Dance Night, by Dawn Powell

Dawn Powell (1896-1965) struggled for literary success and recognition during her lifetime. She tried her hand at a number of literary genres, writing novels, plays and short stories. To make ends meet, she wrote book reviews and worked as a Hollywood screenwriter. Powell’s diaries and letters have also been published posthumously. In recent years, through the efforts of Gore Vidal and Tim Page, her work has been revived for new audiences.

Dance Night is Powell’s fourth novel (although she disowned her first effort, Whither) and belongs to what is considered her ‘Ohio’ novels which describe small town life. Dance Night centres around the town of Lamptown, a working class district full of saloons, factories, small businesses and popular entertainments. The characters of Lamptown are orphan girls, unhappily married couples, hopelessly unrealistic dreamers and people just struggling to get through, surviving on fragile hopes of better times. In short, the world of Lamptown is the American dream in reverse. Powell is quite shockingly candid in her vivisection of the American capitalist system. She essentially argues that only a small handful of the ruthless and unprincipled really get ahead. The legacy of American capitalism is a general social detritus and impoverished cultural landscape: bad buildings, crappy jobs, junk food and glitzy entertainment.

Powell shows how people get completely trapped in a system that promises the world but delivers nothing. This is perhaps the cruellest and most suffocating part of American capitalism. The theory says that everyone can make it big and become rich, but in reality everyone remains wage slaves doing demeaning work with no social status.

Disturbingly, Powell concentrates heavily on the self-deluding psychology of the Lamptown residents who immerse themselves deeply in a life of fantasies, certain that their dreams will come true, yet the reader knows that this fantasy must end in tragedy when reality hits. The self-delusion of a lot of Powell’s characters borders on being something like a mental illness.

Human relationships in Dance Night are completely dysfunctional, made near impossible by this irrational fantasy life. The best example is one of the main characters, Elsinore Abbott. When she falls in love with the dance instructor, Harry Fischer, it turns into a sickly obsession that practically turns itself inside out. After an hysterical episode with her own husband, whom she violently attacks, Elsinore eventually becomes physically repulsed at even the idea of Harry Fischer. Freud would surely have a field day with these sexually extreme and constantly unhappy people.

Dance Night is a deeply glum and pessimistic novel, written in Powell’s wonderfully readable and smooth prose. No wonder her grim realism wasn’t a huge hit in its day. She exposes American capitalism as a mean con that dupes its citizens. Her perspective on the American psychology is unique: behind all the glitz and glitter there lies a depressed, downtrodden and mentally unstable people.

Dance Night, by Dawn Powell. Published by Steerforth Press. ISBN: 978-1883642716