Jazz Age

The Jazz Age is presented by Screwtape as a cultural turn in fashionable ideals of female beauty: men are taught to prefer women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from boys’. He links this preference to a broader infernal strategy that reshapes sexual taste, making desire harder to satisfy and less likely to support marriage and family life.

A Shift in Fashionable Beauty

Screwtape places the Jazz Age after the age of the waltz and describes it as the latest turn in a long history of redirected male taste. Earlier fashions had favored an aristocratic, statuesque ideal or an exaggeratedly feminine, languishing type. The new preference moves in the opposite direction, toward a boyish appearance. These are not neutral changes in taste in his account: each fashion rewards different traits and channels desire away from relationships he considers spiritually helpful.

The period’s ideal is bound to a wider visual culture. Screwtape says that popular art, stage presentation, and bathing attire promote an apparent nudity that is not an unaltered representation of the body. He argues that figures are drawn, or presented through clothing and supports, to appear firmer, slimmer, and more boyish than nature allows. The culture nonetheless regards this ideal as frank, healthy, and natural, a mismatch that lets an artificial standard pass as common sense.

Desire and Its Consequences

The boyish ideal is, in Screwtape’s analysis, especially temporary. It therefore heightens women’s fear of growing old and makes them less willing and less able to bear children. At the same time, the ideal directs men’s desire toward something that does not exist: an image increasingly shaped by the eye and increasingly impossible to satisfy. The result is not simply a preference for a particular appearance, but a widening gap between desire and ordinary human reality.

Screwtape situates this period-specific fashion within a general scheme of sexual misdirection. He distinguishes between desire that can be joined to charity and marriage, and desire that tends instead toward avoiding marriage or treating a spouse as an instrument. The Jazz Age’s visual ideal helps explain how cultural fashion can shape the conditions in which such desires develop, though the letter does not establish that the patient himself adopts this specific preference.

Cultural Mechanism and Narrative Context

The fashion is not attributed to spontaneous collective choice. Screwtape says that infernal influence works through a small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses, and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. This account makes the period’s ideal an example of desire being produced and circulated socially, rather than merely discovered in individuals. Its apparent naturalness conceals the mechanisms that make it persuasive.

The reference occurs within a letter advising Wormwood about the kind of woman the patient might be encouraged to love if sexual temptation cannot make him unchaste. The Jazz Age thus serves as a historical frame for Screwtape’s instruction, not as an independent episode in the patient’s life. More broadly, the novel’s prefatory note cautions that Screwtape is a liar and that his judgments should not automatically be accepted as true; the account of fashionable beauty belongs to his infernal, strategic interpretation of human culture.