No, we wish to escape to any
imagined life that will satisfy desires suppressed by
circumstance, or incapable of development in any attainable
reality.
This desire to escape is eternal, the variety differs with the
individual and still more with the period. While youthful love, or
romantic adventure as in "Treasure Island," has been an acceptable
mode for literature at least as far back as the papyrus tales of
the Egyptians, more precise means of delivery from the intolerable
weight of real life appear and disappear in popular books. In the
early eighteen hundreds, men and women longed to be blighted in
love, to be in lonely revolt against the prosaic well-being of a
world of little men. Byron was popular. In the Augustan age of
England, classic antiquity was a refuge for the dreaming spirit;
in Shakespeare's day, Italy; in the fifteenth century, Arthurian
romance. Just at present, and in America, the popularity of a
series of novels like "The Beautiful and Damned," "The Wasted
Generation," "Erik Dorn," and "Cytherea," seems to indicate that
many middle-aged readers wish to experience vicariously the
alcoholic irresponsibility of a society of "flappers," young
graduates, and country club rakes, who threw the pilot overboard
as soon as they left the war zone and have been cruising wildly
ever since.
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