Mae West's Babe Gordon or: The Constant Sinner

Almost done with Mae West's novel first published in 1930 as Babe Gordon and then as The Constant Sinner, which she also adapted into a play in 1931. It's remarkable for a number of reasons: the main character, Babe Gordon, despite being only eighteen and nineteen years old during the action, is a strong antihero (or heroine, if you prefer) who is able to work her magic despite all sorts of edgy and highly charged racial, gender, sexual and socio-economic conflicts. 

The text. A reader having no clue about historical or literary context will be presented with a society that seems unhinged about race, gender, sex, money and power, and will probably wonder why social relations are so deranged. Babe Gordon is unquestionably out for herself, seeking good times but also security and self-preservation. She divides and conquers, but not without challenges, setbacks and enemies. Strange lingo peppers the text, slang, racial, gender and class slurs and epithets included, yet a 2011 reader will certainly recognize many social realities that seem familiar. One must come away from the text and ask: what is the same, and what has changed?

One place to look is at word usage, technology employed and attitudes made evident by what is contested and what is subverted in Babe Gordon's arc.

As a social document, Babe Gordon / The Constant Sinner remains compelling -- and incendiary -- in many ways. The text, the language and cultural attitudes revealed are fascinating. On the other hand, this novel also fits within the context of other writings published around the same time. A lot of dialogue shifts gear and employs clashing perspectives as in James Joyce's Ulysses (1920-1922) and Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), and let's not forget Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen and many other of Mae West's contemporaries. Nor should we be particularly shocked by Babe Gordon's bold attitudes: one need only consider some of the great blues singers of the 1920s to perceive the contesting of power in many social spheres at a time when Prohibition was the law, segregation was almost universally pervasive, and adult women could finally vote across the USA.  

Today's Rune: Harvest.