Programming National Identity by Joelle Neulander

Author:Joelle Neulander [Neulander, Joelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0807134945
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2009-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

the perils of the single life Marginalized Working-Class Men and Women at Radio’s Fictional Center

Et voila comment Paulette Toujours tres honnete Toujours comme il faut Fait le trottoir a Villette V’la c’que c’est d’etr’ sans defaut!

And that’s how Paulette

Always upstanding

Always proper

Walks the streets at Villette

That’s what it means to have no faults!

—andre hornaz and paul misraki, “Paulette (Toujours comme il faut)”

Paulette, the title character in a 1938 song by Ray Ventura et Ses Collegiens, decides to leave her rural home for Paris to make her way in the world. The band jokingly tells us in the refrain that she is, like every country girl, “Always upstanding / Always proper,” never stepping out of her role as a good girl and woman. Once in Paris, she easily finds work as a shop girl in a haberdashery and becomes one of a multitude of urban single working women. In spite of her “impeccable” behavior, attested to in each chorus, after many trials (and many verses), she ends her life as a cheap prostitute on the working-class outskirts of northern Paris. Although here part of a comical swing number,

Paulette’s story, from when she moves to the city and finds a job to her tragic end in Villette, reflects the general and usually much more serious trend of the stories portrayed in radio fiction of working single men and women in the city.

As we have seen, radio often focused on life in the bourgeois home. Women in radio song and play had to fight against their emotional natures to stay virtuous, and women listeners were served a traditional menu of programming by broadcasters. Married male characters sometimes had affairs, but they had marriages that kept them stable and happy. Yet the lives of those who did not fit into the models of family stability, marginal figures by traditional domestic standards—the single working-class men and women in the city—fascinated radio writers and performers, who focused many radio hours both on the joys of single life and on the horrible sorrows destined to those without the protective envelope of the family. These characters served as constant reminders of appropriate behavior and provided both titillation and lessons of decency for radio listeners.

In radio fiction, young, unmarried bourgeois men and women could live out the freedoms of the single life, pursuing light relationships with the people around them and enjoying their carefree world at least until marriage. Yet these images had class limits because only bourgeois singles were shown to have true prospects of marriage after a short period of freedom. Often, the single working-class man was portrayed as a buffoon, who bragged about his exploits but never really got the girl. Radio fiction also limited working-class women in their occupations, seldom depicting them as anything but maids in the bourgeois household or prostitutes.1 For both working-class men and women, too much time alone led to bad behavior when no patriarchal figure put limits on desire and fun. Many of the plays and songs depicted these men and women’s drop into the criminal world of prostitution, robbery, and murder.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.