Life — February 22, 1917 — page 10: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# Analysis of "Signs of Spring: If We Behaved As We Felt" This satirical cartoon depicts spring as a season of uninhibited behavior and abandon. The illustration shows people of various social classes—from well-dressed gentlemen in top hats to working-class figures—engaging in chaotic, playful, and undignified activities throughout a public space. The satire suggests that spring awakens primal impulses that proper Victorian or early 20th-century society normally suppresses. The contrast between formal attire and wild behavior emphasizes the gap between social propriety and genuine human desires. The title's conditional phrase—"if we behaved as we felt"—implies that spring makes people *want* to abandon societal restraint, but they normally don't. This reflects period anxieties about civilization's thin veneer over human nature.