Jazz Innocence

The quintessential live-fast-die-young-in-the-City quote. Life moves so fast, and there is no much scandalous sin everywhere, that the young people get wise beyond their years. In the same way, life is so nonstop and exhausting that you just get old after a certain point. No midlife crisis for the City-dweller. No innocence, either.

Alice is the gatekeeper of innocence, and is working with the backward understanding that loss of innocence is something that comes from the outside. Her logic goes: As long as a man doesn't see Dorcas as sexual, she won't be sexual. Hmm… We know how well that works out.

Giving Alice the full historical benefit of the doubt, we guess she has a right to be shocked. The 1920s were super-shocking. Women were wearing dresses down to the floor a decade prior, and now they were showing off their scandalous knees. Lipstick was, prior to the 1920s, essentially stage makeup, it was the cosmetics equivalent of wearing a Vegas-style feathered headdress. No wonder it looked like innocence was gone for good for old women like Alice.

Felice knew that Dorcas was playing the oldest game in book: going out with parent-approved clothes on and then making a switcheroo to something sexier. But Dorcas didn't just swap a sweater for a crop top. She swapped out weird 1920s girl-underwear for weird 1920s woman-underwear. Seriously, those things look like torture devices. But hey, proof positive that loss-of-innocence doesn't start with the first application of lipstick. Hear that, Alice?

What does Dorcas see in Joe? Well, we know that a couple of mean boys at a party didn't want to dance with Dorcas, so by the time Joe comes around she is super-happy to have someone drooling over her. But from all accounts, Joe is a silver fox. He might be fifty, but he's aged gracefully.

Yeah, this answers—partially—the question about why Joe wants to date an eighteen-year-old so badly. Because he's sixteen inside. He wants a girl around his own age—he's not being an old perv, he's just a teenaged boy trapped in a fifty-year-old body. Proving that innocence can be lost at any age, and it can also persist to any age.

If you take away one thing from Jazz (besides an appreciation of jazz music) remember not to make snap judgments about girls. Not all young girls are sweet and innocent, and neither are all young girls scandalous and after older men. The characters in this book keep learning this over and over again, with women tending to view girls as sinful and men tending to view them as innocent.

The laws of hunting, folks: Don't kill babies, don't kill women. This is one of those things that is totally sound when it's kept to sphere of hunting, but starts getting angry-making when it becomes metaphorical. Because it lumps women and babies together as innocent, defenseless, kind of unformed entities, and that's kind of messed up when you think about it.

This is Joe's point-of-view, and you can tell a whole lot about Joe from this statement. This highlights both his feelings toward young women and his feelings toward young men: that both are more powerful than he is, and that both are equally lacking in innocence.

This line underlines in neon yellow the thesis statement Dorcas is not innocent. She likes to provoke, she's of her time, the provocative 1920s. Dorcas's lack of innocence isn't a form of shaming in the context of Jazz; it's a testament to her agency as a character. She's a victim of murder, absolutely, but she isn't manipulated and used by Joe. Her lack of innocence is full of power.