VARIETY
time stereotyped, emotions that
surround the literary use of the
airplane. Even before it was at–
tached to war, the airplane had
come to represent man's love of
danger, the death wish, sexual re–
pression and all the lesser demands
of powerful egos.
The ability to consume rather
startling amounts of alcohol is an–
other inevitable attribute of these
harassed female characters. The
alcohol is nothing in itself; it is
merely a further symbolic act of
irresistible wickedness designed to
set these women off from the rest
of the world. Just as the mainten–
ance of stables suggests elegance
and wealth, the alcohol must be
associated with a substantial back–
ground in order to have the proper
psychological content. A poor girl
flopping around in a drunken
stupor would simply arouse a res–
ponse of pity or, perhaps, humor.
Yet when these rebellious daughters
of the ruling class drink it is evid–
ence of their strength as creatures
above the demands of society as
well as their weakness in being
pawns of emotional insecurity. Sue
Murdock says of herself, "... It is
one thing little Sue can do. She
can drink a great deal of whisky.
She can drink a great deal of
gin. Her capacity is truly remark–
able . . . " In
Boston Adventure,
Hopestill Mather expresses her re–
volt against the stuffiness of her
background by saying, "Five mi–
nutes of this sort of thing and I'm
at the end of my tether. Don't you
think we should have cocktails?"
Through drinking, these decadent
heroines take on the quality of
421
masculinity that was so common to
the haunted flappers of the
twenties. The
animus
of these wo–
men has triumphed to such a
degree that the reader knows in–
stinctively there can be no man
equal to the task of conquering
them wholly. However, the one
hope they have is that salvation
may be achieved by masochistic
contact with those despised by their
own world.
Both Sue Murdock and Hopestill
Mather feel an immense need for
slumming. They must have af–
fairs with men beneath them either
in income or position. Since Jerry
Calhoun in
At Heaven's Gate
is
climbing up from poverty, we take
it as quite natural that Sue Mur–
dock, the financier's daughter,
should respond to
him.
In this boy
she can crystallize her rejection of
her father's economic success.
Hopestill Mather becomes involved
with a tasteless parvenu: the anti–
thesis of all she might have been
expected to choose. In addition to
these men in whom the fundamen–
tal conflicts are expressed, there is
a constant urge toward Bohemian–
ism. The Bohemian friends are a
mere foil for the heroine's back–
ground. They are meant to an–
tagonize the family. The interest–
ing thing here is that the women
themselves, without any particular
talent or drive, manage to live much
more intensely than do the Bohe–
mians with whom they associate.
Perhaps the hidden psychological
reason for this is that the reader
expects a certain amount of hard
luck, danger and dissatisfaction to
be the lot of those in average cir-
