942, then Popular Library in 1943; in 1945 Ian Ballantine (formerly director of Penguin’s American operations) set up Bantam Books (publisher of the paperback edition of Tomboy), followed by Ballantine Books, launched in 1952. And in 1948 Kurt Enoch (who had fled Nazi Germany after launching Albatross Books) established New American Library, initially publishing paperback reprints of classics, then a few original mysteries, romances and adventure stories.

But the key pioneer in the production of paperback originals was Fawcett, a major magazine publisher and leading newsstand distributor. Handling the distribution of New American Library’s Mentor and Signet imprints, Fawcett soon saw the potential of paperback sales, and in 1950 the firm launched the industry’s first major line of original paperback novels—Gold Medal Books (publisher of Angels in the Gutter and Girls on the Rampage). Specialising in westerns, mysteries and thrillers, Gold Medal had churned out over nine million books by the end of 1951, with many novels quickly going to three or four editions. By 1953, then, the paperback trade was burgeoning and the business magazine Fortune could trumpet ‘The Boom in Paper Bound Books’, estimating that the previous year had seen national paperback sales of 243 million in a market worth over $69 million (Fortune, September, 1953, 122).

The paperback bonanza, however, was itself indebted to another link in the ‘cultural circuit’—the shifts in markets and consumer demand engendered by America’s economic upturn. After the Second World War disposable incomes and living standards rose across the board, and publishers rode the tide of consumer affluence. But one market was especially attractive—teenagers and young adults. The post-war ‘baby boom’ ensured a ‘bulge’ in the US teenage population throughout the 1950s and 1960s; and this, combined with buoyant levels of youth employment and a growth in parental allowances, ensured a sustained growth in young people’s spending power.⁴ In 1956, for example, Time magazine estimated that ‘allowances and earnings give the teenage boy an average weekly income of $8.96, compared to only $2.41 a dozen years ago’ (Time, 13 August, 1956, 72); and by 1959 an awestruck Life magazine was observing that American youth had ‘emerged as a big-time consumer in the US economy’, with teen wallets reckoned to be worth around $10 billion per year (Life, 31 August, 1959, 78). Industries scrambled to stake a claim in the teenage goldmine, with everything from rock ‘n’ roll records to ‘brothel-creeper’ shoes pitched to young consumers. And publishers, too, were keen to cash-in.

While paperbacks enjoyed a diverse readership, teenagers and young adults were squarely in the book trade’s sights. In 1946, for example, Pocket Books launched the Teen-Age Book Show, a touring exhibition that pitched paperbacks to young readers, while throughout the 1950s New American Library had an educational sales department geared to penetrating the classroom market. Largely based on paperback reprints of classic titles, such initiatives were promoted as offering young readers easy access to literature deemed worthy and educational. But, alongside this earnest fare, there also lurked a legion of paperback books with less high-minded sensibilities.

During the early 1950s the flourishing paperback trade was regularly decried by critics who argued the market was dominated by what they dubbed ‘the three Ss’—’sex, sadism and the smoking gun’ (Schick 1958, 96). The point was not without foundation. Many paperbacks were noir-esque tales of hard-boiled tough guys and hot-blooded dames; their scorching narratives matched by covers that bristled with sneering hoodlums and their improbably buxom molls. The formula had its roots in the traditions of pulp magazine publishers, many of whom had become major players in the new paperback business.

The ‘pulps’—so-called because of the low-cost, wood pulp paper they were originally printed on—were cheap fiction magazines renowned for their gripping themes and racy cover art. The genre’s heyday was during the 1920s and 1930s when US newsstands were thronged with cheap, visually striking pulp titles such as Argosy, Amazing Stories and Dime Detective, all proffering thrilling tales of mystery, crime and adventure. Paper shortages during the Second World War b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. ‘Subcultural Fictions’
• Part II. Subcultural Representations on Screen
• Part III. Critical Theory and Subcultural Representations in Other Media
• Back Matter