Postwar Modernity and the Wife's Subjectivity: Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti

By Elizabeth L. Keathley

Leonard Bernstein's short opera Trouble in Tahiti (1951-52) is a humorous but scathing satire on postwar consumerism and bourgeois marriage. Such critiques are now so commonplace that it may be difficult to appreciate the opera's political edge unless it is seen against the backdrop of repression that marked the years following World War II: in an era in which a group as mainstream as the league of Women Voters was denounced as a "communist front organization," Trouble in Tahiti's criticisms risked reprisals.