Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton is a romantic novel with a cautionary message about youth and its preservation.
We join Lee Clavering, a young, sophisticated playwright in the early 1920s who falls for the alluring Madame Zatianny. Slim, elegant and poetically beautiful, the lady to whom he falls is the epitome of twenties class and style. Yet despite the enchanting appearance of the apparently young flapper, it comes to light that Zatianny has in fact prolonged her youth through unusual forms of glandular surgery and a complex treatment involving X-rays. She is actually aged fifty-eight.
The contrast of youthful appearance with a mind clearly made wiser with age is portrayed incisively by Gertrude Atherton. At the time this book was released in 1923, the author was herself sixty-five but capable of analysing both the glitzy heights and woeful shortcomings of the so-called 'Lost Generation'.
Enormously successful upon its release, Black Oxen was considered a pointed counter to the youthful generation which would come to define United States culture in the Roaring Twenties. In the decades following its publication, Atherton's predictions about drastic measures being used to prolong youth would be proven true, as cosmetic surgery emerged as a prospering industry in its own right.
Adapted into a silent film in 1923, Black Oxen enjoyed popularity throughout the early 20th century but thereafter fell out of favor. Its title originates from the Yeats' drama The Countess Cathleen:
“The years like Great Black Oxen tread the world
And God the herdsman goads them on behind.”
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