The very act of accepting her position at Mademoiselle was an act of open defiance against Dick Norton, his entire family, and the gendered expectations of midcentury America.
Sylvia had begun her month in New York with princessy pomp and fanfare….Her departure on June 27 was entirely different. She left New York shaken, depleted, and utterly alone.
…she could not stick by the golden mean…was always anxious to experiment in extremes…to find out what was enough by indulging herself in too much.” (Gordon Lameyer)
That none discussed their doubts, that they assumed everyone else was just having a grand time of it and felt at ease and enjoying the ride, was perhaps the most toxic element to this particular kind of noisy loneliness.
Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.
Before New York, the cracks were already there, but now they began to split open and gape, and the difference between how a thing or a place or a person appears and the reality becomes alarmingly visible, garish.
New clothes left Sylvia reeling with happiness. For Sylvia, a shopping list was a poem. She always shopped alone – it suited her deliberate nature and the artistic joy with which she approached all things aesthetic.
These were the new girls of New York- complete with rapid heartbeats from too much nicotine and coffee. They were nervous and fluttery but completely alluring- the new face of urban femininity.
All year long Sylvia had been trying to overthrow her guileless, college girl image. She knew “cottons with big full skirts and university personalities” would have looked hopelessly naive in New York. Sylvia wanted to be hard and urban.
Sylvia’s inherent appreciation for beauty as both artist and consumer is evident in her journals and letters…….she wrote beautifully about clothes. She wrote about them with irony and wit mixed in with all the rococo prettiness.
Judgement is so often a thwarted, frustrated expression of envy.
New York is unruly, tangled. The city woos first, then mangles, then pastes back together in a fresh, dazzling mosaic.
Her romances often seemed like dalliances; she enjoyed male company and blossomed in its presence, but she did not appear to care deeply about any of the men [Steiner]