"There's a warm and concentrated comfort in devotion. It possesses a single focus, and so it gives back an instant and manageable gratification." -- Lee Davis from Scandals and Follies: The Rise and Fall of the Great Broadway Review
The above quote is the first line of Scandals and Follies- my background reading for understanding the zeitgeist that gave us some of the more fascinating, under-researched stage productions of the early 20th century. Davis says his "abiding allegiance" has always been musical theater. And I feel that way about the musical culture of women. I try not to be one dimensional- oh, there's that girl who always studies girls. But I feel such a connection to this; like Davis says, there's a comfort I feel when I'm trying to hash out the subtext between the Gibson Bathing Girl and the Brinkley Bathing Girl. So I have my 15 new books checked out, 20 new articles/dissertations downloaded, and I'm ready to dig into all this. We'll see where it takes me.
[Further explanation: Dissertation option number 1 from the previous post was brought to the next level about a week ago with a CFP for gilded gender topics. Digging further into the early Ziegfeld Follies has led to simply too many questions for me to even begin to formulate a competent abstract for March 2012. That means two things: one- rehash some Etude materials (never a bad thing), and two- read as much as possible on this topic for future research ideas. It doesn't mean it'll be a dissertation topic (yet), but it means Ziegfeld was doing an awful lot of gender commentary in his pre-1910 reviews- poking fun at the changing characterizations of American women- from Gibson to Christy to Brinkley and beyond. So this has only just begun.]
