F Scott Fitzgerald

Summary:

F Scott Fitzgerald’s heroines were fake, unpleasant and, ultimately, tragic.  They are a romantic fiction, and it is doubtful that there were many, if any, such people in reality.  They arguably harmed the cause of feminism and women’s rights. 

Nevertheless, Fitzgerald created an enduring myth of ‘the flapper’ which has dominated interpretations of the 1920s ever since, and it is possible that hundreds of thousands of women at the time watched, and perhaps themselves became a little more self-assertive and free.

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The first thing to note about F Scott Fitzgerald’s novels is that they are FICTION.  The people, events and settings in them are not real; they are inventions designed to sell stories to their readership. 

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, for a short while at the beginning of the 1920s, Fitzgerald’s novels impacted American society.  His 1920 novel This Side of Paradise galvanised 1920s co-eds as much as Catcher in the Rye spoke to 1950s teenagers – and, since the novel featured Princeton: “it was read as a handbook for collegiate conduct” (Bruccoli, 1993). 

Most of Fitzgerald’s readership in the 1920s were young females, or older middle-class women with enough free time to read magazines, desperate for some vicarious excitement in their lives; Fitzgerald’s stories were the 1920s’ Love Island. 

Do Fitzgerald’s novels offer historians any insights into the period, and into the situation of women in the 1920s?  The British historian John Traynor writes (1997):

“His portrait of a glamorous upper class helped to create the image of the ‘Roaring Twenties’, in which glamorous women and handsome men spent their time attending glittering parties and dancing….  Historian Hugh Brogan says that Fitzgerald created a legend that the rich lived in a whirl of parties, yachts, furs and cosmetics.”

As part of this legend, American popular magazines in the 1920s “were in the habit of proclaiming Fitzgerald as the ‘discoverer’ of the Flapper”.  (Cowley and Cowley, 1966)

The Barnes & Noble edition of Flappers and Philosophers comments:

“The short story collection Flappers and Philosophers (1920) introduced the personality – the flapper – that, like Fitzgerald, came to emblematize the era.  Flappers were pert women who wore makeup, bobbed their hair, hiked up their skirts, and rebelled against the constraints the older generation tried to impose upon them.”

So it will come as a surprise for you to be told that – although in This Side of Paradise Isabelle is called a ‘speed’ (a girl with a reputation for sexual experience) and Cecilia calls her sister Rosalind a ‘vamp’ (vampire: a dangerously flirtatious woman) – I have not been able to find any instance of Fitzgerald directly describing any of the women in his books as a ‘flapper’; if there are any such instances, there are not many. 

In fact, the female characters in Fitzgerald’s novels are not nice people at all – materialistic, shallow, selfish, dumb and deceitful – indeed, what one critic comments about The Great Gatsby (“No one cares about anyone else”) is arguably true of all of Fitzgerald’s heroines. 

Rather, Fitzgerald’s ‘heroines’ are objects: beautiful, flirtatious and young (usually aged 17-19 … ‘past it’ by 24), and described with a lurid sensuality which we find inappropriate today.  And while Gretchen Fischle (2016) condemns Fitzgerald as merely ‘sexist’, there is a strong argument that he was downright misogynistic … he clearly despised his female characters, whom he makes to leech off men, and who end up either defeated, or ultimately a disappointment. 

“Fitzgerald only wrote books about men: men’s thoughts, men’s professional sacrifices, men coming to terms with the basic pointlessness of women… As Daisy Buchanan reminds us in The Great Gatsby, the best thing a girl can be in this world is a ‘beautiful little fool’.  The hero will have excelled at a wide range of academic achievements at Princeton, but as a heroine you are not required to have excelled at anything, except sitting drunk in the passenger seat of a terrifically expensive car”,

writes Natasha Green (2020) .

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Examples from Fitzgerald's books and short stories:

‘Bernice Bobs her Hair’ (Flappers & Philosophers, 1920)

Bernice is a dull, shy and part-Native American girl who is taught how to flirt by her popular cousin Marjorie, who tricks her into bobbing her hair to try to be more socially attractive.  When this backfires, Bernice cuts off Marjorie’s pigtails while she sleeps, and sneaks off to return home, chuckling that she “should have scalped the selfish thing”. 

‘The Offshore Pirate’ (Flappers & Philosophers, 1920)

The book is set on a luxury yacht, and starts with Ardita aggressively refusing her uncle’s attempts to introduce her to a suitable husband (Toby). 

“She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity.  Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied.  And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand.  The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.”

That night, as Ardita sits alone, the yacht is captured by pirates, led by Curtis Carlyle, with whom she falls in love:

“Carlyle broke the silence at last ‘Lucky girl,’ he sighed, ‘I've always wanted to be rich – and buy all this beauty.’
Ardita yawned.  ‘I'd rather be you,’ she said frankly. 
‘You would – for about a day.  But you do seem to possess a lot of nerve for a flapper.’”

"‘Now,’ said the young man cheerfully to Ardita, who had witnessed this last scene in withering silence, ‘if you will swear on your honor as a flapper – which probably isn't worth much – that you'll keep that spoiled little mouth of yours tight shut for forty-eight hours, you can row yourself ashore in our rowboat.’”

When the police and her uncle return, Carlyle turns out in fact to be Toby in disguise, and Ardita goes off happily to marriage. 

This Side of Paradise (1920)

This Side of Paradise is about the infatuation of a young man, Amory Blaine, with Rosalind, a brazen flapper, who hates other women and stalks around with a haughty, petulant air. 

“All criticism of Rosalind ends in her beauty.  There was that shade of glorious yellow hair, the desire to imitate which supports the dye industry.  There was the eternal kissable mouth, small, slightly sensual, and utterly disturbing.  There were gray eyes and an unimpeachable skin with two spots of vanishing color.  She was slender and athletic, without underdevelopment, and it was a delight to watch her move about a room, walk along a street, swing a golf club, or turn a cartwheel.”

“How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtones, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his.  Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air.”

“AMORY: (Softly – the battle lost) I love you. 
ROSALIND: I love you – now.”

‘Winter Dreams' (Metropolitan Magazine 1922)

Dexter Green is first captivated by Judy Jones when she is a "beautifully ugly" child of 11 ... but whom we are told is a girl "destined after a few years to be inexpressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men”. 

By the time she is 19, she was “a slender enamelled doll in cloth of gold; gold in a band at her head, gold in two slipper points at her dress’s hem” and she has him besotted:

"Dexter surrendered a part of himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had ever come in contact.  Whatever Judy wanted, she went after with the full pressure of her charm.”

“She had treated him with interest, with encouragement, with malice, with indifference, with contempt.  She had inflicted on him the innumerable little slights and indignities possible in such a case — as if in revenge for having ever cared for him at all.  She had beckoned him and yawned at him and beckoned him again and he had responded….  She had insulted him, and she had ridden over him, and she had played his interest in her against his interest in his work – for fun. 

At the end of the story, finding out from an acquaintance that – at age 27 – Judy had lost her looks, Dexter breaks down and weeps … but not for her:

“The dream was gone.  Something had been taken from him.  In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of … her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning.  Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer.”

The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

This story (believed by many to be based on the realtionship of Fitzgerald with his wife Zelda) is about Anthony and Gloria, who wreck their life “on the shoals of dissipation”, living their meaningless lives in such a reckless and hedonistic way that the grandfather cuts them out of his will. 

Gloria Gilbert is a noted beauty and former ‘speed’ with the nickname: ‘Coast to Coast Gloria’ – “a sweet young thing, with a flippant manner and a penchant for chewing gumdrops”. 

Already, however, at age 22, Anthony is joking that she is “this female Methuselah”, and by 30 Gloria is an unhappy woman living in failure and dread of the future, whose bedroom calls out to her:

“yours is not the first daintiness and delicacy that has faded here under the summer suns.  Youth has come into this room in palest blue and left it in the grey cerements of despair, and … that bed stands pouring out waves of misery into the darkness.”

The Great Gatsby (1925)

In this book (which has been made into a film), Jay Gatsby tries to win Daisy Buchanan by flaunting his wealth and possessions in a world of parties:

“Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes….  Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed.  And all the time something within her was crying for a decision.  She wanted her life shaped now, immediately – and the decision must be made by some force – of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality – that was close at hand.”

When Daisy learns that her husband Tom has a mistress, the narrator is shocked by her reaction:

“I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away.  It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head.”

And when Daisy runs over and kills a woman, Gatsby takes the blame for her, and is shot dead by the woman’s husband. 

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

The novel ends with a comment to thrill historians:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

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Fitzgerald went to a posh school paid for by a rich aunt.  He lived in a very limited world, with six years in Europe and most of his later years in depression or alcoholism.  His wife, on whom we are told he based the ‘flappers’ in his stories, suffered from mental illness and was committed to an asylum. 

So if we were evaluating Fitzgerald’s representations of 1920s women as an historical source, we would pronounce him very unreliable indeed .