Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles

As femme fatale, cabaret siren, and icon of Camp, the Christopher Isherwood character Sally Bowles has become this century's darling of divine decadence--a measure of how much we are attracted by the fiction of the shocking British/American vamp in Weimar Berlin. Originally a character in a short story by Isherwood, published in 1939, Sally has appeared over the years in John Van Druten's stage play I Am a Camera, Henry Cornelius's film of the same name, and Joe Masteroff's stage musical and Bob Fosse's Academy Award-winning musical film, both entitled Cabaret. Linda Mizejewski shows how each successive repetition of the tale of the showgirl and the male writer/scholar has linked the young man's fascination with Sally more closely to the fascination of fascism. In every version, political difference is read as sexual difference, fascism is disavowed as secretly female or homosexual, and the hero eventually renounces both Sally and the corruption of the coming regime. Mizejewski argues, however, that the historical and political aspects of this story are too specific--and too frightening--to explain in purely psychoanalytic terms. Instead, Divine Decadence examines how each text engages particular cultural issues and anxieties of its era, from postwar Momism to the Vietnam War. Sally Bowles as the symbol of wild Weimar or Nazi eroticism represents history from within the grid of many other controversial discourses, including changing theories of fascism, the story of Camp, vicissitudes of male homosexual representations and discourses, and the relationships of these issues to images of female sexuality. To Mizejewski, the Sally Bowles adaptations end up duplicating the fascist politics they strain to condemn, reproducing the homophobia, misogyny, fascination for spectacle, and emphasis of sexual difference that characterized German fascism.Linda Mizejewski is the author of 'Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles', published 1993 under ISBN 9780691078960 and ISBN 0691078963.