Bad Girl by Viña Delmar, a 1928 Novel That Was “Banned in Boston”
By Nava Atlas | On September 30, 2024 | Comments (0)
In the 1920s, urban American women experimented with sexual freedom more openly than ever. Popular novels by writers — male and female — held up a mirror to the times. Despite its provocative title, the forgotten bestselling 1928 novel, Bad Girl by Viña Delmar, wasn’t one of them.
Dorothy, or “Dot,” as she’s familiarly called, has one instance of premarital sex, marries the guy (who’s not a bad sort, but not very bright), and after a respectable period of time, becomes pregnant. The novel is then preoccupied with her pregnancy and childbirth. The cover of a later edition, at right, sensationalizes the contents, as was typical of pulp novels.
There’s nothing scandalous about this middling novel, but the realities of a young wife’s pregnancy and her experiences in a birthing hospital were enough to catch the eyes of The New England Watch and Ward Society.
This New England-based organization whose mission was censorship of books and the performing arts was most active from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s.
For the most part, publishers welcomed a book being “banned in Boston,” as this kind of controversy boosted sales. Winning these censorship cases in court, however, really did mean that the books in question couldn’t be sold in Massachusetts under severe penalty of law.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Being banned in Boston drove Bad Girl onto national bestseller lists and helped make its 23-year-old author an overnight sensation. The 1931 pre- Hayes Code film adaptation received great reviews, making the most of its thin material and breathing new life into the novel’s notoriety just a few years later.
“Bad Girl is Popular” read the headline of a brief blurb that was syndicated to several newspapers in 1928:
Vina Delmar’s novel, “Bad Girl” which attracted so much attention before and after it was “banned in Boston,” has reached (so its publishers, Harcourt, Brace and Company announce) its seventh large printing, not including the 40,000 to the Literary Guild. During the last two weeks in has been reported to be the best selling novel in the country, supplanting, at least for the present, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”
Reviewers were, if not bowled over, generally kind to the novel and its young author. Following is a fairly typical review from the period, after which are two articles about its banning in Massachusetts.
. . . . . . . . . .
Another sensationalized cover of Bad Girl. See also —
Her First Time: Seduction and Loss of Innocence in 1920s Women’s Novels
. . . . . . . . . .
Bad Girl is a Poignant Transcript of Life
Tulsa Daily World, Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 17, 1928: Viña Delmar has written a rough and honest tale of loving. Bad Girl by Viña Delmar has been so widely heralded as a precocious first novel that a cautious reader is to be pardoned if it has been catalogued among books that can wait. And yet caution, in this instance, is totally unnecessary.
A first novel it may be, but it is free from the taint of precocity, and from the blight of conscious straining for style. It is a spontaneous and honest piece of writing. It concerns the meeting, mating, and marriage. It depicts one year of married life of two young people from that strata whose constituents consider themselves educated and ready for life when the eighth grade is behind them.
Mrs. Delmar’s Dorothy is an eager, slim, pliable young thing exactly like all the other millions of lipsticked, bobbed, silk-stockinged young women whose bright eyes shone with life. Her Eddie is an unbelievably sensitive, consistently staunch youth, outwardly like all the other swaggering boys who seek and accept the challenge of bright eyes.
Eddie and Dorothy (often referred to as Dot) pick each other up on an excursion boat. For all the shield of their rude, self-protective banter they understand one another. They marry and have a child.
Dorothy and Eddie are real people. So is Edna, the strange girl who Dorothy’s brother loved, so far as he could love. And so are the sly-eyed, perfumed Maude, the noisy Sue, the kind, matter-of-fact doctors who took Dorothy through the hell of labor into the blessed haven of her motherhood.
Viña Delmar has written a poignant, moving story of honest thought and action. There’s no reticence in Bad Girl. Perhaps that’s why Boston banned it. But its frankness is that of reality, and is not offensive. The book takes its its title form Dot and Eddie’s prenuptial adventure, out of which she emerged panic-stricken an afraid, and Eddie came out of grim and purposeful.
There’s something intensely appealing about Eddie. He is sullen, he is rude, he is profane, but underneath this rough exterior is a man who is tender, wonderfully kind, oddly wistful, and ready to sacrifice anything for the little flame of a girl he married.
When Dot found out she was to have a baby, she trembled for fear that Eddie didn’t want it. She was ready to go any lengths if he didn’t. And Eddie, interpreting her fear as an aversion to the baby, thought that it was Dot who didn’t want it. He feigned disgust at the thought of a third member coming into the family. Love makes such strange tangles sometimes!
Anyone who could produce such a vital book as this one will go a long way. The reader feels that Viña Delmar knows what she’s writing about in this, her first book — that she has felt the pain and joy that color it. And knowing and feeling as she does, she was able to write about simple and elemental things.
Bad Girl isn’t, from any standpoint, an important book. But it is a true one, which makes it good.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Viña Delmar in 1928
. . . . . . . . . . .
Boston Bans “Bad Girl”
The Springfield Daily Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), May 4, 1928: Literary Guild selection novel by Viña Delmar, former actress, held by booksellers to be “Actionable” under Massachusetts. “Obscenity” ignores truth, says author.
Bad Girl, a novel that raised Vina Delmar to literary fame at the age of 23, has been banned from sale in Boston. Harcourt, Brace & Co.. the publishers. received notice today from the Boston Booksellers’ association that the book is “actionable.”
The association. by agreement with the district attorney. has the power to rule on the counters of its members any books which it believes violate the Massachusetts “obscenity” law.
When Miss Delmar was informed of the action. she said Boston ignores the truth. Propagation is evidently obscene, The Lord was less cautious in his personal contacts than the Boston book banners in their reading. They are witch burners, truth hiders, and killers of the seeds of sincerity.
Bad Girl, by being barred from Boston. now joins the company of Elmer Gantry, An American Tragedy, The Plastic Age, and other recent novels that have won praise elsewhere.
Bad Girl was selected by the Literary Guild as its book for the month of April. This made Miss Delmar. a former actress and writer of short stories. famous overnight. She contends that Bad Girl is true to the lives or the people in her neighborhood” and that she took all the characters from her acquaintances.
The heroine in the book was married at the age of seventeen and the story goes on with her married life until the first baby is born.
Boston Bans New Novel, Bad Girl; Editor Is Angry
The Dispatch (Moline, Illinois). May 12, 1928: Bad Girl. a new novel by Viña Delmar, has been banned in Boston, The Watch and Ward Society having disapproved it. The Boston Booksellers’ association has sent word to Harcourt. Brace & Co. of New York that they will not handle the book.
“The book has one pretty strong chapter in it,” said a leading Boston publisher, “and the Watch and Ward society, I’m frank to say, under Massachusetts statutes anyone who sold it could be prosecuted. We care neither to push out such books, nor to furnish our contemporaries over in New York with just much free advertising.
“We read the book, of course, before submitting it to the Watch and Ward society. The banning by the society didn’t cause even a ripple among us. Dare say we will sell plenty of books without adding this one to our stock.”
“The exploitation of ‘Banned in Boston’ or ‘puritan Boston’ gives any such book a certain boost in New York. I suppose. but the New York publishers are welcome to it.”
Silly, says editor
A letter from the Boston Booksellers’ association was received by Harcourt, Brace & Co. publishers. notifying them that Viña Delmar’s novel, Bad Girl was actionable. No other reason was given by the association for its refusal to handle the book in Boston.
The author of the book is twenty-three, a former usher, stenographer, and vaudeville actress. Its banning was termed an act of “a crazy bunch of madmen” by Harrison Smith, editor for Harcourt, Brace & Co.
“What’s the use?” he said. Asked if the prohibition from sale would be contested. “It’s incredible that the book should be thought obscene, even in Boston. A baby is born in it; can’t babies be born in books Boston reads?”
The theme of the novel—Mrs. Delmar’s first—is pregnancy. A Bronx stenographer, Dot, flirts with a “white Harlem” radio mechanic, Eddie. on board a steamer. They marry, and Dot, believing her husband does not want a baby, suffers in silence because she is pregnant, Eddie, too, thinking his wife dreads childbirth, suffers quietly. The birth, it’s hinted at the very end, will clear up these misunderstandings.
. . . . . . . . . . .
More about Bad Girl by Viña Delmar
Full text on Internet Archive
Viña Delmar, Flapper Fiction, and Snappy Stories Magazine
Leave a Reply