I am currently reading Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson, about a small number of creative types in the early 20th century who turned their backs on strangulating Victorian moral codes and rules of behaviour to pursue freedom and, most of all, creativity, often deliberately abandoning bourgeois ideals to embrace poverty and hardship – and scandal.
In some ways they were proto hippies, ‘dropping out’ of society’s strictures to revel in sexual emancipation and a rejection of the mainstream’s expectations of conformity, work and consumerism (although I note that things were, in both cases, a little less free for women, who still had to bring up the children resulting from all this free love, and also to spend more time being ‘muses’ than actual artists).
They were certainly the rebels of their day, and, at risk of sounding like Carrie Bradshaw, it made me wonder: what would constitute rebellion today?
Our Western society is a descendant of all that Bohemian experimenting, and perhaps we have more freedoms and opportunities than ever before. But it still seems to me there is an ‘accepted’ path, and the true rebels of today would have to reject the 9-5, Eliot’s famous crowd flowing over London Bridge, individually isolated yet stoically en masse; being tied into endless commuterism and consumerism, the endless pursuit of money and promotion, cars and gadgets and houses. Perhaps returning to ‘the land’ if there is any left without tarmac or a Barratt home on it.
I don’t know whether I could be such a rebel. I have been addicted to the traditional acknowledgements of what it is to be ‘successful’ ever since I first realised what an ‘A’ was at school. I am prepared to travel four hours a day just to get to and from work. I can’t help but feel that to ‘drop out’ now and sit around writing unpublishable novels and living off the land in some remote village would be something of a failure, not only in my eyes but others'.
But I feel an intensifying unease at the march of consumerism, the juggernaut of cheap clothes and plastic packaging, by the constant cycle of earning and spending. It would be exhilarating, if terrifying, to abandon all that.