Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's Muses of Disillusionment Allison Rogers
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
University of Texas at Tyler Scholar Works at UT Tyler English Department Theses Literature and Languages Spring 6-1-2015 Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's Muses of Disillusionment Allison Rogers Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uttyler.edu/english_grad Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Rogers, Allison, "Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's Muses of Disillusionment" (2015). English Department Theses. Paper 5. http://hdl.handle.net/10950/279 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Literature and Languages at Scholar Works at UT Tyler. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Department Theses by an authorized administrator of Scholar Works at UT Tyler. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FITZGERALD’S AND HEMINGWAY’S MUSES OF DISILLUSIONMENT by ALLISON ROGERS A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master’s of Arts English Department Karen Sloan, Ph.D., Committee Chair College of Arts and Sciences The University of Texas at Tyler May 2015 © Copyright by Allison Rogers 2015 All Rights Reserved Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Chapter One: Defining the Form .....................................................................................................1 Chapter Two: The Muses .................................................................................................................7 Rosalind Connage ................................................................................................................7 Eleanor Savage .....................................................................................................................9 Daisy Buchanan .................................................................................................................10 Nicole Warren ....................................................................................................................14 Lady Brett Ashley ..............................................................................................................17 Catherine Barkley ..............................................................................................................20 The Sea ...............................................................................................................................23 Chapter Three: Form Conclusions .................................................................................................27 Chapter Four: Applying the Form: Delusion before Disillusion ...................................................28 Chapter Five: Two Sides of One Muse (This Side of Paradise) ....................................................30 Chapter Six: Dreaming in Daisy (The Great Gatsby) ....................................................................42 Chapter Seven: Tender Tidings of a Promised Land (Tender Is the Night) ..................................53 Chapter Eight: The Sun Also Rises on Disillusionment (The Sun Also Rises) ..............................65 Chapter Nine: Hope Stillborn (A Farewell to Arms) .....................................................................80 Chapter Ten: The Old Man and the Muse (The Old Man and the Sea) .........................................93 Chapter Eleven: Conclusion ........................................................................................................106 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................109 i Abstract FITZGERALD’S AND HEMINGWAY’S MUSES OF DISILLUSIONMENT Allison Rogers Thesis Chair: Karen Sloan, Ph.D. University of Texas at Tyler May 2015 This paper examines how the main female characters in three F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night, and three Ernest Hemingway novels, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea, function as muses of disillusionment for the protagonists of those works. First, I analyze the extent to which each of the protagonist’s female complements can be defined as a muse in accordance with qualities ascribed to the ancient Greek mythological muses. Subsequently, I assess how each muse functions in her respective novel first to inspire delusion and later to reveal reality for the man, who in each case becomes her absolute devotee since she reflects an ominous seed of hope within him. In looking at these women in this context, I hope to illuminate one of Fitzgerald and Hemingway’s potential purposes in characterizing them: to reveal the utter devastation and isolation of the post-WW I generation as they were forced to accept the inevitable chaotic cruelty of the world. ii Chapter One Defining the Form Even during F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway’s respective lifetimes, many critics hailed them as the voices of an entire generation—a generation lost between its yearning for and remembrance of pre-war times dominated by traditional American values (hard work, heroism, true love, and roots) and its new post-war reality. The nation’s armor of optimism may have endured chinks over America’s 150-year history, but each time the country seemed to emerge stronger, more affluent, and more successful on the international stage. Just in the 30 years leading up to the Great War, the average per capita GDP (gross domestic product) in the United States had climbed by over 60 percent (Balke and Gordon 84), proof of the “economic dynamism” that Zbigniew Brzezinski claims was the “necessary condition for the exercise of global primacy” (23). The United States had ushered in its first legitimately American literary movement, Transcendentalism, and by the second decade of the twentieth century, Europeans began to accept culture and art in and from the United States as independently valuable and therefore worthy of both criticism and appreciation. Generally speaking, Americans had seen the American spirit triumph. According to Music Professor Brian Dykstra, Ragtime music ruled the club, saloon, and party scene across America because of its “joy, energy, and jaunty bounce” (qtd. in Schulslaper 92), which made it “great music for both listening and dancing” (Argyle 24). The good-times atmosphere, fueled by prosperity and peace, reinforced the innocence of a people ripe for the ruining. With America’s participation in its first overseas war—its first war in two generations, and its first outside war with a draft—came a brand new understanding of the world.1 American 1 When the war began, the United States only had a standing army of around 100,000 men. President Woodrow Wilson immediately signed a selective service draft. Eventually, 1 men who fought in WW I, even those who were not physically injured, returned confident only in their uncertainties as to the best way to deal with their broken ideals. They saw for the first time the world’s bitter injustices as well as the inadequacy of traditional measures for tackling those injustices. Returning to a nation whose ideals seemed as rigidly promising as ever, many of these men felt caged by their hope for the truths they had once innocently revered and their realization of the fallacies holding up those hopes. Consequently, as Hemingway cites on the dedication page of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, Gertrude Stein dubbed these men members of “a lost generation.” Her observation does not only apply to the American writers and artists of the interwar period, but it does accurately describe those writers and artists. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not just members of the Lost Generation though; they used their member status as a platform, a platform most efficiently revealed by considering three of each master’s most influential works: Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night (clarified by Cathy Barks as his most important and critically acclaimed works in her article “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Critical Reception”) and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea (enumerated by Robert Evans as three of “the works on which his reputation most depends” in his article “Critical Contexts: In His Time (and Later): Ernest Hemingway’s Critical Reputation” [5]). In these works, Fitzgerald and Hemingway define the reasons for their generation’s feelings of isolation, loss, and bewilderment through the struggles of their protagonists. They capture these characters’ (and thereby their generation’s) failed attempts to regain the deeper meaning through their nostalgic longings for around 4.8 million men served in WW I, and an estimated half of those were drafted. The other half were soldiers who volunteered for the cause. More than 110,000 American soldiers died during the war (“Selective Service Act”). However, these American soldiers fought in battles that Killed a combined 10 million soldiers and wounded 20 million (Liulevicius 20). 2 the idealist values of their pre-war Edenic America. We can see one outcropping of this nostalgic longing in the relationships both authors’ male protagonists form with female characters in their respective books. In the past, critics have focused on these relationships as shallow and superficial evidence of a derogatory authorial disease or system of values, such as in Richard Fantina’s “Hemingway's Masochism, Sodomy, and the Dominant