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Country of Illusion: Imagined Geographies and Transnational Connections in F. Scott Fitzgerald's America

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Country of Illusion: Imagined Geographies and Transnational Connections in F. Scott Fitzgerald's America Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2012 Country of Illusion: Imagined Geographies and Transnational Connections in F. Scott itF zgerald's America Charles Mitchell Frye III Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Frye III, Charles Mitchell, "Country of Illusion: Imagined Geographies and Transnational Connections in F. Scott itzF gerald's America" (2012). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 764. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/764 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. COUNTRY OF ILLUSION: IMAGINED GEOGRAPHIES AND TRANSNATIONAL CONNECTIONS IN F. SCOTT FITZGERALD‟S AMERICA A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Charles Mitchell Frye III B.A., University of South Carolina, 2003 M.A., University of South Carolina, 2006 May 2012 “The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Winter Dreams” (1922) “We once believed... that there were things one place which did not exist in another.” -Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (1932) ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to the many scholars who read or heard portions of this dissertation and generously offered advice for improvement. These include Gerald Kennedy, Brannon Costello, Richard Moreland, Katherine Henninger, Michael Nowlin, Kirk Curnutt, Jackson Bryer, and Park Bucker. Louisiana State University‟s Graduate School and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society both provided fellowships that facilitated the research and composition of this project. Thanks, too, to The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review for allowing me to reprint the essay that appears here as chapter four. Lastly, I thank my family, friends, and fiancée for forming the alliterative trio that kept me sane. iii PREFACE I started out intending to write a dissertation on confluences of manhood, economy, and American region in F. Scott Fitzgerald‟s fiction. I was drawn both to Fitzgerald‟s dated Alger- esque regional stereotypes and his deployment of these static forms in the spastic modernist literary environment. My original project entailed mapping Fitzgerald‟s representation of the United States through the gender and economic tropes coded in the regional types he so frequently invoked: stock characters like his displaced Southern men (who flee home to pursue wealth up north) and his wide-eyed Midwestern boys (who never fit in with their East Coast peers at prep school). Yet every attempt to write that particular dissertation faltered, for Fitzgerald‟s America proved at each step to be much broader in historical scope than the first half of the twentieth century and much larger in space than the forty-eight states that formed the Union when he died in 1940. More often than not, Fitzgerald‟s sectional stereotypes are indebted to nineteenth-century American regionalist literatures, meaning that any serious consideration of region in his Jazz Age and Great Depression fiction must reach at least as far back as the time of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why Fitzgerald‟s contemporary critics resisted his sentimental caricatures and what political purpose he had in invoking them in the first place. Fitzgerald‟s cosmopolitanism (and that of his peers) poses another obstacle to an exclusively American, strictly twentieth-century reading of region in his works. When writing about American place, interwar authors made frequent connections between domestic and foreign spaces. H.L. Mencken, along with a number of eugenicist thinkers, blamed the South‟s economic woes in part on the supposedly bad genes of European immigrants; Fitzgerald himself compared the French Riviera to the American South; and many writers likened the glamor of US iv cities to the Orientalized allure of the Far East. The recent Great War had made the world a smaller place, a phenomenon evident in the overlap of these imagined geographies. Thus, while this dissertation retains an emphasis on American region in the era of Boom and Bust, it incorporates a wide perspective of regionalist literary history and a transnational approach more conducive to explicating Fitzgerald‟s politicized citations of foreign contexts. In referring to “Fitzgerald‟s America,” the title of the present project alludes both to the places he represented in fiction and to the American/transnational histories surrounding his works. These strategies provide a toolset for analyzing the paradox of American place in the early twentieth century: the country seemed to shrink as a result of syndicated media and the homogenization of culture, but it expanded considerably in terms of global connectivity and the dissemination of US cultural products abroad. What I hope to show is the remarkable extent to which Fitzgerald‟s fiction capitalized on the blurring of these geographic boundaries. v TABLE OF CONTENTS EPIGRAPH......................................................................................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................................iii PREFACE.......................................................................................................................................iv ABSTRACT..................................................................................................................................vii INTRODUCTION: PLACE IN FITZGERALD..............................................................................1 REGION IN REVERSE: SOUTHBOUND AND BACKWARDS WITH FITZGERALD AND FAULKNER..................................................................................................................................23 ORIENTAL BY OCCIDENT: RAJAHS, SHEIKS, AND SAMURAI IN FITZGERALD‟S AMERICAN EAST.......................................................................................................................68 FITZGERALD, MIDWESTERN MODERNISTS, AND THE PLACE OF THE POLITICAL CENTER IN THE URBAN MIDWEST.....................................................................................111 WESTWARD EXPANSION, ECONOMIC CONTRACTION: THE “SEMI-COWBOY” POLITICS OF FITZGERALD‟S THE LAST TYCOON..............................................................149 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION OF THE PARIS CAFÉ: EXPATRIATE AUTHORS, COCKTAIL CULTURE, AND TRANSNATIONAL NATIONALISM....................................176 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................220 APPENDIX: PUBLISHER‟S PERMISSION TO REPRINT.....................................................229 VITA............................................................................................................................................230 vi ABSTRACT The two decades between World Wars I and II were a remarkably isolationist, xenophobic period in the history of American politics and culture. In the era‟s literature, however, some US authors repurposed regional writing as a medium for rethinking conservative nationalism and for imagining their country‟s place in the emerging global community. F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose career successes and failures mirrored the parabolic national pattern of Boom and Bust, was one such author. Though his works have seldom been interpreted through a regionalist lens, Fitzgerald lived in and wrote about every major American section, often planting tropes of transregional and transnational significance in his “local color” fictions, using US place to address sociopolitical topics. When Fitzgerald wrote about his native Midwest, he contrasted its pastoral past with its rapidly urbanizing present; in taking up this theme, he linked his works with a body of 1920s fiction and social scientific discourse arguing that newly- booming Midwestern cities presented evidence of a spreading cultural homogeneity. His stories about the South ponder the role of biological determinism in inter-regional debates about defining “progress” and “regress” in the 1920s. In his writings about the regional East, he frequently incorporated nominal “Oriental” elements, juxtaposing the excessive privilege of blue-blooded American “Brahmin” with the plight of Asian immigrants assailed in the era by draconian immigration reform. Fitzgerald‟s American West came to serve in his late career works as a representation of moribund Western Civilization, beleaguered by fascism and anti- democratic elements; like a handful of other authors in the 1930s, he drew inspiration from the elegiac, apocalyptic tone of the Western film genre, and he combined Western tropes with the philosophy of Oswald Spengler to express his
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