Bohemianism

Bohemianism, unconventional lifestyle or subculture, followers of which prioritize community living and artistic endeavours while rejecting certain constraints of mainstream society, such as money and social etiquette. Usually associated with writers, the movement is thought to have formed as a counter to the harsh marketplace they faced.

Bohemians sought to live a life of creative freedom outside of materialism, violence, and other aspects of society they felt were corrupt. The French word bohemién emerged in 15th-century France to refer to the Roma people, also known as gypsies (considered pejorative), based on the false belief that the Roma people had come from Bohemia many years before. The Roma people were nomadic; many of them lived a migratory lifestyle and worked jobs on what may be considered the fringes of society. Some populated the poor areas of French cities, particularly Paris, where in the 19th century the word “bohemian” developed its modern significance from this impression of nomadism, creativity, and poverty.

After the concept of bohemianism took hold in 1830s Paris, it swept through Europe before reaching the United States. Its spread was aided by writers such as Henri Murger, who in 1845 began to publish short stories depicting fictionalized versions of his own bohemian life among a community of impoverished artists living in Paris’s Latin Quarter. In 1851 he released a collection of the stories under the title Scènes de la vie de Bohème (“Scenes of Bohemian Life”). Murger collaborated with playwright Théodore Barrière to turn his stories into a play, the success of which thrust Murger into fame. His stories were popular with the public for their romantic idealizations of the bohemian lifestyle, and thus Murger gained recognition as a sort of spokesperson for the bohemians of his time. Murger’s writing was a precursor to other famed works about bohemianism, including Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera La Bohème, which would later be reimagined by Jonathan Larson in his 1996 rock musical Rent.

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Bohemianism has most strongly been associated with the plights of male writers. Though women were involved in the lifestyle, the expanding bohemian world of 19th-century Paris was dominated by men hailing from educated middle-class families. Individuals associated with Murger’s bohemia were generally not born into the impoverished circumstances that they chose to occupy. Some treated the lifestyle as an obligatory yet impermanent period of suffering in their quest for creative success. Murger himself left his destitute community for a comfortable apartment once his work earned public recognition.

Bohemianism reached America, and New York City in particular, in the 1850s. New York’s bohemian scene found an early home in a Manhattan beer cellar known as Pfaff’s Cellar, where a group of self-proclaimed bohemians, including writers Walt Whitman and Henry Clapp, Jr., were known to gather. Whitman’s sprawling poetry represented the group’s emphasis on freedom of expression, while Clapp founded the bohemian periodical The New York Saturday Press, wherein fellow bohemians were regularly published. Other literature that publicized the movement in New York included the translation of some of Murger’s short stories from Scènes de la vie de Bohème, published in 1853 in the New York magazine The Knickerbocker, and Fitz-James O’Brien’s 1855 story, “The Bohemian,” a reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug.”

The origin of bohemianism in the United States has historically been framed as a result of Parisian bohemians’ emigration to New York, as well as American writers’ travel between the two cities. In the 21st century, however, scholars of bohemianism argued that the movement in New York should also be attributed to the American South, as the funding for multiple pillars of New York’s bohemian scene can be traced back to families that owned enslaved people in South Carolina. Ada Clare, who was regarded by her contemporaries as the “Queen of Bohemia” and ran a famed bohemian salon out of her New York home, and Edward Howland, whose investments allowed Clapp to launch The New York Saturday Press, were both born into wealthy plantation families and used their inheritances to finance their contributions to New York’s bohemia. This perspective complicates the notion of bohemianism as a rebellion against societal injustice and capitalism.

It is thought that bohemianism contributed to later counterculture movements. San Francisco in the 1950s was home to poets of the Beat Generation, who challenged the conservatism and consumerism of postwar America with free-verse radical poetry that mirrored their unconventional lifestyles. Most famously involved was poet Allen Ginsberg, who cited Whitman as a beloved inspiration. The hippies of the 1960s, considered to have evolved from the Beat movement, shared bohemian values; they believed in nonviolence and lived outside the social and cultural expectations of society. Like bohemians, hippies often came from middle-class families, despite their rugged and unadorned lifestyles. Though bohemians and hippies were famously anti-capitalist, an eager market has since developed for “bohemian style” (often abbreviated to “boho”) clothing, decor, and more. The fashion of the hippie movement is the most obvious inspiration for contemporary bohemian style.

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