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Elvis, It's Me!
story by Elizabeth Zubritsky
The king uncorked the spirits of Southern
teenage girls.
Elvis' swiveling hips have made women scream since his first major
performance in July 1954. But he inspired more than lust in female
followers, says Joel Williamson, Lineberger professor of the humanities.
Williamson argues that Elvis was a catalyst who helped Southern teenage
girls rebel against a rigid, limited definition of the Southern woman.
Since the 19th century, white women in the South had been raised to
be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive curators of Southern culture,
Williamson says. They were not supposed to be aware of their sexuality.
Williamson says there were strong indications that women were
dissatisfied with this limited identity as early as the 1920s. In 1926
Margaret Mitchell began to write Gone With the Wind and created
the enormously popular character Scarlett, who embodied a forbidden
outspokenness, sexuality, and ambition. But for real women, pressures
such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War enforced
conformity.
The Supreme Court's 1954 decision to desegregate schools began to
unravel the strict Southern hierarchies of race, class, and gender.
Teenage girls sought to break out of the molds imposed by their culture.
When Elvis took the stage, they enacted their
own sexual liberation - screaming wildly and reaching to touch him.
"At Elvis concerts these young women could publicly claim
ownership of their bodies, declare themselves loudly, clearly, and
explicitly to be sexual as well as spiritual creatures," Williamson
says. "It allowed them to seize power and to interpret themselves
and the world in a way that made them feel more whole."
And they were safe, because they only expressed themselves this way
at Elvis concerts. The girls might have been scorned for their hero
worship, but they never had to fear the kind
of violence associated
with the civil rights demonstrations of that period.
Elvis' good looks and physical performances contributed to his
popularity with young women, Williamson says, but women also liked Elvis
because he was an idealist - like them, he was spiritual and romantic.
"He was concerned with 'what ought to be' rather than
with
what is," Williamson says. "Most of all, Elvis seemed
to be
uniquely in touch with what we might call his
'feminine self.'"
He loved the company of women and knew how to win their approval.
"Elvis' body was his primary instrument," Williamson says.
"And women played him in their own way. They were sculptors, and
Elvis was their marvelously willing clay."
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