chapter 1 introduction chapter ii the american daeam...
TRANSCRIPT
P.'l'lcla PaclV
SCOTT FITZGER~LO'S E~RLV FICTION AND FEMININITV
0ep81'tmant Dr Engl1lh
Melt81' or Al'tl
ln Fltagal'ald'. a81'lv 'letlon, tha girl ls the
Imaglnatlvs cantre. As tha qulnteasanca Dr youth, baautV.
Innocence. laI.e1th and populsl'ltV. 8he lait bath tha ambodlmant
or the ,:a.rleen Ol'aem and tha Feil' Haralne. litas" thle lmags
1. threatanad. aa lt la by .... m81'1'1eoa DI' tha radlng Dr
her aaBata. lt cDl1epeea end the girl bacGmea tha embadlment
Dr the American nlghtmara end tha Uerk Harolne. As a reault
Or thle a.eggarstlon or the glr1'8 power, th.re lB e virtuel
exchange of roles: the men retreete From the girl, ehrlnks
'ram axperlence, tekae refuge ln the home, end eccapt~ en
ln ferlaI' position whlle tha girl aeeka the man, embreces a.
perlencs. maves 'rom tha home to tha office, Bnd BCQulrae the
dominent l'ole. The girl, howaVDI'. 1ucks tha mantal end phyalcal
8trength to rulr11l thle role end thua enda, llka the men, ln
daapelr and rutn.
i
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT 1
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION l
CHAPTER II THE AMERICAN DAEAM AND THE FAIR HEROINE 18
CHAPTER III THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE AND THE DARK HEROINE . . J8
CHAPTER IV. ROLE REVERSAL 59
CHAPTER V CONCLUSION 84
INDEX TO ABBREVIATIONS 88
BIBLIOGRAPHV 89
il
SCOTT FITZGERALD'S EARLY FICTION
AND FEMININITV
by
Patricia Elizabeth Pace y
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE.
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF.
Master of Arts
in the Department
of
English
McGill University
July, 1969
1 @ Patricia Elizabeth Pacey 1970 î;
SCOTT FITZGERALD'S EARLY FICTION
AND FEMININITY
I?atricia Pacey
CHA~TER l
INTRODUCTION
From the earliest prep-school story to the last,
unfinished novel, the focal point of Scott Fitzgerald's vision
is the American girl. In his own time, Fitzgerald was an
immensely contemporary and an immensely popular writer, but
what one recalls about his work is not his vivid picture of
the twenties, the parties, the roadsters, nor even the money -
50 much as the girl. For his critics, this association was
a vital though an unconscious one. In 1945, Malcolm Cowley
wrote: "it was as if all his novels, described a big dance
to which he had taken ••• the prettiest girl."l John O'Hara,
writing in the same year, said of This Side of Paradise: "1
cannot refrain ••• from comparing my first and countless'
lMalcolm Cowley, "Third Act and Epilogue", f. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener, (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 66.
2.
subsequent meetings with that book to a first and subsequent
meetings with The Girl."2 More recent1y and 1ess romantica11y,
Les1ie Fied1er has written: "Fitzgerald has come to seem more
and more poignant1y the girl we 1eft behind - dead to boot,
before we returned to the old homestead, and particu1arly
amenable to sentimental idea1ization."3
The identification of Fitzgerald with The Girl is
so strong that Fitzgerald, himse1f, confessed to his secretary,
"1 am ha1f feminine - at least my mind is. • • • Even my
Feminine characters are Feminine Scott Fitzgera1ds."4 His
secretary, as have countless other females, conceded that he
"understood women." There is a pronounced Feminine quality
to his work - his style is delicate, graceful and ethereel and
his subject matter shows traces of a Feminine mind. Edmund
Wilson, his Princeton friend and literary mentor, described
this quality: "For a person of his mental agility, he is
extraordinarily little occupied with the general affairs of
the world: 1ike a woman, he Is not much given to abstract or
2John D'Hara, "Introduction", The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1945), p. VII.
3Leslie Fiedler, "Some Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald", F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collection of Critical Essavs, ed. Arthur Mizener, (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 70.
4Andrew Turnbu11, Scott Fitzgerald, (New York, 1962), p. 259.
3.
impersonal thQught. n5 He has an uncanny ability to proj~ct
himself into women's lives. In his short stories and novels,
he often adopts the point of view of the heroine and does so
in a convincing manner. When he decided to have Cecilia Brady
narrate the story of rh! ~ Tycoon, he wrote to his editor,
"Cecilia is the nerrator because 1 think 1 know exactly how
6 such a person would react to my story.n Indeed, if one did
not know the sex of the author, one might conceivably guess it
to be female. Comparing his writing with the consciously mas
culine fiction of Hemingway is like comparing the fragile,
intricate lacework of a spider's web with the strong, firm
framework of steel scaffolding.
Fitzgerald considered his audience to be largely
feminine. He counted on)andlater attributed the phenomenal
sale of This .2!!:!.! f!f. Paradise to lthe American debutante:. "1
know l'Il wake sorne night and find that the debutantes have
made me famous overnight.,,7 Comparing the financial success of
The Great Gatsby and Tender is ~ Night, his basis was the
relative appeal of each to this same feminine audience:
5Edmund Wilson, IIF. Scott Fitzgerald", F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener,(Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 70.
6Charles E. Shain, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Minnéapolis, 1967), p. 19.
7 Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 343.
4.
l don't think there is a comparison between this book and The Great Gatsby as a seller. The Great Gatsby had against it--its length and its purely masculine interest. This book, on the contrary, i5 a woman's book. l think given a decent cha~ce, it will make its own way insofar as fiction is se1ling under present conditions. B
Much of his inferior writing was deliberately aimed at the
american female; he was a regular contributor to women '9 magl:=!-
zines such as Ladies' Home Journal, Vanitv ~, McCall's, and
Woman's Home Companion. In these articles, his favorite topics
were himself and his wife, ~elda, the domination of children
by their parents or by women in the culture.
Fitzgerald's female audience was a receptive one -
so receptive that man y began to model themselves on his fictional
portraits. The appeal of his heroines was so strong that his
early work, as he himself put it, "created a new type of
American girl.,,9 Rightly or wrongly, Fitzgerald has been
credited with the phenomenon of the "flapper". Fitzgerald,
for the most pa~t, bitterly resented the development. After
seeing a number of them in Paris, he wrote: "If l had anything
to do with creating the manners of the contemporary American
girl l certainly made a botch of the job."lD In one of his
notebooks, he said of an unnamed relative that she was still
a flapper in the 193D's. "There is no doubt," he added, "that
she originally patterned herself upon certain immature and
Blbid • , p. 267. 9lbid • , p. 208.
lOIbid. , p. 362.
5.
unfortunate writings, of mine, so that 1 have a special indul--gence for~as for one who ha5 lost an arm or leg in one's
service."ll The imitative process has not been confined
to his own lifetime. In a recent issue of Time magazine
appeared the following description of a young, American star-
lette, Alice McGraw:
The language is that of a Scott Fitzgerald heroine, and rightly so. ~li ••• i5 a. reasonable facsimile of Judy Jones in Winter Dreams, whose mouth gave a 'continuaI impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality -balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes.' Even more, she seems to be playing some endless version of Gatsby's Daisy, whose voice had 'a5inging compulsion, a whispered "Listen", a promise that she has done gay, exciting things just a while since and there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour! Fitzgerald - not cOincidentally, one of her favorite authors - surely could have written her biography.12
His portrait of the American girl seems to be as attractive
and as haunting to his readers as to Fitzgerald, himself.
F.itzgerald's preoccupation with the American female
can perhaps b~ best explained by his biography. AlI his life,
Fitzgerald moved in a "world of petticoats". In his home, his
mother was the dominant figure - she possessed the money and
social prestige. His father, although of old Maryland stock,
was financially a failure and continued to recede into the
background, Their first two children, both girls, died shortly
befora Scott was borne "Three months before 1 was born," he
Il as quoted by Malcolm Cowley, "Third Act and Epilogue", f. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collectign of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener Œnglewood Cli ffs, 1963)., p. 65.
l2~on. "The Girl Who Has Everything - Just About", Time, May 9, 1969, p. 54.
6.
wrote, "my mothar lost her other two children and 1 think
that came first of all though 1 don' t know how i t worked.
exactly. 13 1 think 1 started then to be a writer." Fitzgerald
always claimed that his mother spoiled and "sissified" him -
made him become a writer rather than a football hero. Indead,
if the assessment is correct, F.itzgerald does fit the image
of the "mother's boy". In his critical portrait of Fitzgerald,
Henry Dan ~iper writes of his mother:
As she grew older, she became increasingly eccentric and possessive, and so never really succeededin winning Scott's friendship or respect. She perennially worried that he would succumb to a chronic family weakness toward tuberculosis, a fear that was justified, as things turned out. He was so bundled up in hats, coats, and overshoes that he developed a lifelong hatred of protective clothing of any kind. And, on the pretext of his delicate health, Molly let him stay home from school whenever he felt like it - which was often. She also encouraged his tendency to show off in public. Nothing pleased her better than to have her five-year-old son perform for the neighbors in the front parlor, reciting poems he had memorized or singing popular ballads. 'Godl' he would one day write in the margin of his autobiographical account of his childhood, jabbing his pen angrily through the page at this humiliating memory.l4
As he grew older, Fitzgerald was increasingly embarrassed by
his mother - she dressed oddly and was famous for her faux ~.
There is a good deal of evidence to prove that
Fitzgerald suffered From an abnormal relationship with his
mother. AlI his references to his mother in his letters
exhibit a deep loathing and disgust for her:
13 Imdrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, (New York, 1962), p. 7.
14Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald. A Critical Portrait, (New York, 1965), p. 8.
Why shouldn't l go crazy? My father is a- moron and my mother is a neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry. Betwèen them they haven't and never have had the brains of Calvin Coolidge. 15
Isn1t Mother a funny old wraith? Didn't you get a suggestion of the Witches Cave from several of the things that she said at 2400?16
l wasn't fond of my mother who spoiled me. Vou were a great exception among mothers - managing by sorne magic of your own to preserve both your children's love and their respect. Too often one of the two things is sacrificed.17
Mother and l never had anything in common except a relentless stubborn quality •••• 18
Throughout his novels and short stories, the maternaI figure
ispresented as a domineering, ogre-like figure; the state of
motherhood, as something bestial and disgusting; and sex, as
something fearful and guilt-producing, characteristic of the
incest complexe Perhaps the most persuasive evidence of aIl
is the unfinished novel that was to follow Gatsby - a novel
about matricide called ~ Boy ~ Killed His Mother~
"At about this time he also wrote a comic ballad about a dope
fiend of sixteen who murdered his mother. . . . Fitzgerald
used ta deliver this ballad at parties, his face powdered white,
a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and his hands trembling.,,19
Whether or not Fitzgerald really wanted to kill his mother and
15 ~ndrew Turnbull, ed. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
(Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 219.
l612i&., p. 437.
17Ibid ., p. 439.
l8Ibid ., p. 554.
190 • S. Savage, "The Significance of F. Scott Fitzgerald", F. Scott Fitzgerald, A-Collection of Critical Essavs, ed. Arthur Mizener (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 153.
8.
suffered from incestuous regression is dangerous speculation,
but that he did have a conscious and deep-rooted dislike of
her which was ne ver completely resolved is a relatively safe
assumption.
The autobiographical material of Fitzgerald's child-
hood and early adolescence is populated with female figures.
He had a younger sister, whom he later tried to transfdrm into
his image of a popular girl: "Up till now Fitzgerald hadn't
much to do with his sister ••• she was quiet and pretty, and
he was proud of her and anxious that she make the most of he~
possibilities. To this end he wrote her lengthy instructions."20
Regardless of whether Dr not his mother was responsible, there
is no denying that Fitzgerald was preoccupied and fascinated
with the femme fatale. At sleven, he succumbed to the charms
of Kitty Williams:
l don't remember who was first but l know that Earl was second and as l was already quite overcome by her charms l then and there resolved that l would gain first place •••• It was impossible to count the number of times l kissed Kitty that afternoon. At any rate when we went home l had secured the coveted lst place. l held this until dancing school stoppsd in the spring and then relinquished it to Johnny Gowns a rival. On Valentines day that year Kitty received no less than eighty-four valentines. 21
His "thought book" records one such childish romance after
another. Each succeeding belle dame ~ merci is given a
20 Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, (New York, 1962),
p. 66~ 21
John Kuehl, ed. "Introduction", The Aeprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1909-1917, (Brunswlck, N. J., 1965), p. Il.
9.
detailed description of her appearance and manners. He de-
scribes one such "belle", Violet Stockton, as "very pretty
with dark brown hair and eyes big and soft. She spoke with
a. soft southern accent leaving out the ris. She was a year T
aIder then l but together with most of the other boysAliked
her very much.,,22 One can see in the se youthful sketches the
beginnings of the later, full-sc ale portraits of his novels.
The most important femme fatale of Fitzgerald's later
adolescent years was Ginevra King, "the love of my youth."23
He described his affair with her in a. letter ta his daughter
in 1937: "She was the first girl lever loved and l have
faithfully avoided seeing her up ta this moment ta keep that
illusion perfect, because she ended up by throwing me over
with the most supreme boredom and indifference."24 Fitzgerald's
"Ledger" records his college romance with Ginevra in a series
of short statements who se very casualness lends them poignancy.
When he met her, Ginevra was sixteen, a junior at Westover,
and already popular with the Ivy League boys. Arthur Mizener
has summed up their relationship:
For Ginevra, he became for a time the most important of her many conquests. As she said many years later, " ••• at this time l was definitely out for quantity not quality in beaux, and, although Scott y was top man, l still wasn't
22 Ibid ., p. 11 .• 23 Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
(Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 35. 24 Ibid ., p. 34.
10.
serious enough not to want plenty of other attention!" ••• To the end of his life he kept every letter she ever wrote him (he had them typed up and bound; they run to 227 pages). Born and brought up in the best circumstances in Chicago and Lake Forest, Ginevra moved for him in a golden haze. 25
Rosalind, the climactic girl of This Side of Paradise, was
based on Ginevra King. The duration and depth of Fitzgerald's
feelings toward the girl are shown by a remark from a let ter
of November 9, 1938, to Frances Turnbull: "In This ~ BI
Paradise 1 wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding,
as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.,,26
As Fitzgerald was recovering from the collapse of
this college love affair, he met and subsequently fell ln love
with lelda Sayre. Barely eighteen, lelda was the daughter of
a prominent judge of Montgomery, Alabama. She was renowned
for her beauty, her daring, and her golden hair, and was
regarded as the "top girl." (Fitzgerald wrote later in his
notebook, "1 didn't have the two top things: great animal
magnetism or money. 1 had the two second things, though:
good looks and intelligence. 50 1 always got the top girl. u27 )
Fitzgerald showed considerable narcissistic tendencie8 in
choosing someone he admired for a similarity with but a superiority
to his own qualities -- the type of person he wanted to emulate.
25~rthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise, (Boston, 1951), pp. 48-9.
26 Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 598.
27F• Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson, (New York, 1956), p. 211.
11.
Andrew Turnbull describes this appeal of two alikes:
There was something enchanted, as if predestined, about the coming together of this pair, whose deep similarity only began with fresh, scrubbed beauty. People remarked that they looked enough alikB to be brother and sister, but how much more they resembled each other beneath the skinl For the first time Fitzgerald had found a girl whose uninhibited love of life rivaled his own and whose daring, originality and repartee would never bore him. With Ginevra, part of the attraction had been the society she came from; with Zelda, it was she alone who made an overwhelming appeal to his imagination. She pleased him in all the surface ways, but she also had depths he fell in love with, without understanding why.28
Fitzgerald fell passionately in love with her, and
she with him, but she refused to marry him immediately:
"leI da was cagBy about throwing in her lot with me before
l was a money-maker. She was young and in a period when
any exploiter or middleman seemed a better risk than a
29 worker in the arts." It was not until the publication of
lb!! Side 2f Paradise was assured that lelda agreed to marry
him.
lelda was of course a very important factor in the
development of the Fitzgerald heroine. In a letter to Edmund
Wilson in 1922 he wrote, "the most enormous influence on
me in the four and a half years since l met her has been the
complete, fine and full~hearted selfishness and childmindedness
of lelda."30 Together with Ginevra, she was a model for the
28Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1962), p. 87. 29 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson
(New York, 1956), p. 78. 30 Andrew Turnbull, ed. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
(Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 351.
12.
heroine of This Side of Paradise: "I married the Rosalind of
the novel, the southern girl l was so attached to, after a
grand reconciliation. 1I31 Every cri tic has acknowledged the
close resemblance between Zalda Sayre and Gloria Gilbert of
The Beautiful sn& Damned. Zelda, in a review of the novel
for the ~ ~ Tribune, confessed she recognized parts of
her diary and sorne personal letters in the book, "in fact,
Mr. Fitzgerald - l believe that is how he spells his name -
seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home. 1I32
Whether Dr not she is a faithful portrait of actual
persons, the "girl" plays a crucial role in Fitzgerald's early
fiction. Of the fourteen selections included in The Apprentice
Fiction of [. Scott Fitzgerald 1909-17, ten are initiated by or
revolve around the girl. The girls are, for the most part,
adolescent femme fatale figures. In liA Luckless Santa Claus"
and "The Trail of Duke", two Newman stories, the girls set
foolish quests that humiliate the heroes. The femme fatale
appears again in four Princeton pieces published in 1917 by
The Nassau Literary Magazine just after Fitzgerald's break with
Ginevra King. Both Isabelle of -Babe in the Woods" and Helen
of "The Debutante" 'are modelled on Ginevra. Although the men
in these stories are not destroyed, the humiliation is much
deeper than it was in the earlier stories. F.lappers SD& Philoso-
31Ibid ., p. 396. 32----
Charles E. Shain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Minneapolis, 1967), p. 31.
13.
phers, a collection of short stories published after the success
of lh!2 Side of Paradise, includes eight stories, only one of
which does not have the girl as the central figure. As the
title suggests, the teenage femme fatale has developed into
the "flapper", the 192o's version of a good-time girl. In fact
only four of the stories have the type-character of the flapper
in the leading role. In two of these, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"
and "Benediction", the action of the story is seen through
the eyes of the heroine. In two of the remaining stories,
"Head and Shoulders" and "The eut-Glass Bowl~' Fitzgerald gives
us a glimpse of the life of the girl after marriage, a life
that turns out not to be such a good time after all. Readers
of Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, Tales of
the Jazz Age and other Stories, might weIl ask with Fitzgerald's
daughter "Where, oh where, is this wild and brassy Jazz Age?"33
As she says in her introduction to the collection, "If you
search closely, you may discover two flappers betwesn these
covers: the girl who washes her shoes in gasoline in 'The
Jelly-Bean', and the one who dances on top of the table at
Pulpat's restaurant in '0 Russet WitCh,."34 In the se stories,
the flapper has been superseded by the young married girl but
the girl is still atthe heart of the narrative. The la st four
-3.3Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan, "Introduction", Six Tales
of the Jazz Age and O.ther Stories, (New York, 1966), p. 10 Q
34 Ibid., p. 9.
14.
stories deal with the trials and tribulations of early married.
life and the consequent period of adjustment - the taming,
not of the shrew, but of the flapper. Only one story, "The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button", traces the history of the
girl to that, for Fit}gerald at least, dangerous and disastrous
period of middle age.
In each of Fitzgerald's first two novels, the girl
plays an equally, if-not a more, important part. This Side of
Paradise, a very flawed but nevertheless a very "living" novel,
traces Amory's development from his first childish love affair
with Myra St. Clair ta his last "tragic" college affair with
Rosalind Connage. Although Amory is largely restricted ta male
institutions, the six or seven boy-girl relationships occupy
about half of the novel. The novel is the story of a "romantic
egotist" (the novel's first title) and as such focuses on
its hero, Amory Blaine. The girl, therefore, is important
not so much in herse If as in what she reflects about the hero.
As Kenneth Eble points out in his study of Fitzgerald:
"Amory, the romantic egotist, moves, as he should, through a
hall of mirrors which display the facets of his developing per
sonality. 'In fact,' Fitzgerald wrote about The Romantic Egotist,
'women and mirrors were preponderent [sic] on aIl the important
pages,.,,35 The "dramatic" and emotional climax of the novel
35 . Kenneth E. Eble, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Twayne's United
States Authors Series, (New Haven, 1963), p. 46.
15.
is Rosalind's refusaI of Amory's marriage proposaI.
In The 8eautiful ~ Damned, his second novel, the
girl plays an even more vital role. Edmund Wilson defined the
essential difference between the two books wh en he said that
Fitzgerald, in his first novel, "supposed that the thing to
do was to discover a meaning in life," while in his second,
he made, "much of the tragedy and what Mencken has called 'the
meaninglessness of life t ."36 At any rate, the hero no longer
dominates the stage. Anthony Patch and his girl, Gloria Gilbert,
have equally important parts. Gloria's is, if anything, a
much more vivid role. The hero is completely inanimate and
colorless until his first confrontation with the girl. Gloria
first appears in the second chapter of the novel and is per-
vasive, if not present, until its completion. When she is
absent, as in their forced separation during the war, she is
replaced by another feminine character.
An Inevitable, if unfortunate, consequence of Fitz-
gerald's early work was his identification with the "type ll
character of the flapper. The early stories and This Si de of
Paradise do, in fact, offer few characters who do not either
fit the stereotype or disclose a variant of it. The heroines
of the short stories and Isabelle and Rosalind of This Side of
Paradise seem to merge into one character - pe~haps because
36Edmund Wilson, "F. Scott Fitz~erald"J F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener, (Englewood Cliffs, 19635, p. 83.
16.
they were fictional portraits of Ginevra and lelda. We do not
expect too much depth of character in a short story but we do
in a novel. However, since the novel is the story of Amory's
development, the "fIat" female characters can be justified.
Depth in them would only divert attention from the protagoniste
If they lack depth, they compensate for it in vividness and
memorableness. Fitzgerald's flapper is young, blond, popular,
witt y, bored and, above aIl, beautiful. She is "unconventional" -
she smokes, says "damn", is fond of kissing, bobs her hair,
makes witt Y cynical remarks, and generally shocks her eIders.
She 15, however, basically innocent and irresistibly charming •.
As Fitzgerald noted, the flapper was the product of
his "immature and unfortunate writings". In his later work,
The 8eautiful and Damned included, he at least attempted a
deeper, more rounded study. Although Gloria possesses many
of the attributes of the flapper, there 15 a ·gulf of difference
between her and the typical flapper, Muriel Kane. Gloria
expands, improves upon, the flapper and, as Fitzgerald was
50 fond of pointing out, "began it aIl". She is occasionally
individualized - hates laundry, loves gumdrops, toys with
8ilphism, denies jealousy - and is given a hint of third
dimension, yearnings after poetry, philosophy and insight.
Fitzgerald tells us she is intelligent, but we are never
thoroughly convinced. Dorothy, a subservient figure, is also
a distinct and human character. 80th are a long way from sorne
of the pale, sentimental portraits of the Victorian and early
17,
American novels.
Apart from the flapper characteristics, the Fitzgerald
girl does have certain constants and consistencies throughout
her fictional career. She is always "golden", always vaguely
defined, always suggestive of an exclusive, magical, whispered
"tomorrow". This vague, elusive quality is basic to her
integrity as a character. Fitzgerald was a romancer and there
by avoided the limitations imposed by "credibility". He
was not attempting to create "real people" so much as stylized
figures who expand into psychological archetypes. The sig
nificance of the Fitzgerald girl exists, not in her literaI
credibility, but in her power of implication and of trans
cendence. She is both vividly contemporary and latently
mythical.
CHAPTER II
THE AMERICAN DREAM AND THE FAIR HEROINE
The Fitzgerald girl in the early short stories and
in the two seminal novels, This ~ of Paradise and The
8eautiful and Damned, is, initially at least, the embodiment
of the American Dream. Marius 8ewley defines the rather
out-worn phrase, American Dream:
Essentially, the phrase represents the romantic enlargement of the possibilities of life on a level at which the material and the spiritual have become inextricably confused. As such, it led inevitably towards the problem that has always confronted American artists dealing with American experience -the problem of determining the hidden boundary in the American vision of life at which the reality ends and the illusion begins. Historically, the American Dream is antiCalvinistic - in rejecting man's tainted nature it is even anti-Christian. It believes in the goodness of nature and man. It is accordingly a product of the frontier and the west rather than of New England and Puri tan traditions. Youth of the spirit - youth of the body as weIl - is a requirement of its existence; limit and deprivation are its blackest devils.37
37 Marius 8ewley, "Fitzgerald and the Collapse of the
Amer:i.can Dream", The Eccentric Design (New York, 1963), p. 266.
19.
That Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby incorporates the
American Dream is common knowledge, but what few critics, if
any, have noticed ls that the metaphor is already implicit,
if not explicit, in Fitzgerald's early fiction. The girls
in these short stories and novels, like Daisy, in their
shadowy way, come to embody the qua lit y of dream that is both
insistent and elusive. They too become the narrative
correlative for the hero's "insatiable capacity..for ~Ender" -
a capacity that, if it is not as Infinite, is at Ieast as
intense as Gatsby's.The girl, beautiful, wealthy and clean,
represents to her romantic, ambitious lover success, the
American Dream itself. The girl, for the heroes of the short
stoxies and of the two novels, Amory Blaine and Anthony Patch
respectively, is the very incarnation of the American vision
of youth, beauty and wealth. The possession of an image like
the girl is the only thing that the hero can finally conceive
as success and he is meant to be a representative American
male, bD th in the intensity of his desire for success and
in the image with which he equates it.
Replacing Heaven, the girl becomes the material,
secular object of what was originally a spiritual, religious
vision. Fitzgerald was Roman Catholic by birth, but agnostic
by inclination. Urged and inspired by his close friend Sigourney
Fay, however, the adolescent Fitzgerald considered the idea
of entering the priesthood. In IIThe Ordeal," one of his
20.
apprentice fictions, Fitzgerald wrote about a young man on
the verge of taking his first vows to become a Roman Catholic
priest. The youth, during the ceremony, is momentarily
accosted by imaginary worldly temptations. The first and
most,insistent is characteristically represented by the girl:
••• he had done with that part of life - and yet he seemed to see a girl with kind eyes, old in great sorrow, waiting, ever waiting. • •• He saw struggles and wars, banners waving somewhere, voices giving hail to a king - and looking at hi~through it aIl were the sweet sad eyes of the girl who was now a woman. • •• The voices pleaded 'Why?' and the girl's sad eyes gazed at him with infinite longing.
(AF, p.)))
The hero manages to overcome the temptation and complete his
vows but in a later, revised version of the story, entitled
"Benediction", the Roman Catholic faith has lost its grlp.
The hero Is replaced by a heroine who visits her brother,
another priest-to-be, and informs him of her loss of faith:
l don't want to shock Vou, Keith, but l can't tell Vou how - how inconvenient being a Catholic is. It doesn't seem to apply anymore. As far as morals go, sorne of the wildest boys l know are Catholics. And the brightest boys - l mean the ones who think and read a lot, don't seem to believe in much of anything anymore. • •• It seems so - so narrow. Church school~, for instance. There's more freedom about things that Catholic people can't see - like birth control.
(F&P, p.15))
In another early story, "Sentiment and the Use of Rouge",
Fitzgerald explains how the war caused the widespread
religious disillusionment: "Damned muddle - everything a
muddle, everybody offside, and the referee gotten rid of -
everybody trying to say that if the referee were there he'd
have been on their side. He was going to find that old
referee - find him - get hold of him - get a good hold -
2].
F cling to him - cling to him - ask him • " ( A~ , p .159 ).
Fitzgerald, it seems, never found the referee but he did
find the girl. In later stories, such as "The Offshore
Pirate", images normally reserved for religious figures are
centred on the girl:
••• poised for a moment like a crucified figure against the skye (F&P, p.37)
. . • pagan rituals of her soul. (Ibid., p.38)
Her sigh was a benediction - an ecstatic suret y that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know." (Ibid., p.44)
In This Side of Paradise, Amory finds "all Gods "fol'
dead, aIl wars fought, aIl faiths in man shaken ••• " (œp,
p.282) 8etrayed by the spiritual, the men of the 1920's
substitute the material, "destined finally to go out into
the dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new
generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of
poverty and the worship of success" (TSP, p.282). Mon-
seigneur Darcy, modelled on Father Fay, was in love with
Amory's mother but betrayed by her. In consequence, he
turns from woman to religion. Amory does just the reverse.
Brought up a Roman Catholic, he substitutes the girl for
the religion: "There was no God in his heart, he knew; • . . But - Oh, Rosalind ! Rosalind ! • • ." (TSP, p. 282) . Clara,
like the others, becomes the raluctant victim of Amory's
deification: "She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone.
His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to
22 ..
touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must
have had of Mary's eternal significance" (TSP, p.145). Iq
/.lmory's mind, Clara. has usurpad the celestial throne of Marv,
the central female figure of the Roman Catholic faith, and
Amory becomes an obsequious subject, an ardent worshipper.
/.lmory's earthly paradise, "a paradise of rose and flame"
(TSP., p.186), is an inverted theological conception; his
American Dream is a profane vision.
The Beautiful and Damned envisions a similarly God
less world. The novel begins in 1913 "when Anthony Patch was
twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the
Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least,
descended upon him" (BD, p.3). It continues in the same
vein':
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleesant and very attractive to intelligent men and to aIl women. ln this state he considered that he.would one day accomplish some quite subtle thing that the BIset would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immort~lity.
\ (BD, p.3)
The contrast between Monseigneur Darcy and Amory Blaine of
This Side of P.aradise is replaced by the contrast between
Anthony Patch and Chevalier D'Keefe, the figment of Anthony's
romantic imagination. The contrast i9 brDI~ht one step further
in The Beautiful and Damned. O.' Keefe, "enormously susceptible
to aIl sorts of conditions of women" (BD, p.89), forsakes the
woman for monastic life only to be brought to death by the
23.
sight of a garter. Anthony, like his fictional predecessor
~ory, does just the reverse. He forsakes his god, irony,
for romance (or the woman) only to return to irony through
insanity. Anthony deifies Gloria, but the Christian metaphor
becomes a pagan one, "she was a sun, radiant, growing,
gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity
pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence,
to that part of him, that cheri shed aIl beauty and aIl
illusion" (BD, p.73). Their world is a world of "private
swimming pools", a world in which "both were walking alone
in a, dispassionate garden with a ghost found in a dream"
(BU, p.137). Anthony's American O.ream not only inverts its
theologicai conception but also denies its Christian origine
The American Dream, in Fitzgerald, is inextricably
linked with the traditional fair heroine. This tradition
flourished in America with Cooper and was subsequently used,
with variations, by Hawthorne, Melville and Henry James.
The Fitzgerald girl closely fits Leslie Fiedler's description
of the Fair Heroine "in his LDve .s!J.f!. Oeath in the American
Novel. Fitzgerald's "golden girl", true to tradition, is
a "Fair Virgin", a "blond Goddess", a "blue-eyed Protestant
virgin", a "glorious phantom at the mouth of the cave", the
"Good, Good Girl", the "Nice American Girl". Uke Henry
James, Fitzgerald augments "the charm of chastity with
the magic of money", The fair mai den is "at once the embodi-
24.
ment of a country which dreams such virgins of milk and snow,
and another example of the type; but she is also the portrait
of the artist who makes such a maiden his Muse."38
The first and most important aspect of the girl's
role as American Dream and fair heroine is her beauty. She
satisfies the aesthetic capacity for wonder. For F.itzgerald,
"beauty" refers to physical appearance - the aesthetic object
is a material one. Like Carlyle, the hero of "The Offshore
~irate", Fitzgerald has a vivid and demanding aesthetic
imagination: "You see this is the kind of beauty l want.
Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding - it's got to
burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a
girl" (FP, p.29). Through the girl F.itzgerald conveys
again and again aIl that is socially and sexually desirable
in youth and beauty. The portrait of Lois in "Benediction"
i5 typical of aIl the short story heroines~
She was nineteen with yellow hair and eyes that people were tactful enough not to calI green. When men of talent saw her in a streetcar they often furtively produced little stub-pencils and baçks of envelopes and tried to sum up that profile on the thing that the eyebrowâ did te her eyes. Later they tore them up with wondering sighs.
(FP, p.143)
Fitzgerald's "golden girl" i5 always beautifuL
and blond - in This Side of Paradise, Myra has "strands of
ye110w hair" (TSP, p.13), Clara, "ripp1y golden hair" (TSP,
38Leslie Fied1er, Love and Daath in the American Novel, (New York, 1966), pp. 291-316.
25.
p.l38), and Rosalind, "glorious yellow hair, the desire to
imitate which supports the dye industry" (T5P, p.121). For
Amory, the American Dream is a "fairyland of piping satyrs
and nymphs with the faces of fair-haired girls he passed in
the streets of Eastchester" (T5P, p.33). True to the tra-
ditional colour scheme of the fair heroine, Fitzgerald's
girl is always pale and white, with blue or grey eyes.
Amory dreams of Montmartre "where Ivory women delved in
romantic mysteries" (TSP, p.32), and realizes his dream in
Rosalind: "There were gray eyes and an unimpeachable skin
with two spots of vanishing color" (TSP, p.172).
In The Beautiful and Oamned, Fitzgerald devotes the
bulk of his lyricism to the description of Gloria's beauty.
Like Gatsby, she is born of "Platonic conception". In a
"d'ramatic" seq~ion entitled "A Flash-Back in Paradise lJ , she
is the personification of Beauty", a phoenix-like figure with
beautiful budy and soul:
Bea ut y, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a_breathless hurried star. The stars winked at her intimately as they went by and the winds made a soft incessant flurry in her haire 5he was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soule 5he was that unit y sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in contemplation of herself.
(80, p.29)
This rather sophomoric attempt at humor or wit apparently
represents Fitzgeraldls preparation for Glerials overwhelming
26.
beauty. 8eauty is reincarnated in twentieth cent ury America
in the person of Gloria Gilbert.
For Anthuny, Gloria becomes the subject of aesthetic
contemplation:
Anthony, sitting at one end of the sofa, examined her profile against the foreground of the lamp; the exquisite regularity of nose and upper lip, the chin, faintly decided, balanced beautifully on a rather short neck. On a photograph she must have been completely classical, almost cold - but the glow of her hair and cheeks, at once flushed and fragile, made her the most living person he had ever seen.
(80, p.S8)
Gloria is a work of art, and a traditional fair heroine -
a "golden girl" (80, p.133) with "yellow ripples of hair"
(80, p.6l) pale, white skin, "Alice-blue" and white clothes.
Like Hawthornels Phoebe, Glorials beauty has the typically
American attributes of freshness and cleanliness. With
"miraculous freshness" (80, p.210) and "blowy" (80, p.13l)
cleanliness, "starched and fresh as a flower" (80, p.128),
the girl radiates an immaculate, laundered beauty.
Two other important aspects of the girlls role as
American Dream and fair heroine are youth and innocence. In
the American Dream there are only two tenses - present and
future. It is essentially an irresponsible attitude toward
time in that it rejects history and tradition. The attitude
explains the obsessive youth worship of popular American
cu~ture. The female is always a "girl" never a "woman " ,
always a "child" never an "adult". She embodies the vision
of perpetuaI and eternal youth. Like Ar~ita in "The Offshore
27..
Pirate", she is "a high-spirited, precocious child" (FP, p.19);
like Sally CarroI in "The Ice-Palace", she is "a happy lit~le
girl" (EP, p.69); like Roxanne in "The Lees of Happiness",
she is "as young as a spring night and summed up in her own
adolescent laughter" (JA, p.124). Since the stories and
This Side of P.aradise are, for the most part, adolescent
narratives, the image patterns of childhood are understandable.
However, in The Beautiful and Damned, a story of.adult life,
they a~e even more profuse. Gloria, as both her mother and
Maury Noble testify, has a very youthful spirit, "Gloria
has a very young soul - irresponsible, as much as anything
else.She has no sense of responsibility" (BD, p.39). "She
seemed somehow the youngest person there • • • [a] Beautiful
child" (BD, p.48) The word "child" and its variations, in
a series of picturesque images, recurs again and again. "Her
face was as untroubled as a litt le girl's, and the bundle
that she pressed tightly to her bosom was a child's doll, a
profound and infinitely healing balm to her disturbed and
childish heart" (BD, p.6S). Like aIl American girls, she
calls her father "daddy" (BD, p.6S) and uses "the adjective
Ilittle l whenever she asked a favor - it made the favor sound
less arduous" (BD, p.183). Fitzgerald's American female is
more girl than woman, more chi Id than ~irl.
Like time, morality is viewed with a child-like,
irresponsible attitude. Innocence, for Fitzgerald, is the
pristine integrity of the asexual childish selfhood. As the
28.
girls are children, their chief virtue is that most closely
associated with childhood and the state of innocence -
chastity, a virtue which for Fitzgerald means virginity.
Fitzgerald, both in his short stories and in ~ ~ of
Paradise, with his asides on kissing and petting, meant to
shock the reader~
None of the Victorian mothers - and most of the mothers were Victorian - had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed. • •• Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible: eating three-o'clock, after-dance suppers in impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, ha If of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a: real moral let-down.
(TSP, p.sa)
Ironically, what strikes the reader today is not the "moral
let-down" but the moral innocence. Fitzgerald's daughter
expressBS this feeling in her introduction to Tales gf ~
Jazz ADe: ----And another thing which may surprise some youthful readers of this collection is the fact that nobody in it kiss8s anybody else unless they're related by marriage or parenthood -and again with the single exception of the gasoline girl, who rewards Jim with a brush of her Irresistible lips for his success at shooting craps. The book is totally devoid of sex as we have come to take it for granted in modern writing. One exasperated wifl~ in "Gretchen's Fort y Winks" appears on the verge of going into New York to the theater with another man, but her husband promptly puts a sleeping powder into her coffee and that disposes of the matter sumlii<:::rily.39
Indeed, when the girl does "kiss" she seems to like it in the
same way she would like a new style of dresse The "kiss"
39 Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan, "Introduction", Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories, (New York, 1960), p. 10.
29.
is the climax of a fairy tale in I!:!!::!. Sida of Paradise; liAs
in the story-books, she ran into them, and on that half
minute, as thair lips first touched, rested the high point
cf vanity, the crest cf his young egotism" (TSP, p.89). Love'
is a - childish game:.. "Children, most astute of match-makers,
plot their campaigns quickly, and Sally had played a clever
correspondence Sonata to lsabelle's excitable temperament ll
(TSP, p.62).
The same aura of innocence surrounds the heroine
of The Beau·ti fuI !ill!. Damned. The images attempt to be more
subtle and sophisticated but are essentially the same. After
Gloria and Anthony's first kiss, the girl is described as a
"swan" , her fece a "white Iake" (BD, p.I02). 5Me becomes the
goddess of chastity: "In a thousand guises Thais would hail
a cab and turn up her face ~or loving. And her pailor would
be virginal and lovely, and her kiss chaste as the moon"
(80, p.I07). With her too, IIkissing ll is merely a game: "My
kisses were because the man was good-Iooking·, Dr because there
was a slick moon, Dr even because live felt vaguely sentimental
and a little stirred. But that's all - it's had utterly no
effect on me" (BD, p.~8Z). 5he flatly refuses ~thony's kiss
"that was neither agame nor a tribute" (BD, p.1141. 5he
tells Anthony that she IImight ll be unfaithful in marriage, but
when she has the chanceshe is disgusted. She keeps her
chastity intact and fulfills Fitzgerald's ~erican Dream of
immaculate womanhood.
30 .•
Fitzg~rald's "golden girl" is not only blond but
wealthy. Money is one of her most potent charms. The close
association between money and the girl probably stemmed from
hie own experience. Of the pUblication of ~ ~ of
Paradiee which provided the money, which in turn brought back
Zelde, Fitzgerald remerked in retroepect~
The man with the jingle of money in hie pockets who married the girl e year leter would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity towards the leisure class ••• since then l have never been able to stop wondering where my friends' money came from, nor to stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl.40
Money, as has so often been pointed out, is important in Fitz-
gereld - but its importance lies in its function as a means
not as an end. As the above passage reveals, money is a symbol
of possession. With money, the man can possess t~e girl.
Either the man proves he is a success and wins the girl, or
he proves a failure and loses the girl.
Money, in fact, becomes a magic wand capable of
transforming the 1920's into a Golden Age and the American
girl into a Fairy P.rincess. The addition of money to the girl
turns the story into a fairy tale. Like Henry James,
Fitzgerald deliberately employs many of the elements of the
fairy-tale. The most obvious fairy tale he uses is Cinderella -
but there is a significant change. The hero becomes Cinderella
40D• S. Savage, "The Significance of F. Scott Fitzgerald", F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener, (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 149.
31 •.
and the heroine is the Golden Prince(ess.). The success stciry
is his, not herse Bank-notes usher in .the bride.
F.itzgerald's girl is an embodiment of the glamor
of weal th. The chief recommendation o,f the heroine of "The
Camel's Back", as it is of many other heroines, is her father's
gold:
l want Vou ta meet his love. Her name is Betty Medill, and she would take weIl in the movies. Her father gives her three hundred a month to dress on, and she has tawny eyes and hair and feather fans of five colors. l shall also introduce her father, Cyrs Medill. Though he is ta aIl appearance flesh and bloon, he is, strange ta say, commonly known in Toledo as the Aluminum Man. But when he sits in his club window with two or three Iron Men, and the White Pine Man, and the Brass Man, they look very much as vou and l do, only more so, if you know what l mean.
(JA, p..35)
The association of gold and the girl evokes the fairy story
in which the Princess spins whole rooms of money from akeins
of wool. In This Side f!.f. P.aradise, the fairy tale is alluded.
to wi th regard to Clara:. "Golden II it!.ê. m, golden notes f.!:f!!!!.
golden mandolins, frets of golden violins, fs!!, Qh. wearilv
fair ••• skeins f!Qm braided basket, mortals mav Ilot ~; oh,
what young extravagant Gad, who would ~ BI ~ it, •••
who could give such gold ••• "<"TSP, p.147). Rosalind, the
most important "golden girl" of the novel, is another Golden
Princesse In a dramatized section of the novel aetually
transformed from an apprentiee play called "The Debutante",
Fitzgerald gives us a detailed inventory of the luxurious ra am
and expensive material possessions of the debutante ta create
this magic of wealth: "One would enjoy seeing the bill called
32.
forth by the finery displsyed and one is posaessed by a des ire
to see the princess for whose benefit - Look! There's sorne
oneL" (TSP, p.16).
Since the glamor of wealth is one of the golden
girl's most attractive attributes, she demands money to
maintain that charm. Frustrated by Zelda's refusal of marriage
on financial grounds, Fitzgerald asked her several times why
"they kept princesses in towers". lalda never answered the
question but Rosalind tells Amory that she rejects his suit
because she realizes that without the glamor of wealth her
attraction would be considerably diminished: "1 can't be
shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a narrow
atmosphere. l'd make Vou hate me" (TSP, p.195). She would
make a poor domestic Cinderella~ "1 don't want to think about
pots and kitchens and brooms. 1 want to worry whether my
legs will get slick and brown when 1 swim in the summer" (TSP,
p .. 196). As she herself confesses: "1 never think about
money" (TSP, p.178), but nevertheless she must have it, oYes,
1 suppose sorne day 1'11 marry a ton of it ••• " (TSP, p.179).
She does capitulate to the most financially successful suitor
and Amory is le ft disillusioned with lia system where the
richest ma~ gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her"
(TSP, p.277).
The same system exists in The Beautiful and Damned
but the hero has the "top thing" and therefore wins the "top
girl". ~nthony Patch is the grandson of Adam Patch, a
33.
multimillionaire, and as such is in a favorable position to
disregard the "system". He too, nevertheless, has his troubles
in winning the Golden Princesse True to the fairy-tale
erchetype, the heroine must be rescued from the unwelcome
embraces of another and older male. "That person Bloeckman",
as he is called, "a stoutening, ruddy Jew of about thirty-
five" (BD, p.43), fulfills the role. Anthony, first realizing
the objective of the middle-aged suitor, "wanted to kill
Bloeckman and make him suffer for his hideous presumption"
(BD, p.118), but later sees it is unnecessary. J;\nthony's
suit is accepted, the rescue is complete.
As in the short stories and This Side of Paradise,
love is a commercial agreement; the "girl" is bought and sold
across the counter, as it were. The Beautiful ~ Damned,
hOWBver, carries the process further. Not only is the girl
"acquired" by financial success, but she must be protected
by continued success. Possession of the girl, like a kind of
stock-dividend, depends on perpetuaI "investment" of financial
and emotional funds. Their mutual dreams of private swimming
pools and private rivers depends upon money: "These times were
to begin 'when we get our money;' it was on such dreams rather
than on any satisfaction with their increasingly irregular, -
increasingly dissipated life that their hope rested" (BD, p.277).
The money, the inherited wealth of Adam Patch, becomes the
buried treasure of the fairy-tale or quest romance and
Anthony's Puritan reforming grandfather becomes the dragon
34.
who guards the hoard. Money, then, is the means not only
of acquiring but of maintaining the girl. Gloria, to sustain
h~r charm and glamor, needs financial investment. The
-Golden Princess turns out to be an expensive proposition.
The Fitzgerald girl is a fair heroine and a Golden
Princess but she is also the "girl next door". As Amory
thinks to himself, his girls were'''all-American'': "Eleanor
would pitch, probably southpaw, Rosalind was out-field,
wonderful hitter, Clara first base, maybe" (TSP, p.259). The
most "American" of aIl their charms is their "popularity".
Popularity, a curious American phenomenon, implies a wide
social acceptance or desirability. For a girl, popularity
means a long list of admirers of the opposite sex. Fitzgerald
describes the "Popular Oaughter" in a characteristic sophomoric
satire in This Si de QI paradise:
• • • the P.opular Oaughter becomes engaged every six mon"ths between sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young Hambell, of Campbell and Hambell, who fatuously considers himself her first love, and between engagements the P.O. (jhe is selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the survival.of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness ••••
The "belle" had becom~ the "flirt", the flirt had become the "baby vamp". The "belle" had five or six calIers every afternoon. If the P.D., by sorne strange accident, has two, it is made pretty uncomfortable for the one who hasn't a date with her. The "belle" was surrounded by a dozen men in the intermission between dances. Try to find the P.O. between dances, just try to find her.
(TSP, p.58-59)
That this satire was o~ly half-hearted is indicated by the fact
that Fitzgerald wrote lengthy instructions to his sister on how
to become a popular girl. Included among the instructions are
35.
the general subjects of conversation, poise, carriage, dancing,
expression, dress and personality. It shows amazing insight
for a boy of nineteen. He sums up the last qualifications,
"the person you're with, man, boy, woman, whether it's Aunt
Millie or Jack Allen or myself likes to feel that the person
they're sponsoring is at least externally a credit".4l
Popularity or social acclaim is a very important.~nd attractive
attribute to the conforming, insecure American male.
Fitzgerald's instructions to his sister, like 50 much
of his personal experience, was of service to him. As he later
inserted in the margin of the letter, the lesson was the "basis
of Bernice". "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" tells the story of how a
shy, withdrawn girl is transformed by her more vivacious cousin
into the image of a popular girl. Bernice must emulate her
cousin and follow her instructions on dress, personality and
conversation. 5he succeeds so weIl that Bernice wins her
cousi~'è best besux. Out of spite, her cousin dares her to
follow up her line of "bobbing" her haire 5he takes the dare
and, "This was the test supreme of her sportsmanship, her
right to walk unchallenged in the starry heaven of popular
girls" (FP, p.13S). 50 that the last laugh will be on her
cousin, Bernice "bobs" her cousin's hair while she is asleep
and throws the hair on the boyfriend's porch. This act of
daring completes her transformation.
41F.. Scott Fitzgerald, ~T~h=e~A~~~~~~~~~~~~5=c~ot~t~ Fitzgerald, 1909-1917, ed. John N.J., 1965), p. 131.
36.
Fitz~erald and his heroes continued to be infatuated
with the popular girl. For Amory of This Side of Paradise,
the girl's popularity assures him of her romantic notice. The
more popular sheis, the more desirable she becomes. Isabelle,
who appeare both in an apprentice piece called "Babes in the
Woods" and in This Side Ef Paradise, is a typical exemple of
the "P.O."
Her education or, rather, her sophistication had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled on her favori her tact was instinctive, and her capacity for love-affaire was limited only by the number of the susceptible within telephone distance. Flirt smiled from her large black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical magnetism.
(TSP, p.63)
The American male seems afraid to rely on his own judgement;
the girl's value must be acknowledged by the common denominator.
Amory "loved to do any sort of thing with Claral Shopping
with her was a rare, epicurean dream", not because he enjoyed
her company but because: "In every store where she had ever
traded she was whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page"
(TSP, p.143). The sense of competition provides much of the
ettraction of romance. Amory is elated when Myra confesses
that she likes him the "first twenty-five and Froggy Parker
twenty-sixth" (TSP, p.l4). Amory is similarly elated when
Rosalind chooses him from a host of eligible suitors.
Gloria Gilbert of The Beautiful and Damned is another
example of the Popular Daughter. Nicknamed "Coast to Coast
Gloria", she is thus described by h~r mother: "Gloria goes,
goes, goes. 1 tell her 1 don't see how she stands it. She
37.
dances aIl afternoon and aIl night, until l think she's going
to wear herself to a shadow" (BD, p.39). Gloria's social
promiscuity is described in terms more of recommendation than
of blame: "And then euer since she was twelue years old she's
had boys about her so thick - oh, so thick one couldn't ~.
At sixteen she began going to dances àt preparatory schools,
and then came the colleges; and euerywhere she went, boys,
boys, boys."(BD, p.79). To the girl herself, popularity is
a source of endless delight and power, "she had fed on it
ruthlessly - enjoying the crowds around her, the manner in
which the most desirable men singled her out; enjoying the
·fierce jealousy of other girls" (BD, p.81). That Gloria has
been tos6ed about as a social football does not seem to
bother Anthony; indeed, he is proud that she is one of the
most sought-after and celebrated young girls of the country.
Popularity spells success, and success i5 what the American
Oream is aIl about.
CHAPTER III
THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE AND THE DARK HEROINE
Fitzgerald was a chronicler of the American Dream,
but he was also a cri tic of it. For as powerful and perva-
sive as the American Dream ls in his work, it is only tran-
sient. The images that reinforce it - flowers, moths, ghosts,
glass, wind and leaves - are as fragile and delicate as the
American Dream itself. "The Off-Shore Pirate", perhaps the
most dream-like and paradisial of aIl his work, possesses
these images in rich profusion~
They float out like dri~ting moths under the rich hazy light, and as the fantastic symphony wept and exulted and wavered and despaired, Ardita's last sense of reality dropped away, and she abandoned her imagination to the dreamy summer scents of tropical flowers and the Infinite starry spaces overhead, feeling that if she opened her eyes it would be to find herse If dancing with a ghost in a land created by her own fancy.
(FP, p.41)
Even here, however, Fitzgerald is aware that the American
Dream deals in perishable goods: "The dew rose and turned to
a golden mist, thin as a dream, enveloping them until they
39.
ssemed gossamer relics of the late night, infinitely .transient
and already fading." (FP, p.41) Although these 5ame image
pstterns give unit y to aIl his work, the controlling symbolism
of his vision is lunar. The moon is present at every love
affaire It is en appropriate image since it simultaneously
suggests romance and chastity and also the changeability and
mortality of woman.
Fitzgereld's romantic imagination is not one-sidedj
he was endowed with a double vision. 8ehind or beside the
American Dream lies the American nightmare:
AlI the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them - the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my stories blew up, my millionaires were es beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy's peasants. In life these things hadn!t happened yet, but 1 was pretty sure living wasn1t ~~e reckless, careless business these people thought.
E-laborating on this "touch of disaster", Fitzgerald wrote
in the account of his crack up, "the test of a first-rate
intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in
the mind at the same time, and still retain the ebillty to
function. ,,43 In the b~st. of his ~ork, Fi t~gerald possesses
this ironic intelligence. Like the narrator in The Great
Gatsby, Fitzgerald was "within and without, simultaneously
enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
This double vision is present even in his early short stories
42F• Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up, (New York, 1956), p. 87.
43Ibid ., p. 69.
40..
and hls flrst two novel~. We may feel that the affirmation
ls stronger than the denial, but closer analysis reveals a
balance, if a dangerously precarious one. We are still this
side of paradise; even.the beautiful face damnation.
Like the American Dream, the American nightmare
clusters around the female figure. Enchantment and adoration
of the girl changes to terror and disgust. In "The Drdeal",
an apprentice story, the young prie~t-to-be Is about to succumb
to the charm of the Feminine image when suddenly " •••
something snapped. They were still there, but the girl's eyes
were aIl wrong, the lines around her mouth were cold and
chiselled and her passion seemed dead and earthy" (AF, p.84).
Dften the sense of horror, the repulsion, and the despair
focuses on the Feminine sex as a whole. The sense of hope-
lessness, futility and betrayal Amory experiences at the end
of This Side of Paradise he attributes to the female sex: --- ~
Women - of whom he had expected so muchj whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvellously Incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of experlence - had become merely consecrations to their own posterity. Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were aIl removed by their very beauty, around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to write.
(TSP, p.263)
In The Beautiful ~ Damned, the disillusion ·becomes
bitter cynicism. In it, Fitzgerald occasionally betrays a
somewhat unconscious disllke of the whole female species:
"females, in the word's most contemptuous sense, breeders
and bearers, exuding still that faintly odorous atmosphere of
41.
the cave and the nursery~ (BD, p.104). The noise of woman's
laughter evokes a Gothic vision of the horror of life:
Try as he might to strangle his reaction, some animal quality in that unrestrained laughter hed g~sped at his imagination, and for the first time in four months aroused his old aversion and horror toward aIl the business of life. The room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and live sere ne and detached back in the corners of his mind. Life was that sound out there, that ghastly reiterated female sound.
(BD, .p.150)
Fate, the strongest barrier to the realization of the American
Oream, is disguised as the Eternal Feminine. The female
paradoxically becomes the embodiment of the American reality
which, for Fitzgerald, is the American nightmare.
The American nightmare is more Dften crystallized
by a single female figure. The figure becomes the dark com-
plement to the Fair Heroine and again closely resembles
Leslie Fiedler's description of the dark heroine in Love
-and Oeath in the American Novel. Fitzgerald's dark heroine,
true to tradition, is the IIsinister embodiment of the sexuality
denied the snow maiden ll , a "bearer of poison ll , "the Romantic's
concept of Belle dame sans merci reinforced by the resurgence
out of the Christian past of the arche types of Lilith and Eve
who brought sin into the world".44 Oangerous and wor~dly, she
traditionally possesses thick dark hair and dark eyes and has
behind her ~ll the primitive terror of darkness and blackness.
44Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the AmericBn Novel, (New York, 1966), p. 296.
42.
She cames ta symbolize the triple threat of sex, sin and death
and represents the world not of heaven but of hell. The rela-
tionship is a demonic, erotic one - passion becomes fierce and
destructive. The dark heroine is a harlot, witch, siren or
other luring female, an abject of desire - n ••• the man faels
horror for the woman and at the same time an attraction which
45 is part of his sense of horror." 5he is sought as a
possession but can never be possessed.
Sometimes the dark heroine 15 merely a prostitute.
There are two such women in ~ Si de of Paradise. Axia
Marlowe, the first one, 15 Amory's date for a night in New
York. They, together with a college friend and his oate,
Phoebe go out "on the town" and finally retire ta the girls' J
apartment. At the point of erotic communication with the dark
girl, Amory envisions Satan:
There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm wlnd, and his imagination turned ta fire, and he took the glass from Phoebe's hand. That was aIl; for at the second K that his deèision came, he looked up and saw, ten yards from him, the man who had been in the cafe, and with his jump of astonlshment the glass fell from his uplifted hand. There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan. His face was cast in the same yellow wax as in the cafe, neither the dull pasty color of a dead man - rather a sort of vile pallor - not unhealthy, you'd have called it; but like a strong man who'd worked in a mine or done night shifts in a damp climate.
(TSP, p.l)))
The Satanic vision overwhelms him, and he flees in a fit of
45 i Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, (London, 1951), p. 268.
43.
terror. "Axia's sidelong, suggestive smile" (TSP, p.117)
continues to haunt him. He doesn't admit it to himself but
the dark girl, the embodiment of sex, becomes the embodiment
of evil and of horror.
The encounter with the second promiscuous dark lady
produces the same vision of horror. Alec Connage, Rosalind's
brother and Amory's Princeton friend, brings Jill, a morally
lax girl, to his hotel room. Amory co vers for Alec with the
house detectives. The same pervasive sense of evil overcomes
him:
• • • Over and around the figure crouched on the bed there hung an 'aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusely brooding already over the three of them. • • and over by the window among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar •••
(TSP, p.247)
It is not until later in the novel that Amory is able to
analyse the two experiences:
Once he had been miraculously able to sc'ent evil as a horse detects a broken bridge at night, but the man with the queer, feet in Phoebe's room had diminished to the aura over Jill. His instinct perceived the fetidness of poverty, but no longer ferreted out the deeper evils in pride and sen5uality.
(TSP, p.2(2)
Sex and evil have come to form a neat equation in his mind.
Fitzgerald's dark heroine is not always so crude
and simple as these two harlots. Nancy Lamer, the central
female figure of IIJelly Sean", is distinctly not a harlot.
She possesses, however, aIl the attributes of the conventional
dark lady. She i5 an American girl but of Foreign extraction;
44.
"Nancyhad a mouth like a remembered kiss and shadowy eyes
and blue-black hair inherited from.her mother who had been
born in Budapest" (JA, p.20). She has a wild, passionate
nature and a circumspect morality:
She's a wild baby ••• but l like her. So do es everybody. But she does do crazy stunts. She usually gets ,out alive but she's got sc ars aIl over her reputation from one thing or another she's done - Oh she's a wild one. Shoots craps, say, boy! And she do like her high-balls.
(JA, p.23)
Her idol is appropriately Lady Diana Manners, whom she attempts
to emulate: ~Well, she's what l'd like to be. Dark, you
know like me, and wild as sin. She's the girl who rode her
horse up the steps of some cathedral or something and aIl
the novelists made their heroines do it afterwards". (JA, p.26)
Nancy does not ride a horse up the steps of a cathedral but
shedoes do something comp~rable, if not worse. It is in-
directly related how~in an inebriated state, she decides to
shock tne town and marry her contemporary boyfriend during
one of her wild nocturnal adventures. The spark of ambition
that she ignited in Jelly Bean, an enchanted observer, is
extinguished by the act.
The hero, however, is not always an untouched on-
looker. Amory, of This Side of Paradise, actually becomes
involved with a dark heroine. Eleanor, the girl he meets
six months after the break with Rosalind, is a more sophisticated
and complex rendering than either of the two harlots or Nancy
45.
Lamar but she still is a variation on the same theme. 5he
evokes for Amory the "Dark Lsdy of the Sonnets" CTSP, p. 236) ,
has "dark, damp bobbed hair" (TSP, p.225), is "more European
than American •••• 5he had been born and brought up in
France" (TSP, p.223) and ls appropriately called Eleanor
Savage. Like Hawthorne's Zenobia, her American predecessor,
she ls identified wlth wild nature. Amory first discovers
her in a haystack, and "often she sat ln the grass" (TSP, p.
231). They swim and go for moonlight rides in the woods.
Theirs is a country affaire For the aver-urban Fitzgerald,
the country "and nature taka on exotic and~strangely anough~
sinister implications. Like Nancy, Eleanor's associations
are with other rebellious and avil characters. She ls a:
"little devil" (TSP, p.235), "a witch" (T5P~ p.22?), and also
a siren, luring Amory by her enchanting voice: "a weird chant
that started and hung and fell and blended with the rain"
(TSP, p.224). On the final night, she threatens suicide and
in that way embodies the death-wish of Amory. 5he is very
much a femme fatale.
Eleanor is strongly linked with the romantic tra
dition of the Gothic horror story. Her presence is foreshadowed
by a violent storm and Amo~y find~ himself imprisoned in a
Gothic labyrinth: "He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a,
way out, and finally, through webs of twisted branches,
caught sight of a rift in the trees where the unbroken light
ning showed open country." (TSP, p.224) The ghost is a re-
46.
current 1mage associated w1th her. She becomes Amory's
alter ego - that sida of him that longs for evil, horror and
death:
W1th her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then that they could see the devil in each other. But Eleanor - did Amory dream her? Afterwards their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped From their souls never to meet.
(TSP, p.233)
As bright and attrective as Eleanor is, Amory is
very much efraid of her "half-sensual, half-neurotic quality"
(TSP, p.233). As with Isabelle, the affair remains pre-
dominently a verbal one and Amory succeeds in rationalizing
himself Dut of love: "Vet was Arnory capable of love now? He
could, as always, run through the emotions in a half hour,
but even while they revelled in their imaginations, he knew
that neither of them could care as he had cared once before."
(TSP, p.23l) Eleanor's problem is that she 15 a real human
being with real sensuality and real spiritual substance.
Eleanor, like the other dark heroines, ends as the embodiment
of evil: "Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept
close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird
mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his
soul to flakes." (TSP, p.222)
The Beautiful and Damned has another variant of the
dark heroine but the relationship changes From involvement
to entanglement. 5he too ls the embodiment of sex, which for
Fitzgerald seems to mean sin. Anthony Patch meets his dark
47.
lady, Oorothy Raycroft, while he is separated from his wife
in the southern army camp. One of the "vividly dressed, over-
painted girls" (80, p.321) who people the sidewalks, she la
very much a part of "the slow, erotic breath of the South,
imminent in the hot softness of the air, in the pervasive lull
of thought and time" (80, p.321). She is dark and exotic not
because she ls European, but because she is a swarthy, lower
class southerner - just as evil to the New England Puri tan
conscience:
It was an advantage that her accent was different. He could not have determined the social status of a; southerner from her talk - in New York a girl of a lower class would have been raucous, unendurable - except through the rosy spectacles of intoxication •••• Oark was creeping down.
(80, p.323)
Her coloring and dress suggest the sensual and the exatic:
"her black hair in disarray" (BD, p.334), her lilac dress,
and "Her eyes were soft as shadows. Were they violet, or
was it their blue darkness mingling with the gray hues of
dusk?" (BD, p.322). Dot is a "temptress" (80, p.325); she
tempts him to betray his wife. Anthony has an affair with
this "dark,unenduring little flower."
Oorothy is distinctly not a Nice American Girl. In
her town, she enjoys a "rather unsavory reputation" (80, P .326).
No longer retaining her "technical purity", she permits Anthony
to become her fourth "lover " • Anthony is both attracted and
repulsed by her sensuality. He comes to see her whenever he
can but not without severe pangs of conscience. Their habituaI
48.
dating gets him into trouble with the army officials. One
night, like Eleanor, sha thraatens suicide and thereby becomes
the embodiment of the death-wish. She causes Anthony two weeks
of confinement and consequent mental instability. Her image,
if not person, haunts him to the end. He returns to New
York, rejoins his wife and awaits the outcome of the lawsuit
contesting his grandfather's will that has disinherited him.
If the case is successful, they will have more than enough
money to make their dreams realizable and live happily ever
after. Dorothy, however, follows Anthony to New York and ap-
pears in his apartment just befor~ the announcement of the
co urt deci sion :.
He retreated before her into the living room, comprehending cnly a word here and thera in the slow flood of sentences that poured from her steadily, one after the other, in a persistent monotone. She was decently and shabbily dressed -a somehow pitiable litt le hat adorned with pink and blua flowers covered and hid her dark hair.
(BD, p.444)
Her flowered hat 15 a modern version of the flower in Zenobia's
hair, symbol of nature and passion. Her visit provokes in
Anthony "a sort of stupefied horror" (BD, p.44S). Since she
embodies the death-wish for him, he threatens to kill her.
He resorts to violent and destructive action - "then a thick,
Impenetrable darkness came down upon .him and blotted out
thought, rage, and madness together - with almost a tangible
snapping sound the face of the world changed before his
eyes ••• " (BD, p.446).
49.
Sorne of Fitzgerald's heroines are schizophrenic
characters. Nicole Diver of Tender !! ~ Night, his fourth
novel, is a schizophrenic in the layman's sense of the ter~.
She is a double, divided personali ty, fluctuati.ng between
fair and dark heroine. The heroines of the earlier novels
and sorne of the early short staries are double personalities
too, but their doubleness lies not 50 much in their own
mental state as in that of the hero. In the mind of the
hero, the girl experiences a transformation from Fair Maiden
into Dark lady. Once sexually posSBssed, Thais becomes
Circe; the fairy tale becomes a horror story; and the American
Dream becomes the American nightmare. The hero, especially
after marriage, finds not the milk-white maiden he envisaged
but a corrupt and destructive witch.
Sex, then, is the pivot on which the transformation
from fair ta dark heroine occurs. It becomes inextricably
linked with evil, death .and beauty. In the early short staries,
"the problem of sex" appears either as the criminal act of
"Tarquin of Cheapside", in which Fitzgerald tells how Shakespeare
wrote "The Rape of Lucrece", or as the adolescent and frust
rating game of "Babes in the Woods". In another early story
"Sentiment and the Use of Rouge", sex causes the hero ta
question the old truths. Coming back from the war the he ra
expects to find the fair heroines as he left them: "But there
was something in the very faces of these girls, something
which was half enthusiasm and half recklessness that depressed
50.
him more than any concrete thing" (AF, p.146). Confronted
with the sexual revolution attendant upon the war, the hero
experiences nothing but loathing and disgust for the "new"
girl. One of them attempts to explain the new morality to
him: "It's this - self sacrifice with a capital 'SI. Young
men going to get killed for us. - We could have been their
wives - we can't - therefore weIll be as much as we cano
And that's the story." (AF, p.154) The girl remains for
the hero the extreme opposite, a dark lady: "Eleanorls voice
came to him like the grey creed of a new materialistic world,
the contrast was the more vivid because of the remains of
erotic honor and sentimental religiosity that she flung out
with the rest." (AF, p.154)
In This Side of P.aradise, the hero reacts with
horror and revulsion to any form of sex. Amory's first
sexual encounter exhibits this repugnance of sex and the
sudden transformation of the girl. Myra St. Clair is a young
and lovely golden girl until their relationship reaches the
climax of the kiss: "He had never kissed a girl before, and
he tasted his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new
fruit" (TSP, p.14). The Adamic allusion is obvious; paradise
is lost.
Suddenly revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss anyone; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe Dut of sight, up in the corner of his mind.
(TSP, p.14)
51.
Myra loses her ethereal mystique and becomes "a new énimal
of whose presence he had not heretofore been aware" (TS~, p.13).
The same abrupt transition From Fair to dark heroine occurs
with Isabelle. She reaches.the heights of her career as a
golden princess: "It was Isabelle, and from the tep of her
shining hair to her little golden slippers she had never seemed
so beautiful" (TSP, p.89). They kiss and the snow maidSn
turns to ice: "the sparkle in her eye was like lce" (TSP,
p.9l). They argue and the revulsion turns to dislike: "He
became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for
Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him" (TSP, p.29). The
first kiss is the last; consummation is avoided: "Amory
watched the night that should have been the consummation of
romance glide by with great moths overhead and the heavy
fragrance of roadside gardens, those little sighs. " • •
(TSP, p.92). The dominant feeling is always of sexual desire
and frustration; the kiss or embrace remains unexpressed.
The confusion of beauty and sex with evil becomes explicit
at the end of the novel:
The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of sex. He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic worship in Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with evil was beauty - beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor's voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously through life like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, ha If darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of aIl joy, most of aIl beauty of women.
(TSP, p.280)
52.
In ~ ~ of Paradise the hero loses the girl,
whereas in The Beautiful and Damned he marries her. In it,
marriage replaces sex as the pivotaI situation. What strikes
one about this novel is not sex but the lack of lt. The only
allusion to sexual communication is Anthony and Glorials first
kiss, and the response to it "was neither mental nor physical,
nor merely a mixture of the two" (BD, p.104). The identifica-
tion of sex and reproduction with evil and horror is mutual
and for the most part unexpressed. There ls a pervasive sense
of sterility about their marriage. Even before their marriage,
Gloria expresses her repugnance of children and the reprOductive
state: "What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my
self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers"
(BD, p.147). There is a point when she believes she is preg-
nant. The idea repulses her, "And this body of mine- of
yours - to have it grow ugly and shapeless? It's simply
intolerable" (BD, p.203). When they discover her fears to
be unfounded, they "rejoiced happily" (BD, p.209). Gloria
equates fertility with the common and the animal:
She knew that in her breast she had never wanted children. The reality, the earthiness, the Intolerable sentiment of childbearing, the menace to her beauty - had appalled her. She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving itself. Her sentimentality could cling fiercely to her own illusions, but her ironie soul whispered that motherhood was also the privilege of the female baboon.
(BD, p.393)
It ls the girl that clings to her ethereal mystique and rejects
her earthlness. Gloria, even more than Anthony, wants to remain
53.
the Fair Maiden. Her efforts, however, are fruitless.
Despite efforts on both their parts, m~rriage succeeds
in transforming the virginal mai den into an evil witch, the
fairy tale into a horror story. The transformation begins
when the honeymoon ends: "The breathless idyll 1eft them,
fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day and it
was gone, how thay scarcely knew" (80, p.156). The. fair
mai den is revaaled to have human and unattractive traits:
"Anthony found that he was living with a girl of tramendous
nervous tension and of the most highhanded selfishness" (80,
p.157). He discovers he~ overly-fastidious eating.habits,
her hatred of laundry, and her financial extravagance.
Instead of adjusting themselves to each other, they seem to
be swept to greater and greater dissension. The real
horror story begins when they unwittingly lease the gray
house for another summer:
For the summer, for eternity, they had built themselves a prison. • •• There was a horror in the house that summer. It came with them and settled itself over th~ place like a sombre paIl, pervasive through the lower rooms, gradually spreading and climbing up the narrow stairs until it oppressed their very sleep.
(80, p.234)
Failing to find more enduring resources in themselves, they
come to rely more and more on others' company. Solitude be-
cornes frightful ahd oppressive: "Anthony and Gloria grew to
ha te being there alone •••• More from fear of solitude than
from any Desire to go through the fuss and bother of entertaining,
o
54.
they filled the house with guests every weekend, and often
through the week."(BD, p.235) Their internaI spiritual
degeneration is represented in the wild parties, the furious
drinking and extravagant spending. The horror story reaches
a climax with Glorie's living nightmare durin~ one of these
parties. Developing a Gothie claustrophobia, she flees in
terror from the "evil house and the sombre darkness that was
growing up about it" (BD, p.244). The reversaI is complete;
the dream has become more terrible and sordid than reality
itself.
The- problem with making the girl the embodiment of
the American Dream soon becomes apparent. The girl ls ~
materièl object and, unl~ke the dream, is exhaustible. The
things which she represents - youth and beauty - are transient.
With their fading thera follows tha transformation from fair to
dark heroine. Often the transformation accompanies an actual
change in hair color. In ~ Side of Paradise, Clara bacomes
a datk h~rolne wh en Amory thinks of marriage: "Once he
dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a co Id panic, for
in his dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the
gold gone out of her hair and platitudes falling insipidly
from her changeling tongue" (TSP, p.141). Rosalind's trans
formation occurs before our eyes - her youth and beauty begin
to vanish before she has finally and formally rejected Amory:
"She has changed perceptibly - sha is a tri fIe thinner for
one thing; the light in her eyes is not 50 bright, she looks
55.
essily a year older ll (T5P, p.190). Once Rosalind's msrriege
is announced, she ceases to be an object of desire and a fair
msiden for Amory. With her charms of innocente, youth and
beauty gone, shs becomes s dark, unattractive lady:
Never again could he find even the sombre luxury of wanting her - not this Rosalind, harder, older - nor any beaten, broken woman that his imagination brought to the door of his forties - Amory had wanted her youth, the fresh . radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was selling now once and for aIl. 50 far as he was concerned, young Rosalind was dead.
(TS~, p.253)
Amory wants a: young and beautiful fair maiden or no girl at
aIl.
In ~ Beautiful ~ Damned, Gloria, very much a
feminine F. Scott Fitzgerald, is poignantly aware of the
transiency of her youth and be8uty. Their eventual 10ss al-
ready begins to haunt her in the gray house in the form of
an imaginary voice~ "Ah, my beautiful young lady, yours is
not the first daintiness and delicacy that has faded here under
the summer sun ••• youth has come into this room in palest
blue and le ft it in the gray cerements of despair •••• (BD,
p.234).
It is this haunting voice that incites her nightmare
vision. She continually longs to recapture her fading youth
and beauty. The realization that she is almost twenty-nine is
a traumatic experience, "making her wonder, through thesa
nebulous half-fevered ho urs whether after aIl she had not
wasted her faintly tired beauty, whether there was such a
thing as use for any quality bounded by a harsh and Inevitable
56.
mortality" (80, p.3911. Out of desperation, she decides to
use and preserve her beauty through motion pictures: "It
cheered her that iri some manner the illusion of beauty could
be sustained, or preserved perhaps in celluloid after the
reality vanished" (80, p.393). When she fails the screen
test, she discovers in horror that her youth and beauty are
perceptibly slipping away from her: "Oh, I,don't want to
live without my pretty facel" (80, p.404) Hoping against
hope to preserve herself she becomes in the end a figure of
pathos: "Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her
face with soma new unguent which she illogically hoped would
give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty"
(80, p.416). Gloria literally, as weIl as metaphorically~
becomes a dark heroine. The inner deterioration is mirrored
from the outside - her hair begins "darkening slowly ~rom
corn color to a deep russet gold" (80, p.297). "It had changed
in the last year from a rich gold dusted with red to an un
resplendent light brown. She had bought sorne shampoo soap
and meant to wash it now; she had considered putting a bottle
of peroxide into the rinsing water." (BD, p.425) Her dresses
change from white and blue to black and brown. The final
irony comes when two spectators observe: "She seems sort
of - sort of dyed and unclean, if Vou know what 1 mean" (BD,
p.448). Gloria, who so prized her natural golden, antiseptic
beautyl Despite aIl her efforts, Gloria ends as a dark lady.
57.
The heroines of the two novels are still comparatively
young and beautiful st the time of their transformation. How-
ever, when the heroines reach middle age or older, as they
often do in Teles cf the Jazz Aga, the loathing and revulsion
is doubled. Again and again in this later collection, the
theme of middle age appears. Indeed,' it recur~ with such
predictable frequency that one suspects Fitzgerald of an
obsessive compulsion. The following desc~iption is typical
of Fitzgeraid's fair maid~n-turned-dark heroine during middle
age:
At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five, with a son, Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early days of their marriage Benjamin had worshipped her. But, as the years passed, her honey-coloured hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery - moreover, and most of aIl, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it had been she who had "dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners - now conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already BY that eternal inertia which cornes ~ live with each of ~ .Q!!.§!, BIDL and stays with ..!d.ê. to the ~.
(JA, p.75)
In her introduction to Tales of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's
daughter, who was middle-aged herself at the time, admitted
that she had a prejudice against the book since "it implies
in no uncertain terms that people of my own general aga are
very old indeed.,,46 One may weIl wonder with her:
46Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan, "Introduction", Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories, (New York, 1966), p. 10.
• • • why a well-organized group of his readers didn't have my father tarred and feathered forhis b1atant impertinence. But perhaps this is the one detectib1e Jazz Age note after a11: you had to be young, apparent1y, during the Jazz Age, or life might as we1l not have been gone on with at a11. 47 .
58 •
Vouth, beauty and innocence are the imperatives of Fitzgerald's
hopeful vision; when they fade, so vanishes the American Dream.
47Ibid ., p. 11.
CHAPTER IV
RD LE REVERSAL
As Fitzgerald hinted, the dominant and most re
vealing symbol of the male-female relationship he records
is the symbol of the mirror. The mirror ls, in fact, the
traditional, romantic symbol buth of the imagination and of
narcissism or self-love. In F.ltzgerald, the girl ls the
reflection of the herols antithetical, romantic imagination
and becomes both the American Dream and the American night
mare. But she is also, in the beginning at least, the
mirror of the herols "self". The Fitzgerald hero exhibits
considerable narcissistic tendencies. He is a mirror-looker,
an egotist, and chooses the girl for her possession of
qualities that he, himself, does or would like to possesse
The girl, then, is the mirror of the man and their relation
ship 15 that of "twins".
The "twin" quality that most attracts the hero to
60.
the girl is the romantic rebelliousness and necessary courage
to realize the infinite possibilities that life has te effer.
This mutual characteristic ls best described by Ardita of
"The Off-Shore Pirate":
Vou know ••• live been thinking aIl day that Vou and l ere somewhat alike. We're both rebels - only for different reasons. • •• But deep in us both was something that made ùs require more for happiness. • • • Courage - just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to always - the liking what Vou always like; the utter .disregard for other people's opinions - just to live as l liked always and to die in my own way •• o. And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mi st that comes down on life - not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the values of life and the worth of transient things. ) (FP, p.35
~~ Although~not always expressed, each of the Fitzgerald girls
possesses this same passionate ambition to realize in their
lives some self more splendid than the self they were born
with. lt is this quality that supplies the mutual attraction
and sets up an equality between them. As Uncle George sa ys
in "The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw"; "We were equals,
neither was the leader. She was as interested in me as l
was fascinated by her" (AF, p.169).
In This Side gf Paradise, it is this same narcissism
in Rosalind and Amory that provides the basis for their ro-
mance. 5he is a mirror-looker like AmorYi that is how they
meet: "She go es up to the mirror and starts to dance in front
of it on the soft carpet. She watches not her feet, but her
eyes ~ never casually but always intently even when she
smiles. The door suddenly opens and then 91ams behind Amory,
61.
very cool and handsome as usual." (TSP, p.I?3) If Rosalind
is Amory's physical twin, Eleanor is his spiritual and in
tellectual twin; "Was It the infini te sadness of her eyes
that drew hlm or the mirror of himself that he found ln
the gorgeous clarity of her mindl" (TSP, p.222) GloriaJof
The 8eautiful ~ Damned, is both Anthony's physical and his
intellectual double. Like Anthony, Glori~'s figure is
"boyish and s1im" (80, p.3?1) and she says she has a "man's
mind" (80, p.134). Anthony elaborates: "'Vou've got a mind
like mine. Not strongly gendered either way.'" Anthony
earlier remarks that, "'We're twins'." Their genders do
seem inextricably confusedj they are more like twins than
lovers.
Sometimes, however, the hero ls attracted by
qua11ties that he would like to but knows he does not possess.
Amory of This Side of Paradise "lacked somehow that intense
animal magnetism that so often accompanies beauty in men or
womenj his personality seemed rather a mental thing, and it
was not in his power to turn it on and off like a water
faucet" (TSP, p.60). Isabelle is a "match" for him in more
than the romantic sense of the term; "AlI impressions and,
in fact, aIl ideas were extremely kaleidoscopic to Isabelle.
• Flirt smiled from her large brown eyes and shone through
her intense physical magnetism" (TSP, p.63). In her Cqse the
magnetism does accompany beauty. Amory with his mental
capability and Isabelle with her animal magnetism make a
complementary pair.
62.
By aesuming the role as twin or complement to the
female, the Fitzgerald hero, however, is forsaking his male
prerogative to superiority. As a twin, there arises an
equality and as a complement there emerges the hint of an
inequality. Whether it is true or not, the hero understands
himself to be the inferior and the girl the superior. 5eeing
the girl with one thing he desires and does not possess, he
fatuously endows her with aIl the qualities that he deems
desirable. When the girl begins to exercise the power with
which he has endowed her, he becomes not her mirror but her
shadow. There is a virtual switching of roles - the hero
becomes the reflection of the girl. As a reflection or
shadow, the hero becomes smaller and smaller and elowly
loses hie ego.
This process of the shrinkage of the hero hinges on
th~ quality that makes Isabelle and Amory a complementary pair -
animal magnetism. Again and again the hero feels that he
somehow lacks sex appeal. In fact, he is afraid of sex. For
Fitzgerald, reality or experience most often means sexual
consummation. At the point of erotic communication, the hero
has strange Satanic visions and develops "loathing and disgust."
He rationalizes it by making the girl the embodiment of evil.
In This Side of Paradise, Amory "loves" Eleanor only for an
enchanted "afternoon". At the first hint of sexuality, Amory
63~
flees from her in panic. He retreats from experience and
reality and confuses it with evil. In The Beautiful and
Damned, Anthony actually has an affair with Dot during his
marriage. When it threatens ta become more than an affair,
he retreats from experience and regresses to the safety of
insanity. In "Sentiment and The Use of Rouge" the hero can
not accept the sexual revolution. To him sex is evil. Even
war is preferable ta sexual promiscuity. In This §iE! of
Paradise, the reaction of horror and revulsion ta any form of
sex is explained by a Puritan sensibility: "Nowa confession
will have ta be made: Amory had rather a Puritan conscience
. . . a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning
sex." (TSP, p.18) Because, then, of a well-developed Puritanism,
the hero cannot consummate his sexual desire and face reality
as a man. Instead of growing into sexual manhood and. experience
the hero retains his chastity and innocence.
One can see the graduaI diminution of the hero
throughout the body of Fitzgerald's early work. It is already
apparent in one of Fitzgerald's earliest unpublished plays,
"The Captured Shadow", deseribed by Donald Yates in his article
on Fitzgerald's apprenti ce fiction:
A mystery play with a pleasant little romance woven into the drama which is resolved with a good final line (a Fitzgerald trademark) wh en the "Captured Shadow", revealed as a celebrated society figure in disguise, admits that he has succumbed to the hero~nels charms and now is indeed a truly "captured" shadow. 8
4800nald A. Yates, "The Road ta Paradise, Fitzgera1d ' s Literary Apprenticeship", Modern Fiction Studies, VII, (Spring, 1961), p. 23.
64.
"Coward", a civil war play written in the summer of 1913,
has a simila~ theme:
A southernerwho in the first act demonstrates himself a coward is redeemed by curtaindrop in the sscond. The rssolution of a, long-pen ding romance provides the curtain line, as it did in ,"The Captured Shadow." Playing on the titIs of the drama, Fitzgerald has the hero Holworthy confess to having been - three years before - a ."coward" in romance as weIl as in battle.49
"The Debutante", another early play, depicts a bored, change-
able, pseudo-sophisticated society girl throwing over her
ardent beaux:
Helen: For Heaven's sake don't cry! John: Oh, l don't give a damn what l do. . . • John: l don't want anyone else. Helen Cscornfully): Vou,'re making a perfect fool of
yourself. CAF, p.99)
In the short story "The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw"
written at about the same time, the hero is again referred to
by the heroine as a "perfect fool". The narrator ev en admits:
"At any rate my Uncle's mood was now that of a naughty boy
ta a stern aunt, almost that of a dog ta his master" (AF,
p.172). Again and again the hero relinquishes his male
superiority and becomes a "coward", a "captured shadow".
In This Si de of Paradise, Amory ls dominated by his
mother. The first heading of the novel is appropriately "Amory,
Son of Beatrice" and Amory's father is described as "an in-
EffectuaI, inarticulate man" and an "unassertive figure" (TSP,
49.ll!..!.!1., p. 23.
65.
p.3). Amory, himself, is not athletic and possesses none of
the mascul{ne virtues; he has "a curious strain of weakness
• • • he posseased naither courage, perseverance, nor self-
respect" (TSP, p.19). Like the hero of "The Debutante",
Amory makes a "perfect fool" of himself and fails to assert
his supericrrity before Rosalind. He is never initiated into
manhood and his life becomes not the sub-total of his acts
of daring and courage, but the sub-total of his childish
romantic affairs.
Anthony Patch of ~ 8eautiful'~ Damned is an
older but not a more mature version of Amory Blaine. Neither
is he initiated into manhood. When he has the chance of
exhibfting his superiority he assumes the role of a passive,
unassertive male:
She had sent him away! That was the reiterated burden of his despair. Instead of seizing the girl and holding her by sheer strength until she became passive to his desire, instead of beating down her will by the force of his own, he had walked, defeated and powerless, from her door, with the corners of his mouth drooping and what force there might have been in his grief and rage hidden behind the manner of a whipped school-boy.
(80, p.IIS)
Even after their marriage, Anthony does not display a forceful,
dynamic masculinity: "Gloria knew within a month that her
husband was an utter coward toward any one of a million
phantasms ••• he was a coward under a shock and a coward
under a strain -" (80, p.IS7). Like the typical Fitzgerald
hero, Anthony may be intellectually and physically a man, but
emotionally he is still very much a boy.
66.
Always under the sharlow of a woman, the Fitzgerald
hero in fact "develops a "virility complex u , "an anxious desire
to appear masculine, and an extreme susceptibility on this
50 point." Hemingway, in his account of Fitzgerald in B Moveable Feast, attributes to Fitzgerald Just such a complexe
Although he neither played football nor went to war, Fitzgerald
was obsessed with these two manly pursuits:
As the twenties passed, with my twenties marching e little ahead of them, my two juvenile regrets - at not being big enough" (or good enough) to play football in college, and at not getting overseas during the war - resolved themselves into childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism. 51
Two stories in his Apprentice Fiction are projections of this
"imaginary heroism" already discernible in Fitzgerald's ado-
lescent years. "Reade, Substitute Right Half" hes as its hero
a brave and successful football hero while "A Debt of Honor"
has as its hero a gallant, self-sacrificing soldier.
Like Fitzgerald, most of the later heroes neither
play football nor go to war. They do, however, reveal both
a deep regret and an unconscious fascination with these versions
of the modern hero. Carlyle of "The Off-Shore Pirate" regrets
that he was asked to entertain rather than fight during the
war: "It was not 50 bad except that when the infantry came
limping back from the trenches he wanted to be one of them.
The sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of those ineffable
symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding him." (FP, p.29)
50Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, (London, 1951), p. 268.
51F• Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up, (New York, 1956), p. 70.
67.
In This Side of P.aradise, Amory's heroic visions of himself
focus on the football field~
Having decided to be one of the gods of the class, he reported for freshman football practice, but in the second week, playing quarterback, already paragraphad in corners of the Princetonian, he wrenched his knee seriously anough to put him out for the rest of the season. This forced him to retire and considar the situation.
(TSP, p.43)
Although Amory centres his attention alsewhere, he continues
to be fascinated wi th tha athletic hero. Isabelle lists 'some
of her current beaux, sorne of whom "bore athletic nemes that
made him look at her admiringly" (TSP, p.67). Amory does go
to war but not as a man. He stands in contrast to the ardent
patriotism of Kerry and the idealistic opposition of Burne:
"As he walked away it seemed to Amory that the look in his
face bore a great resemblance to that in Kerry's when he had
said good-by under Blair Arch two years before. ~mory
wondered unhappily why he could never go into anything with
the primaI honesty of those two" (TSP, p.149). Amory admires
the heroic soldier but he never becomes one.
Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned neither
plays football nor fights in the war. When he is offered the
job of war correspondent, me refuses: "He had one of those
sudden flashes of illumination vouchsafed to aIl men who are
dominated by a strong and beloved woman, which show them a
world of harder men, more fiercely trained and grappling with
the abstractions of thought and war" (BD, p.206). Anthony
does enlist but even at army camp, his one chance to exhibit
68.
his virility, he retreats From the experience and allows him
self to be dominated by a woman. The war is over before his
infantry unit is called and he misses the initiation of man-
hood. Anthony displays a virility complex in another way.
In the novel, there is one, very magnified and somehow signifi-
cant, instanBe of his desire to assert his own virility. During
a visit to one of their friends, Gloria demands to go ho~e but
Amory resists:
In his mind was but one idea - that Gloria was being selfish, that she was always being selfish and would continue to be unless here and now he asserted himself as her master. This was the occasion of aIl occasions, since for a whim she had deprived him of a pleasure. His determination solidified, approached momentarily a dull and sullen hate.
(BD, p.198)
Although Anthony finally does have his way, he has acute guilt
feelings about the whole incident:
While he did not believe she would cease to love him -this, of course, was unthinkable - it was yet problematical whether Gloria without her arrogance, her independence, her virginal confidence and courage, would be the girl of his glory, the radiant woman who was precious and charming because she was ineffably, triumphantly herself.
(BD, p.202)
By thus asserting his own virility, the hero fears that he
has~espassed on the heroine's territory.
The hero continues to shrink both in his own esteem
and in that of the heroine. Instead of growing into the world
of experience, the hero retreats back to the home. He for-
sakes his masculine will to vocation and assumes the feminine
will to idleness and pleasure. Rejected by Rosalind and de-
69.
prived of the home he wants, Amory in This Si de of Paradise
seeks not the world of action but the world of idleness. He
goes on a three week binge and finds refuge in the bar, the
American antitype of the home. Although as yet undecided,
Amory at the end of the novel is about to enter the world of
business and experience. He goes back to Princeton, the
only home he knows, and contemplatee his future:
- art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew that he was safe now, free from aIl hysteria - • • • his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth - yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But - oh, Rosalindl •••
"It's aIl a poor substitute at best", he said sadly. (TSP, p.282)
Despite his protestations to the contrary, Amory does not sound
like a mature and independent man about to embrace the world
of business and success.
Like Fitzgerald, many of his heroes are writers of
one sort or another and their home becomes their office. AI-
though his multi-millionaire grandfather offers him the world
of business and adventure on a platter, Anthony Patch of The
Beautiful and Damned pre fers to be near Gloria and to indulge
in his inclination to idleness and pleasure. He refuses the
job offer as war correspondent and at army camp allows his
dut Y to become a minor interest. His one attempt at the busi-
ness world - as an insurance agent - is a miserable failure.
AfL81' a couple of unsuccessful attempts he resorts to alcohol.
Professed to be a writer, Anthony becomes more and more passive,
70.
more and more given to idleness and pleasure. Working at
home, he finds that Gloria had "lulled" his mind "to sleep.
She, who seemed of aIl women the wisest and finest, hung like
a brilliant curtain across his doorways, shutting out the
light of the sun" (BD, p.191). Gloria shows no interest in
his work and encourages his 10afing. Anthony blames the
slow-down of his mental activity on Gloria: "'And the ald mind
was working at top speed and now it's going round and round
like a cog-whee1 with nothing to catch it. As a matter of
fact l think that if l hadn't met Vou l would have done some
thing. But Vou make leisure 50 subtly attractive ••• '" (BD,
p.2l1). Anthony capitulates to the enchantment.
The fate of another "writer", Uncle George of "The
Pierian Springs and the Last Straw", resembles close1y that
of Anthony Patch. As a bachslor, Uncle George is a dissolute
but an immensely popular novelist. He finally marries the girl
of his dreams, however, and his successful career is at an end:
"Uncle George never drank again, nor did he ever write or in
fact do anything except play a middling amount of golf and
get comfortably bored with his wife". (AF, p.173) In two
later stories the m8sculine will to vocation is threatened
to be subjected to the female will to leisure. In "Gretchen's
Fort y Winks" an advertising man has to slave for six weeks
to land a big contract. His wife, however, opposes his bringing
his work home, "She was a southern girl, and any question that
71.
had to do with getting ahead in the world always tended to
give her a headache" (JA, p.l76). In protest and Dut of
boredom, she taunts her huaband and goea eut caaually with
a "friend of the family ". Only by putting a sleeping potion
in her coffee, doea her husband aucceed in fulfilling his
contract and his masculine will. In "Hot and Cold Blood",
again the wife begrudgea her huaband for neglecting her. In
the end the huaband decides to devote less time to his work
and more time to his wife and home.
The hero's proceas of diminution, his revers ion from
experience and his search for seclusion in the home, however,
does not end here. There is in Fitzgerald's work a very
pronounced, if unconscious, regression to the childish state.
At the end of This Side of Paradise, Amory, now technically a
man, regresses to his adolescent home, Princeton, and to his
adolescent lover, Rosalind. The regression to childhood is
much more overt at the end of The Beautiful and Damned:
They found Anthony sitting in a patch of sunshine on the floor of his bedroom. Before him, open, were spread his three big stamp-books, and wh en they entered he was running his hands through a great pile of stamps that he had dumped from the back of one of them • • •. • 'What are Vou doing?' demanded Dick in astonishment. 'Going back to childhood 7 [; • • ] 'Shut the door when you go Dut.' He spoke like a pert child.
(BD, pp.446-7)
Anthony, unable and reluctant to cope with experience, represented
in the figure of Dorothy Raycroft, has begun to re-enaet his
childhood. Regressing to childish innocence and fantasy, he
has become a hebephrenic-schizophrenie.
.'
72.
The heroes of two short stories, like Anthony, become
the victims of insanity and they too revert to a childish state.
In "The Lees of Happiness", the hero, Jeffrey Curtain " •••
picked up an oak chair and sent it crashing through his own
front window. Then he lay down on the couch like a child,
weeping piteously and begging ta die. A blood clot the
size of a marble had broken in his brain". (JA, p.127)
Because of "uninterrupted toil upon his shoulders and the
recent pressure at home", Charles Hemple of "The Adjuster"
finds it difficult to accept the responsibilities of manhood.
His wife is "the weak point in what had otherwise been a strong-,
minded and well-organized career." With her demands of ex
citement and pleasure, she precipitates his nervous collapse.
Their maid describes Mr. Hemplels childish behavior to his
wife:, "He came into the kitchen a while ago and began
throwing aIl the food out of the icebox, and now hels in
his room, crying and ~inging -"(JA, p.148). He too seeks
the comfort and security of childhood and shrinks from the
demands of reality.
Perhaps the most impressive example of this childish
regression is "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". The central
narrative 1ine of the story is the reversaI of the growth
cycle. Benjamin is born an oId man and becomes progressively
younger. His is a life of "normal ungrowth" (JA, p.69). At
the age of twenty he marries,. As his wife grows older, however,
he grows younger; while 9he become9 more and more 'an aged
73.
woman, he becomes more and more like a young child. The
story ends with strong overtones of the Freudian return-to-
the womb:
He did not remember clearly whether the milk wes werm or cool at his last feeding or how the deys pessed - there was only his crib and Nana's familiar presence •••• Through the noons and nights he breethed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, end faintly differentiated smells and light and darkness.
Then it was aIl dark, and his white crib and the dim faces thet moved above him and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether From his mind.
(JA, p.83)
Wrapped in warmth and security, the hero has returned to the
womb, his first home. The graduaI deterioration of the hero
is complete. The burdens of experience and reality are
avoided, the masculine will to action is absorbed in the
Feminine will to inaction, and that in turn to the will to
dissolution.
The development of the heroine is almost the reverse
of that of the hero. As the reflection of the hero's mind,
the girl, is forced to live up to the two mirror images, the
American Dream and the American nightmare, and becomes
schizophrenic in the process. Caught between two conflicting
reflections, she is doomed by males who insist on treating
her either as a goddess Dr as a bitch. By making her the
object of the two images, the hero does, in fact, deny her
very femininity. He invests her with a power which she does
74.
not have and gives her illusions of grandeur. The heroine
accepts this power reluctantly at first but gradually she
becomes dazzled and dizzied by its brilliance. In the end,
she passionately aspires for the very things thatare taboo
in a "man's world". Having been treated and worshipped like
an idol, she wants to make sure that she becomes one - and
in the process loses her femininity.
This defeminizing process takes place in the two
novelp. In ~ ~ of Paradise, Clara begins as the epitome.
of feminine charm. Even before the end of their relationship,
however, there is a parity and reversaI of mythic role.
Amory becomes Eve and Clara, Adam: "He asks her the one
thing that he knew might embarass her. lt was the remark
that the first bore made to Adam ••• 'Tell me about yourself.'
And she gave the answer that Adam must have given" LTSP, p.140).
Rosalind, intent upon having an equal if not an upper hand,
confesses to Amory: "l'm not really feminine, you know - in
my mind" (TSP, p.174). Eleanor too confesses to a masculine
mind and despairs of her femininity:
Oh, why am I a girl? ••• and here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If 1 were born a hundred years from now, weIl and good, but now what's in store for me ••• I have to marry, that goes.without saying. - Who? l'm too bright for most men, and yet 1 have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention.
(TSP, p.237)
It is exactly this patronizing attitude she is forced to
adopt, that the girl most objects to. In defiance, Gloria
75.
of The Beautiful ~ Damned insists with the others that she
has a "man's mind" (BD, p.134). Like Bernice, she bobs her
hair and emancipates and defeminizes herself.
In attempting to construct this parity with and
independence from the male, the first thing the girl rejects
is the home. She bitterly resants the traditional and auto
matic association of the girl and the home. It implies the
very inferiority which, because of the hero, she feels she
do es not deserve. In rh!! ~ of Paradise, Rosalind refuses
Amory bacause she doesn't want to be "cooped up in a little
fIat" (TSP, p.195) thinking about "pots and kitchens and
brooms" (JSP, p.196). Eleanor thinks of marriage as a "sinking
ship" that will curb her fiery and independent spirit. In
The Beautiful and Damned Gloria does marry but she has an - -abhorrence of household and wifely duties. She hates cleaning,
cooking and laundry. To her the state of motherhood is
Inconvenient, repulsive, even bestial.
In "The Adjuster", this boredom with the home and
desire to get away From it becomes the central theme. Luella
Hemple, a young and beautiful wife, craves the excitement and
pleasure that her role as wife and mother fails to provide.
She detests both cooking and housework. When once she is forced
to do them she fe81s that "She was merely slumming today in
her own home, and she wasn't enjoying it. For her it was
merely a ridiculous exception" (JA, p.153). The role of
motherhood is no longer enough for fuifiiiment: "Even my
76.
baby bores me. That sounds unnatural, Ede, but it's true.
He doesn't begin to fill my life." (JA, p.14l) Luella, from
her domestic discontent, causes her husband to be bed-ridden.
Even the role of nurse, however, fails to draw her back to
her home.
Slowly but definitely the heroine absorbs the mascu-
line characteristics that the hero has forsaken. Like Bernice,
she adds eourage and daring to her feminine character. For
Ardita of "The Off-Shore Pirate", courage becomes a philosophy
of life, "My courage is faith - fa.ith in the eterna1 resi1ience
of me - that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity" (FP,
p.3S). When Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned discovers
her husbands cowardice: "Her reactions to it were not those
attributed to her sex - it raised her neither to disgust nor
to a premature feeling of motherhood. Herself almost com-
p1etely without physica1 fear, she was unable to understand."
(BD, p.lS7) Gloria fills the vacuum har husband has 1eft.
She adds independence and arrogance to her courage:
Because she was brave, because she was "spoiled," because of her outrageous and commendable independence of judgement, and finally because of her arrogant consciousness that she had never seen a girl as beautiful as herself, Gloria had developed into a consistent, practising Nietzschean.
CBD, p .161)
Instead of a superman, however, Gloria takes on the unmistakable
character of the superwoman.
In her new-found role as superwoman, the girl begins
to usurp not only manly characteristics but manly prerogatives.
??
She smokes, drinks, says "damn" and sven shoots craps. In
"The Lees of Happiness", "the young wives were smoking and
shouting their bets and being daringly mannish for those
days" (JA, p.125).
The girl becomes so dazzled with this novel power
that ~he assumes the masouline role as sexual aggressor. In
"Babes in"the Woods", it is Isabelle, not Kenneth, that makes
the first move towards sexual communication: "Isabelle wes
quite stirred - she wound her handkerchief into a tight baIl
and by the faint light that streamed over her, dropped it
deliberately on the floor. Their hands touched for an instant
but neither spoke" (AF, p.138). Isabelle, however, is passive
in comparison with the heroine of "The Pierian Springs and
the Last Straw": "When she wanted a boy there was no preliminary
scouting among other girls for information, no sending out of
tentative approaches meant ta be retailed ta him. There was
the most direct attack by every faculty and gift that she
possessed" (AF, p.168). Unlike the hero, the girl does not
retreat from experience or sex but actively pursues it. In
This Side of Paradise, Rosalind explains how the girl has
become the sexual aggressor:
There used ta be two kinds of kisses: first when girls were kissed and deserted, second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, every one knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same way every one knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.
(TSP, p.18l)
78.
The girl, in fact, holds such progressive and aggressive
opinions on sex that she ls willing to have extra-marital
relations. Gloria talks openly and freely on the subject:
"How 1 feel is that if 1 wanted anything l'd take it.
That's what l've always thought aIl my life. • • • 1 can't
be bothered resisting things 1 want." (BD, p.192) This
broad-minded liberal attitude is in stark contrast with her
husband's Puritan fear and revulsion.
Having proved her superiority in the sexual field,
the heroine moves into the world of business and commerce.
ln the beginning it is just idle talk as it is with Rosalind
in This Side of Paradise:
She: Oh, 1 do - but not in business hours. He: Business? She: Six to two - strictly. He: l'd like ta have sorne stock in the corporation. She: Oh, it's not a corporation - It's just "Rosalind,
Unlimited." Fifty-one shares, name, good-will, and everything go es at $25,000 a year.
He: (Oisapprovingly) Sort of a chilly proposition. (TSP, p.174)
Rosalind does in fact treat Amory's proposaI of marriage as
a business proposition and a "chilly" one: "No - no - l'm
taking the hardest course, the strongest course. Marrying
Vou would be a failure and 1 never fail - " (TSP, p.194).
The heroine develops a keen Interest in her husband's
financial matters. Jacqueline of "Hot and Cold Blood" dis-
approves of her husband's lending money gratis: "There was,
for instance, much money that he had lent privately, about
thirteen hundred dollars in aIl, which he realized, in his new
79.
enlightenment, he would never see again. It had taken
Jacquellne's harder, Feminine intelligence to know this." ,\ If
(JA, p.168) Roxanne in The Lees of Happiness actually handles
her husband's financial responsibilities: "It was she who
paid the bills, pored over his bankbook, corresponded with
his publishers." (JA, p.l27)
Money, in the hands of the woman, in fact becomes a
. weapon for domination over the male:
When life gets a hold of a brainy man of fair education, that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned. He may be unselfish, kind-hearted, even just in his own way, but his first job ls to provide and hold fast. His wife shoos him on, From ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that hasn't any windows. Hels donel Life's got himl He.'s no helpl He's a spiritually married man.
(TSP, p.271)
Women's financial and social ambitions demasculinize the men
and defeminize the women:
Unfortunately the spiritually married man, as a by-product of his money chase, has garnered in the great newspaper, the popular magazine, the influ~ntial weekly - so that Mrs. Newspaper, Mrs. Magazine, Mrs. Weekly can have a better limousine than those oil people across the street or those cement people round the corner.
(TSP, p.272)
52 Fitzgerald's girls become those "preposterous, pushing women"
that 50 disgusted him with the American female in P.aris. The
golden girl becomes a gold digger.
52 Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 351.
80.
The girl, in fact, assumes the masculine will to
vocation. Thus endowed with the power of money, she begins
to adopt a hard, domineering business attitude. In "0 Russet
Witch", Olive is a wage-earner just like her fianc~. 5he
treats their impending marriage as a business transaction,
in which she is the controlling concern: "lt wes not until
the next dey that she told him about the wedding - how she
had moved the date forward: it was much better that they
should be married on the first of May." (JA., p .104) Caroline
of the same story is a one-time dancer-turned-millionairess
who dabbles in the stock market. After ordering her broker
to sell and promptly dismissing him, she proceeds to dominate
and tyrannize her grandson:
You think l'm senile. You think l'm soft. l'm not! 5he struck herself with her fist as though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and sinew. "And 1=11 have more brains left when you've got me laid out in the drawing room sorne sunny day than the rest of them were born with.
(JA, P .115)
Caroline sounds more like a hardened, authoritarian business
man than a dignifled old lady.
In "0 Russet Witch" the man still retains his will
to vocation but in The Beautiful ~ Damned Anthony Patch has
abandoned it. In it, Gloria appropriates this masculine
role. Frustrated by their lack of money, she suggests be-
coming the bread winner. Her greatest aspiration ia to become
a movie star:
UBlockhead said he'd put me in - only if l'm ever going to do anything l'Il have to start now. They only want young women. Think of the money, Anthony!
"For you - yeso But how about me?" "Don't Vou know that anything 1 have is yours too?"
(BD, p.306)
81.
Feeling his masculinity threatened, Anthony violently puts
an end to it. When Anthony is away at army camp, however,
Gloria clandestinely pursues her dream as a film star:
When Mr. Haight told her that the trial would not take place until autumn she decided that without telling ~nthony she would go into the movies. When he saw her successful, both histrionically and financially, when he saw that she could have her will of Joseph Bloeckman, yielding nothing in return, he would lose his silly prejudices. 5he lay awake half one night planning her career and enjoying her successes in anticipation, and the next morning she called up "Film Par Excellence".
(BD, p.369)
Just before her twenty-ninth birthday, Gloria has a screen
test. With shock and despair she discover~ that she has failed
the test. Her visions of idolatry turn out to be delusions of
grandeur. She does not have the capacity to fulfill the co-
lossal image that the hero has created for her. The image
collapses and she ewakes to find the qualities that gave her
her power - her youth, her beauty, and her dynamism -
perceptibly slip away. The girl resigns herself to become
an indifferent, bewildered and unhappy woman and, like Gloria,
either ends as"a grotesque similitude of a housewife" (BD,
p.424) or as a cheapened, hardened woman. She is left like
her husband with nothing but the ruins of a fantastic dream.
This process of role reversaI and imminent ruin is
82.
succinctly illustrated in a story entitled "Head and Shoulders".
In it an infant prodigy destined to intellectual fame is se-
duced by a young and beautiful singer-dancer. The hero abandons
his academic career and marries the girl. Because of her
agile body and his fertile mind, they calI themselves "h~ad
and shoulders". The girl, however, earns much more money
than he does and out of resentment he looks around for extra
employment. Just as his wife becomes pregnant, he discovers
a talent at gymnastics. His wife suggests, "Vou do sorne
giant swings for me and l'Il chase some culture for you" (FP,
p.88). The result is a complete reversaI of role. She writes
a non-literary but best-selling book "Sandra Pepys, Syncopated"
and he becomes a trapeze artist at the Hippodrome. The hero
comes home one day to find his intellectual idol come to
visit not him, but his wife. The final irony appears in a
newspaper clipping~
Marcia Tarbox's connection with the stage is not only as a spectator but as the wife of a performer. She was married last year to Horace Tarbox, who every evening delights the children at the Hippodrome with his wondrous flying-ring performance. lt ls said that the young couple have dubbed themselves Head and Shoulders, referring doubtless to the fact that Mrs. Tarbox supplies the literary and mental qualities, while the supple and agile shoulders of her husband cantribute their share ta the family fortunes.
(FP, p.9S)
Their ruin is hinted at by the hero himself: "Paor gauzy
souls trying to express ourselves in something tangible.
Marcia with her written book; l with my unwritten ones. Trying
to choose Dur mediums and th en taking what we get - and
being glad." (FP, p.93) The man sacrifices his greatest asset,
83.
his mind, for his body and the girl sacrifices her most
praiseworthy quality, her body, for her mind. Both his body
and her mind are perishable and inadequate vessels for their
respective sexes. The objects that the American society
offers the romantic imagination are gorgaous but gaudy
images at beste
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
In the early short staries and in the first two
novels, then, the girl is the imaginative centre of Fitz
gerald's vision. As the quintessence of youth, beauty,
innocence, wealth and popularity, she is, in the beginning,
bath the embodiment of the American Dream and the Fair
Heroine. This highly idealistic conception of the girl,
however, is as frail as it is all-embracing. When it is
threatened, as it is by sex, marriage or the fading of her
assets, the image collapses and the girl becomes the
embodiment of the American nightmare and the Dark Heroine.
80th the dream and the nightmare image invest the girl with
a power which, in actuallty, she does not possess. ~s a
result of this power, there ls a virtual exchange of roles:
the man retreats from the girl, shrinks from experience, takes
refuge in the home, and accepts an inferior position, and the
girl does just the opposite - she seeks the man, embraces
85.
experience, moves from the home to the office, and acquires
the dominant role. The girl, however, has neither the mind
nor the fortitude to fulfill this power and, like the man,
she ends in despair and ruine
In his Barly work F.itzgerald actually prophesied
his own life. The dream, the nightmare, the role reversaI
and the ruin èventually touched Fitzgerald as vividly and
as poignantly as they touched his characters. In a letter
to his daughter in July 7, 1938, he wrote:
Wh en l was your age l lived with a great dream. The dream grew and l learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when l decided to marry your mother after aIl, aven though l knew she was spoiled and "meant no good to me. l was sorry immediately l had married her but, being patient in those days, made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But l was a man divided - shs"wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late thët work was dignity, and the only dignity, and tried to atone for it by working hers~lf, but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever. 53
Like the F.itzgerald heroine, lelda decided upon a vocation and
frantically pursued her dream of becoming a great ballerina.
She too was lnadequate; "She didn't have the strength for
the big stage - sometimes she pretended, and pretended
beautifully, but she didn't have it u •54 lelda finally had
a nervous breakdown and spent the remainder of her life
under psychiatrie care. Fitzgerald's middle age was not much
53 Ibid ., ~. 47.
54 Ibid ., p. 47.
•
86.
happier: ~It was too late for me to recoup the damage - 1
had spent most of my resources, spiritual and material, on
her, but 1 struggled on for five years till my health
collapsed, and aIl 1 cared about was drink and forgetting ll •55
For the most part, Fitzgerald neglected his literary talent
and devoted his energies to alcohol, Hollywood and the motion
pictures. In 1940, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, a
forgotten writer, and seven years later his wife accidentally
burned to death in a sanitarium. The imminent disaster that
pervades his work was realized in his own life.
Fitzgerald was not only the prophet of his own ~ife
but also the prophet of his own societ~. As he predicted,
with the emancipation of the woman, there is not an equality
but a reversaI of roles. Possessed of the power of wealth
and beauty, the American woman becomes the aggressor and the
dominE~ring figure. The man accepts almost willingly this
subjection to the girl. America, the second paradise, becomes
regressive and inverted - a matriarchal society:
A land where the rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men - • • •• Ves, it is truly a melancholy spectacle. Women with receding chins and shapeless noses go about in broad daylight saying "00 thisl" and 'liDo thatl ri
and aIl the men, even those of great wealth, obey implicitly their women to whom they refer sonorously either as "Mrs. 50 and 50" or as "the wife"
(BD, p.28)
The American girl not only loses her golden hair but also
her white dresse 5he becomes a dark girl who "wears the pants" •
55 Ibid ., p. 47.
87.
Fitzgerald has captured or anticipated the effect of the
emancipated woman - the dramatic reversaI or confusion of
sexual roles and the transformation of America from a
patriarchal to a matriarchal society.
88.
Index ta Abbreviations
AF The Apprentice Fiction of E. Scott Fi tzgerard', 1909-1917, ed. John Kueh1, Brunswick, N. J., 1965.
FP F1appers and Phi1osophers. New York, 1959.
JA Six Tales of the ~ Age and Other Stories. New York, 1960.
TSP This ~ of Paradise. New York, 1960.
BD The Beautifu1 and Damned. New York, 1960.
89.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primarv Sources
The Apprentice Fiction of [. Scott Fitzgerald, 1909-1917, ed. John Kuehl, Brunswick, N. J., 1965.
F1appers and Phi1osophers. New York, 1959.
Six Tales of the Jazz Age SD& Other Stories. New York, 1960.
This Side of Paradise. New York, 1960.
The Beautiful !DE Damned. New York, 1960.
The Crack~. ed. Edmund Wilson, New York, 1965.
The Letters of [. Scott Fitzgerald. ed. Andrew Turnbu11, Harmondsworth, England, 1968.
Secondary Sources
Anon, "The Beautifu1 Rich", The Times Literary Supplement, October 17, 1958.
Bewley, fltlarius, The Eccentric Design. New York, 1963.
Bode, Carl ed., The Young Rebel in American literature. New York, 1955.
Brooks, C1eanth, "The American 'Innocence' in James, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner", Shenandoah XVI, Autumn, 1964.
Chase, Richard, The American Novel and its Tradition. Garden City, New York, 195~---
Eble, Kenneth, [. Scott Fitzgerald. Twayne's United States Authors Series, New Haven, 1963.
Fiedler, Leslie A., Love and Death in the American Novel. New York, 1966.--- -- ---
Liebling, A. J., "Amory, We're Beautifull", New Yorker, XXVII May 19, 1951.
Miller, James E., F. Scott Fitzgerald, His Art ~ His Technigue. New York, 1967.
90.
Mizener, Arthur, ed., f. Scott F.itzgerald, ~ Collection of Critical Essays, Englawood Cliffs, 1963.
------- The Far Side of Paradisa. Boston, 1951.
Mizaner, Arthur, "Scott Fitzgerald and the Top Girl", The Atlantic Monthly, CCVII, March, 1961.
Morris, Wright, The Territory Ahead. New York, 1958.
O'Hara, John, "Introduction". The Portable f.. Scott Fitzgerald. New York, 1965. -
Piper, Henry Dan, f. Scott Fitzgerald, ~ Critical Portrait. New York, 1965.
Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony. London, 1951.
Shain, Charles E., f. Scott Fitzgerald. Minneapolis, 1967.
Turnbu11, Andrew, Scott Fitzgerald. New York, 1962.
Yates, Donald A., "The Road to Paradise, Fitzgerald's Literary Apprenticeship", Modern Fiction Studies, VII, 5pring, 1961.