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Lower-middle-class and working-class girls coming to the big city in the early twentieth century made all sorts of life choices, but in the popular fiction of the period a disproportionate number of them end up as chorus girls. Chorines turned into icons of American urban modernity—versatile, daring, sexy, and young. My article will approach this phenomenon by way of Owen Johnson’s chorus girl novel The Salamander, which appeared monthly in McClure’s Magazine from September 1913 to June 1914 before it came out as a book shortly thereafter. Though now forgotten, the novel was a huge success at the time of its first appearance and led to a veritable salamander craze in the early 1910s. The narrative around a chorus girl and her friends anticipated the idea of the flapper, forging the image of a particular type of young urban woman—walking through the fire of modern urban corruption unscathed, like the legendary animal. For a while, the salamander was everywhere, and while the term disappeared, the phenomenon did not. The salamander just morphed into slightly different forms. A little later, the same type came to be known as a gold digger (following Avery Hopwood’s eponymous play of 1919), then as a flapper (utilizing a term already introduced in Johnson’s novel, to which Zelda Fitzgerald, as the incarnation of flapperdom, pointed as an inspiration). Johnson’s story was picked up and parodied in the society magazines of the day, it inspired a fashion line, was turned into a Broadway play in 1914, and came out as a film in 1916 (dir. Arthur Donaldson, starring Ruth Findlay, now lost).
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periodicals
women
