Jazz Lust Quotes

Ah, love… hearts, red roses, and killing your lover. Ain't love grand? Joe cherishes the feeling of loving more than he cherishes Dorcas herself. So he has to shoot her in what is a quintessential crime of passion. Spooky love indeed: You know when a novel starts like this it's going to be pretty preoccupied with matters of the heart.

Lust and power are equated a ton in Jazz. He (or she) who holds the lust holds the power. A lot of conquests in this novel are described as wins: If a person lusts after someone and gets them, they've won. So when Joe picks Dorcas instead of being picked by Violet, it's a win, which is why he enjoys his "randy aggressiveness" so much.

Yep, Dorcas and Joe have some white-hot passion. It's described as an unstoppable force, something they can't help. Another unstoppable force in this novel, something that is sweeping the city and can't be helped, is the Jazz Age. We're not saying that Dorcas and Joe's passion is just a metaphor for jazz—it's also a complex love affair in its own right—but for the characters who fear change, Dorcas and Joe's affair is exactly the kind of sinful activity that jazz is going to provoke.

Here's another handy jazz-is-lust, lust-is-jazz passage. For Alice, spiritual music is the music of the head and heart, while jazz is the music of the "below-the-sash" region. Dorcas, who loves jazz, is also really interested in kick-starting her love life. Coincidence? In the world of Jazz, nope.

When Neola tells Dorcas about the devastating effects of lust—the ruined lives and the women who fell for the wrong men just because of their looks—Dorcas thinks it all sounds fantastic. This is not the intended effect of Neola's lecture, but hey, you can't win them all. Oh, and this passage kind of proves that Dorcas doesn't have a child's understanding as love as all white doves and wedding cakes and happiness; instead she's "enchanted" by the disastrous possibilities.

Poor Alice. She's subjected to all of these rules about being ladylike. To our 21st-century perspective, being ladylike sounds like a really uncomfortable and constricting activity. But the idea that Alice is raised with is that being a lady means appearing as nonsexual as possible. Lust = bad, while breathing through your nose = good.

Violet remembers when Joe was super-hot. All the ladies loved Joe, and Violet felt victorious when she was the one that ended up with him. This is both perfectly normal—everyone likes to feel like they've landed a hottie—and symptomatic of Jazz's approach to lust and power. Having lust, and picking your mate, makes you powerful.

Violet's lust toward Joe is, first and foremost, based in memory. She remembers when Joe was young and strapping and wonders whether Dorcas's lust toward Joe was, in some way, based in the same memory. Violet's lust toward Joe has deteriorated the same way Joe's thighs have, and she wishes they could have both been preserved. This is kind of similar—though nowhere near as violent—as Joe killing Dorcas in order to keep his lust for, and memory of, her intact.

Right, so this is Joe's fantasy. Dorcas doesn't actually want Joe, Joe and only Joe—she has a new boyfriend named Acton and she lurves him. But Joe's ideal reconnection with Dorcas has her wanting him exclusively. Has his love for Dorcas always been this selfish, or is this Joe just being a sad spurned lover?

Hey, what's more intoxicating that pre-Prohibition bourbon? A touch on the knee. For all the actual doing it contained in Jazz, the most lust-filled passages refer to either the possibility of sex or the memory of it. Not surprisingly, jazz music is also about the possibility or the memory of sex.