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The baby vamp and the decline of the west: Biographical and cultural issues in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s portrayals of women
Gibbens, Elizabeth Pennington, M.A.
The American University, 1994
UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with with permission permission of the of copyright the copyright owner. owner.Further reproduction Further reproduction prohibited without prohibited permission. without permission. The Baby Vamp and the Decline of the West:
Biographical and Cultural Issues in F. Scott Fitzgerald's
Portrayals of Women
by
Elizabeth P. Gibbens
submitted to the
Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences
of the American University
in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree
of
Master of Arts
in
Literature
Signatures of Committee:
Chair: ---
the College
Date 1994
The American University 1o?i Washington, D.C. 20016
THE AMEBIC AIT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE BABY VAMP AND THE DECLINE OF THE WEST:
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CULTURAL ISSUES
IN F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S
PORTRAYALS OF WOMEN
BY
Elizabeth P. Gibbens
ABSTRACT
Meaning in F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction results from biographical
and cultural connotation. Fitzgerald wrote semi-autobiographical fiction.
As a young author, he wanted to live as a romantic hero. Marrying Zelda
Sayre, he enriched his romantic possibilities. Encouraged as a child to
be charming, she complied with her husband's portrayal of her. She suited
her role as his muse. As she matured, the conflicting pulls of her
authentic and fictional selves destroyed her.
Western culture supported Fitzgerald's "creating" Zelda. C.G. Jung
argues that men, in worshipping women, have revered their own creative
powers. In his Zelda character, Fitzgerald celebrates his authority as an
artist. The conspiratorial Zelda that he sees refuses to live in his
fictional cage; she strives to become an artist in her own right.
In The Great Gatsbv. Daisy Buchanan is a modern muse. Since he
constructs his own reality, Jay Gatsby is a figurative artist. In the
failure of Gatsby's vision, Fitzgerald disparages American consumerism.
While Gatsbv emerges as American myth, in Tender is the Night.
ii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fitzgerald creates a metaphor for Western decline. In Tender. Fitzgerald
shows that women's worlds are chaotic --he shows women to be incapable of
governing. He uses Nicole Diver to show that sexually assertive women are
bestial. Seemingly, to Fitzgerald, there can be no equality of authority
between the sexes. Fitzgerald evidently reacts against female
emancipation.
iii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT...... ii
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION...... 1
II. BIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN F. SCOTT AND ZELDA S. FITZGERALD...... 3
III. MALE SOUL WORSHIP: CULTURAL ISSUES IN FITZGERALD'S VIEWS OF CREATIVITY...... 15
IV. A PANDERING MUSE: DAISY BUCHANAN OF THE GREAT GATSBY...... 21
V. THREE KINDS OF MARBLE: THE HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK OF TENDER IS THE NIGHT...... 27
VI. FROM SUFFRAGE TO SUFFERING: THE ODDLY BEVELLED MIRRORS OF A NEW WORLD...... 35
VII. SETTLING THINGS: TRADITION, REACTION, AND AN AUTHOR'S DYING CRY...... 49
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 53
iv
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I. INTRODUCTION Andrei Codrescu, evoking the sultry appeal of New Orleans, describes the cemetery F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing This Side of Paradise, saw from his New Orleans apartment window: [Fitzgerald] had the upstairs apartment, the one with the windows that look on the upraised graves. I can see him, coffee in hand, standing in his robe on the little balcony, wincing from last night's gin, looking down on the little houses of the dead, wishing he was one of them. “It's not so great on this side of paradise," he might have said, to no one in particular. (Codrescu 194) The Lafayette Cemetery is a precinct in New Orleans' city for the dead. Part of a huge complex of cemeteries, its above-ground tombs, with algae like the gnarled velvet of old carnival gowns and ghostly whitewashed facades, fascinate foreigners. Regarding the vaults, people often forget the reasons they exist — the graves hide their inhabitants, who would otherwise make their presence known by washing up after a hurricane on someone's front door step. The seemingly otherworldly inscriptions on the graves, "Louis Octave Broussard, 1801-1848," argue against any impression that Americans' ancestors people this city that only awakens on All Souls' Day. There is a kinship between Fitzgerald's fiction and the graves which were his view. Outwardly enchanting, there are lives buried within Fitzgerald's stories. Alien tourists, we readers can simply admire the preternatural allure of Fitzgerald's words, or we can explore the frequently painful reality which shaped Fitzgerald as an author. While Fitzgerald was writing Paradise, Zelda Sayre was also looking at tombs; contemplating death, Zelda also appeared hopeful. Perhaps wanting to live her life for story, Zelda asked Fitzgerald: Why should graves make people feel in vain? All the broken columnes and clasped hands and doves and angels mean romances and in an hundred years I think I shall like having young people speculate on whether my eyes were brown or blue... (ZSF 1991 446)
1
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It seems that to Zelda, the possibilities in each life story made death purposeful. Zelda's end offers many interpretations; a frustrated ballerina burned beyond recognition, Zelda's remains were identified by the scorched slipper on which they lay (Milford 453). Ironically, Zelda's death resembles a story — the one in which Snow White's father, the king, forces her stepmother to dance in red-hot slippers until she dies.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. II. BIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN F. SCOTT AND ZELDA S. FITZGERALD
Scott and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald created the story of their lives.
Tragic as their tale is, it took its shape from their own creative
methods; Fitzgerald effectively molded the tale into fiction. In a less
straightforward, commercially-successful fashion, Zelda also wrote
autobiographical fiction. Inspired, the Fitzgeralds thrived on inventing
worlds for themselves. However, in later life, both reflected that they
had danced through life on the promises of popular songs (Milford 353,
441); as spirits of the earth, both were unable to live outside their
times. As E.L. Doctorow notices,
If we allow that culture...transforms itself into a jailhouse walling out reality, then songs comprise the cells of our imprisonment...the bars we grasp are our songs (Doctorow 58).
Initially, both Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald grasped the androcentric
standards of their times. In her mid-twenties, Zelda began to realize her
imprisonment as beauty personified; reaching out for a more meaningful
life, Zelda was destroyed.
In his Invented Lives. James R. Mellow recounts how Scott and Zelda,
using the world as paper and themselves as the keys of a typewriter,
authored and practically lived their story before writing it down. Mellow
explores the deeply personal, autobiographical qualities of Fitzgerald's
fiction; nevertheless, Mellow does not examine deeply how Western
patriarchy informs the relationship reflected in Fitzgerald's fiction.
3
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The extent to which Zelda Fitzgerald authored her own existence, and the
ways Scott Fitzgerald portrayed women, particularly Zelda, in his fiction,
are matters requiring careful investigation.
Jean Baker Miller explains that when sexual, racial, or any other
status dictates human relationships, those who wield power misrepresent
the reality in which their underlings live (Miller 183). Of the dominant
group, Miller says, "...It does not encourage subordinates' full and free
expression of their experience," and "...It characterizes subordinates
falsely" (Miller 183). As Miller's statements make clear, even if
Fitzgerald intentionally created shallow female characters, the ways
Fitzgerald perceived Zelda and depicted her in fiction affect women's
lives.
Accordingly, the intimate friend of Scott and Zelda, Gerald Murphy,
argued against the widespread belief that Fitzgerald faithfully modeled
some of his female characters on Zelda. In an interview with Zelda's
biographer, Nancy Milford, Murphy observed:
. . . [Scott] could be.. .very simple-minded about Zelda. I mean, even when he seems to use her as a fictional model she is so one-sided. But she was far more complex; he never really caught that. (Milford 157)
Murphy's comment frees us to investigate some alternative origins of
Fitzgerald's feminine characters. An authoritative source, Murphy
shatters the flapper image, the "Estee Lauder" picture of Zelda, revealing
her to be a woman more substantial than Fitzgerald's enchantress.
Evidently, Zelda was to Fitzgerald as a poem is to its poet. In an
interview with Milford, Sara Murphy said, "I don't think he [Fitzgerald]
knew much about women and children," and she mentions a letter she wrote
advising him that:
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You don't even know what Zelda or Scottie are like -- in spite of your love for them. It seemed to us the other night (Gerald too) that all you thought and felt about them was in terms of yourself.. .1 feel obliged in honesty of a friend to write to you that the ability to know what another person feels in a given situation will make --or ruin lives. (Milford 192; Correspondence 398)
Gerald Murphy's misgivings about Fitzgerald's portrayal of Zelda are
buttressed in Mrs. Murphy's letter. In view of Zelda's insanity, we can
appreciate what Mrs. Murphy apparently observed. That Scott Fitzgerald
thought Zelda was part of himself, not an autonomous human being, damaged
the couple's relationship. Drawing on Miller's insights, the Murphys'
assertions show how Fitzgerald, the dominant man, created reality for his
subordinated wife.
In their book The Madwoman in the Attic. Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar argue that distorted female characters have hampered women's
abilities to write fiction. In his fiction, Fitzgerald renews a tradition
which fatally misrepresents women's reality. Although Fitzgerald's
characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, are all
somewhat mythical, the connotation of each personae is important to female
readers. Dick Diver and Jay Gatsby are sympathetic heroes; we can see
that to the writer, they are positive figures who want to recapture a
genteel past Fitzgerald cherishes. In contrast, Nicole and Daisy are
unsympathetic and distant. While Gatsby and Diver live in godlike
spheres, Nicole and Daisy, having no universes of their own, can only act
upon the worlds of men.
For three generations, women have read Fitzgerald's fiction. It is
not surprising that his feminine personae still resemble the social faces
of many women. Artists try to imitate life so that they can reveal its
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secrets; in the artistic food chain, popular culture transfigures social
life. People often wish to resemble popular images represented in movies,
books, or music. Imitating art, audiences humanly misread artists'
messages. Perhaps this is the dynamism of art: in The Magic Mountain.
Thomas Mann's Hans Castorp reasons that studies of humanity, including
"the artistic impulse," are "...variations of one and the same, just
shadings of it. . .variations of one and the same universal interest" (Mann
259). In other words, Mann seems to say that authors write in different
ways within a definite tradition; writers act as jazz musicians -- they
improvise on a theme.
The musicians who inspired the Beatles, Buddy Holly and Elvis
Presley, were raised in an environment radically different, except for its
poverty, from Liverpool. Mimicking Elvis and Buddy Holly, the Beatles
originated their own sound. They renewed the popularity of rock music
after a period of decline. Taking their predecessors' work into their own
souls, making it their own, they invigorated an art form.
Along the same lines, Zelda, emulating the heroines of popular
songs, breathed life into Fitzgerald's baby vamp. Using Zelda as a
fictional model, Fitzgerald translated her facade into a woman twice
removed from Zelda's core of being. The lives of Fitzgerald's female
characters begin and end with male images of women -- certainly, men wrote
the songs which inspired Zelda; Scott fictionalized Zelda. Writing to
interpret life as he saw it, Fitzgerald rejuvenated a tradition; Zelda's
misshapen personality, the result of her life as the dazzling 1920's
flapper, was and is the reality for many women. Patriarchal literature,
which suppresses women by making them grotesque or ethereal, reflects a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. world in which most psychotherapists are men and the majority of their
patients are women (Kaplan 268).
Had Fitzgerald unequivocally believed that Zelda was not his
animated persona, he would not have said to Malcolm Cowley, "Sometimes I
don't know whether Zelda isn't a character that I created myself" (Cowley
21). On the other hand, Fitzgerald later said to a friend, "...My
characters are all Scott Fitzgerald. Even the feminine characters are
feminine Scott Fitzgeralds" (Heame 258) . Asserting in the first opinion
that he has created Zelda and in the second implying that Zelda is a
feminine Scott Fitzgerald, he appears to intimate his belief that he has
absorbed her ego into his soul. If she were of his own soul, Fitzgerald
would have fashioned Zelda the muse; it seems Scott struggled with Zelda
to confine her life to the space of his mind and fiction.
To a degree, the Fitzgeralds' marital struggle was a battle over who
owned the rights to Zelda; evidently, Scott, considering himself the
professional artist of the couple, made Zelda's work his own (Milford 98).
Although Fitzgerald is the more accomplished artist of the two, it is
obvious why he was; from an early age, Fitzgerald learned that his
vocation would be vital to his happiness. His father, devastated by
failure, was a tragic figure in Scott's life (Mellow 14, 18-19). To
Fitzgerald, becoming successful in a career must have meant the difference
between abiding as a haunted shell and living.
His culture and his education both supported the literary status
Fitzgerald aimed to realize. He received some of the best credentials his
nation, and his mother's money, provided. At the Newman School and
Princeton University, it was almost assured that Fitzgerald would absorb
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the classical training necessary to becoming an author in the Western
tradition.
In contrast, Zelda doubtlessly learned to choose men, not
professions, carefully (Hartnett xiii). Surely, like other Southern
girls, she was admonished, "You are who you marry" (Daniell 6). To some
extent because of her youthful indolence and in part because of her native
culture, Zelda had none of the scholastic opportunities of Fitzgerald.
The society which fixed Zelda's personality ruthlessly repressed African
Americans and prided itself on its iron lilies (its imprisoned women).
The Southern racial system could not have functioned without sexual
oppression -- historians believe that female subordination began when
caste divisions were established among men (Miller 188). In her young
life, Zelda must have seen few alternatives to living through men; it
appears she wrote herself right into Fitzgerald's vision.
By trapping Zelda (with her frequent assistance), and perhaps
himself, in a living fiction, Scott precipitated the Fitzgeralds' collapse
-- no one can live life in a costume. Fitzgerald's work, with its
lyricism, its piercing nostalgia, is the child of his marriage to Zelda.
The painful collapse the Fitzgeralds suffered trying to be literature has
enriched Twentieth-Century American Literature, but their young deaths
must also make us mourn for a complete version of The Last Tycoon and
other possible works.
Fitzgerald's Pierian Springs was itself a cultural product.
Fitzgerald, authoring his existence, chose to be the man he was; Zelda
complied with the pictures popular songs evoked and with the fictions
Fitzgerald created for her. To succeed in terms of her society, Zelda
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enjoyed little freedom in creating her role. Surely, reality threatened
Fitzgerald's Platonic conception of Zelda; in Paradise. he was to write:
When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. (Paradise 230)
When Zelda resisted Fitzgerald's romance, he became frustrated, as Zelda
recalled in Caesar's Things:
He was almost certainly falling in love which was acceptable to him. He had planned his life for story anyway. [She] told him about how poor she was and how he wouldn't have wanted her had he seen her somewhere else. This displeased [him]; he could weave his own romance and was well able to do so with what there was at hand...(ZSF 1942 30)
In fact, Zelda grew up in what is known in the American South as noble
poverty. In interviews with her biographer, her friends remembered that,
although Zelda's father was a judge, her family lived in rented houses and
her mother made her dancing costumes (Milford 23, 30).
Before Fitzgerald married Zelda, she told him that she did not
particularly care about material wealth, but that she would support
Fitzgerald's struggle for wealth to please him (ZSF Papers c. 1919). To
Milford, it is prejudicial to say that Zelda refused Scott's first
proposal because he was not wealthy; evidently, it was Scott's aura of
desperation which at first dissuaded her from marrying him (Milford 74-5).
Marriage or servile spinsterhood were the only alternatives for most women
of Zelda's time; being wedded to a sophisticated man, not having her own
profession, was Zelda's most apparent alternative to the life of a
Southern Junior Leaguer.
One of Fitzgerald’s most acute sensibilities, which he shared with
Zelda, was his belief in the inescapable tragedy of life (Milford 397).
Clearly, Fitzgerald thought of his sense of the tragic as a romantic
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notion; in "The Note-Books," he wrote, "The very elements of
disintegration seemed to him romantic" (ZSF 1942 206). Even in his early
fiction, he communicated his penchant for the tragic. Fitzgerald's
autobiographical character Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise assures
Eleanor Savage:
'I'm not sentimental -- I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last -- the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.' (This was an ancient distinction of Amory's.) (TSP 229)
The narrator, undercutting Amory's statement with a parenthetical phrase,
resembles the F. Scott Fitzgerald who recovered from his broken engagement
with Zelda. Amory is a cynical poseur, but embedded in his personality is
"a desperate confidence" that things will fall apart; committed to no
unifying ideology, he is a "spiritually unmarried man."
While he was courting her, Zelda tellingly wrote Fitzgerald, "I
don't want you to see me growing old and ugly...We will just have to die
when we're thirty" (Milford 71). John Tytell argues that Fitzgerald
agreed to the pact; Tytell writes that Fitzgerald "...respected it and
felt its necessity. It was a vow of romantically linked extinction"
(Tytell 78). It seems the Fitzgeralds foreshadowed their dive into Hell
by believing that life had to resemble a tragic, romantic love story.
During the early years of her marriage, Zelda's persona looks to be
the one Fitzgerald created for his sweetheart, for story, before he knew
her. In "Babes in the Woods," one of Fitzgerald's early narrators defends
his flapper's disingenuousness; Kenneth waits for Isabelle's "mask to drop
off, but at the same time he [does] not question her right to wear it" (AF
136). Staging her affairs "with or without a send-off," Isabelle is as
quick to kiss men as she is to take lessons from them:
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~ [Isabelle] had that curious mixture of the social and artistic temperaments, found often in two classes, society women and actors. Her education, or rather her sophistication, had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled upon her favor... (AF 134)
Mercilessly, Isabelle flaunts her beauty; evidently, Isabelle's mask is
the facade boys have graciously taught her. In Fitzgerald's fiction,
women who wear the mask men ironically give them -- Rosalind of This Side
of Paradise and Nicole of Tender is the Night -- successfully hold onto
wealth while stringing along their bedazzled suitors. From the
accumulation of dissembling beauties in Fitzgerald's fiction, readers can
begin to see that his women not only have a right to wear the mask, the
mask is expected.
Zelda, not unlike many women of her time, felt the need to become
the golden coquette Fitzgerald expected. In 1920, Fitzgerald must have
seen himself as a romantic hero, having undertaken the quest of getting
his book published in order to gain Zelda's hand. Loving her husband and
undoubtedly wanting him to continue to love her, Zelda's first reaction to
marriage was to reinvent herself as the woman of his stories. In a letter
written during their courtship, Zelda sounds like a woman who is offering
to become Fitzgerald's ornamental heroine; she writes:
...I'd just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence-- because you'd soon love me less--and less--and I'd do anything --anything-- to keep your heart for my own.
...I feel like you had me ordered--and I was delivered to you --to be worn--I want you to wear me, like a watch--charm or a button hole boquet--to the world. (ZSF Papers c. 1919)
Presumably, Zelda thought she was living the life a Southern lady should;
in words that could be Zelda's, Pat Conroy's Lillian, of The Great
Santini, teaches her daughter, "...a woman has but one job--to be
adorable. Everything else is just icing..." (Conroy 326).
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Fitzgerald must have confirmed Zelda's view that he "had [her]
ordered" when he complained, "...no sooner does a man marry his
reproachless ideal than he becomes intensely self-conscious about her"
(ZSF 1924 21). Fitzgerald was intensely concerned with image (Mellow 17).
In a review of The Beautiful and Damned. Zelda, appraising the book as a
flapper's guide to manners, was not off the mark (ZSF 1922 11). In the
glamorous Shadcwland. setting the stage for contemporary dating manners,
Fitzgerald pronounces:
...Girls, for instance, have found the accent shifted from chemical purity to breadth of viewpoint, intellectual charm and piquant cleverness...we find the young woman of 1920 flirting, kissing, viewing life lightly, saying damn without a blush, playing along the danger line in an immature way--a sort of mental baby vamp...Personally, I prefer this sort of girl. Indeed, I married the heroine of my stories. I would not be interested in any other woman. (Smith 39)
Fitzgerald's statements are given in a flippant tone, but they clearly
outline a desirable image for his contemporary women. Like women's
magazines of the 1990's that admonish women to keep their hair in place
while they work, cook, and take care of children and husbands, Fitzgerald
advises women to live in a mentally contorted state. To him, women are
admirable when they are smart, but they must be "immature," even babies,
to be attractive.
Not surprisingly, Zelda poses in her review of The Beautiful and
Damned for the New York Tribune. Feigning to critique Fitzgerald's novel,
Zelda pretends to be one of the materialistic, vain women Fitzgerald
depicts. Smug, she admits to soliciting buyers for The Beautiful and
Damned so that with the royalties she can have a gold-cloth dress and a
platinum ring (ZSF 1922 11; Milford 118).
However well-suited Zelda seems for her role, her complicity pains
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her. Writing, "...I love you--I can't tell you how much--To think that
I'll die without your knowing--Goofo, you've got to try [to] feel how much
I do--how inanimate I am when you're gone..." (ZSF Papers c. 1920), Zelda
communicates intense self-doubt. She holds on to what she can see in
black and white -- the fiction in which she abides -- and she knows
herself no more. His Galatea, Zelda can only "come to life" through
Fitzgerald.
As much as Zelda is responsible for Fitzgerald's depiction of her,
her disfigured personality is lamentable; as Nancy Milford writes:
Zelda was becoming entangled in the crosscurrents of a complex of opposing roles, making an effort to be both daring and loving, to not give a damn and to care deeply, to be proud of Scott's drawing on her for his fiction while resenting it. (Milford 104)
Since Fitzgerald defined the chic feminine image of his day, Zelda wanted
the mirror of his fiction to give her back a pleasing self -- she wished
for his novels and stories to tell her of her beauty and vivacity.
Inside, she must have wondered how long she could wear the mask that made
her desirable to Scott. Living the life of a person trapped in a house of
mirrors, Zelda must have felt terrific stress.
Zelda's eventual mental illness seems partly the consequence of her
dualistic existence. In later life, she experienced delusions which
brought to the surface her anxiety of being. To Milford, Zelda's doctors
recollected delusions she had; she thought she heard Fitzgerald saying,
"Please, please don't be in an insane asylum." "0, I have killed her!"
"I have lost the woman I put into my book" (Milford 356).
Moving outside the cage of Fitzgerald's novels anu stories, Zelda
threatened his authority (his right to author their existence).
Fitzgerald clearly wanted to lock-in the romance he had created around
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Zelda. Once, when she upseC him, Fitzgerald declared, "I used to wonder
why they locked princesses in towers" (Ledger 173). Later, talking with
Zelda's biographer, a relative of Fitzgerald revealed that after Zelda
told Scott of her affair with Eduard Jozan, Fitzgerald locked her in her
room (Milford 145).
Scott could not tolerate Zelda's attempts to escape from behind his
words on the printed page. Evidently, he would not allow his wife her own
profession. While he was writing Tender Is the Night. Zelda was working
on Save Me the Waltz. Fitzgerald asserted that Zelda had little right to
root her fiction in the same life territory he used (Milford 262-3).
After an arduous dispute, Zelda agreed to eliminate some events Fitzgerald
used in Tender. and he helped her edit her work for publication (ZSF 1991
468-9; Milford 271-2). Zelda published her book to little success;
arguing with her, Fitzgerald showed how completely he thought, by virtue
of his superiority as an artist, that he owned the material of their
lives.
Zelda, beginning to write novels seriously in middle age, had
perhaps a fraction of Fitzgerald's chance for success with Tender.
Fitzgerald was paranoid that Zelda was writing her novel to destroy him;
Zelda's doctors noticed and were astonished at his fears, which were
unequal to the fact that he was the more established, practiced writer of
the two (Milford 267, 315). Undermining Zelda's meager opportunities as
a beginning writer at middle age, dismissing her creative pursuits as
amateur, Fitzgerald chipped away at his relationship with Zelda. He also
showed a bias against his wife as an artist.
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FITZGERALD'S VIEWS OF CREATIVITY
Palpable in Fitzgerald's works is his unstated belief that his
fiction is the result of an erotic transaction. Fitzgerald believed in
muses; in his fiction, women often exist as inspiration, or as unequal
partners in the creative act. Zelda was his muse in life; as such, she
remained a mysterious, otherworldly being to him. In Tender Is the Night.
Dick Diver creates glowing gatherings with his wife as co-host and
financial patron; in The Great Gatsbv. Daisy Buchanan's attractions
inspire Jay Gatsby to fashion the fiction that is his life.
Fitzgerald's novels and stories are not unique in the way they
employ sexual feelings -- Norman 0. Brown considers Western literature in
the patriarchal tradition an expression of male sexual desire; he says:
Poetry, the creative act, the act of life, the archetypal sexual act. Sexuality is poetry. The lady is our creation, our Pygmalion's statue. The lady is the poem; [Petrarch's] Laura is, really, poetry. (Brown 93)
Desiring Daisy, Gatsby transmogrifies his passion for Daisy into an artful
existence. Daisy is the poem to Gatsby's pen; therefore, the reader
cannot see Daisy as poet. Similarly, Fitzgerald could not imagine that
Zelda-the-poem could be Zelda-the-artist.
Fitzgerald's sexual desire guides him in the creative act; his
authority as a man in a patriarchal culture supports his right to
translate Zelda into a poem. Identifying himself with Romantic poets,
Fitzgerald saw his relationship with Zelda in terms of his place in
15
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literary history, as we have seen --he once said to Zelda that Keats and
Browning had advised Scott to marry her (ZSF 1942 32). Fitzgerald knew
the truth Brown describes, but, with regrettable results, he did not
employ the truth to deconstruct his relationship with Zelda.
Similarly, Carl G. Jung, the pioneering psychiatrist and a
contemporary of Fitzgerald, also interpreted male creativity in terms of
sexuality. In its pure form, Jungian theory is useful to analyzing
patriarchal literature because it presents a paradigm for male creativity.
Jung, like Sigmund Freud, describes a world in which men are presumed to
be in authority; thus, Jung's original theory is gender biased.
Nevertheless, as Gilbert and Gubar write, "...Freud...has defined
processes of interaction that his predecessors did not bother to consider
because, among other reasons, they were themselves so caught up in such
processes" (Gilbert and Gubar 47).
Jungian theory is remarkably useful to understanding the creative
process as Fitzgerald seems to have understood it. Himself sympathetic to
Jung's views on the human mind, Fitzgerald once asserted to his friend
Mrs. Bayard Turnbull that:
I believe that if one is interested in the world into which willy- nilly one's children will grow up the most accurate data can be found in the European leaders, such as Lawrence, Jung, and Spengler... (Letters 433)
In fact, Kermit Moyer argues that Fitzgerald, in his late fiction,
actually drew on Jungian psychology; Moyer writes:
Fitzgerald found in Spengler, Lawrence, and Jung a modernist mythology of history which he used to deepen the resonance and to extend the historical scope of his later novelistic fiction. (Moyer 130)
As Moyer suggests, because it connects psychoanalytic postulates
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with myth, Jungian theory allows Fitzgerald to incorporate his novels into
the mythos of Western culture. To Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald expressed
his regard for literature as myth; he said:
...That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong. (Graham and Frank 196)
To Fitzgerald, myth, like literature, was a framework for making manifest
catholic human emotions. One of the ways Fitzgerald made myth of the Jazz
Age was to change into modern dress the archetypal image of the muse.
Implicit in Western literature, and according to Jung, what makes a
man an artist is an influential feminine soul (Jung 1982 7-10, 77). Jung
postulates that every male has an anima; the anima is a relatively
autonomous psychic element of the male personality which constitutes a
man's feminine self (Jung 1982 77). Although Jung (who tends, as a
theoretician of patriarchy, to define his psychological theory in
dualistic terms) attributes traditional masculine qualities to a female's
animus, he does not associate the animus with creativity in females (Jung
1982 96). Thus, Jung, like Fitzgerald, underrates the possibility of
female creativity and represents women's raison d'etre as the means to
men's creative goals.
Moyer describes a sort of philosophical predisposition Fitzgerald
had to believing in Oswald Spengler's historical theory of cyclical rise
and decline (Moyer 110). Similarly, Jungian theory was easily accessible
to Fitzgerald because it reflected his reality as a writer in the Western
androcentric tradition. Jungian doctrine illustrates how in the West, the
power of men to create and define became expressed in the worship of the
feminine. Jung's linking of femininity, intuition, and creativity shows
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that the feminine mystique in Western culture allows men to worship their
own authority to write, paint, or compose women's existence. Thus,
distantly worshipping Daisy Buchanan and Judy Jones, Gatsby and Dexter
Green revere their abilities to author their lives; to become elegant and
wealthy, they earn as much money as American free markets allow.
Just as Freudian theory can be used to analyze accurately how
patriarchy works, Jungian studies can show how men have projected their
ideas of desirable femininity onto women. Male artists have also shown
women what it means to be undesirable in a patriarchy; women who have
resisted the restraints of patriarchy, for example the apocryphal. Lilith,
have been described as monstrous destroyers of humanity. That men have
judged independent women harshly suggests the dynamic behind the Western
cult of femininity. As Jung argues, men have not idolized actual women,
they have revered their creative souls; he writes:
The Christian principle which unites the opposites is the worship of God, in Buddhism it is the worship of the self (self-development), while in Spittler and Goethe it is the worship of soul symbolized by the worship of woman. Implicit in this categorization is the modern individualistic principle on the one hand, and on the other a primitive poly-daemonism which assigns to every race, every tribe, every family, every individual its specific religious principle. (Jung 1982 5)
Thus, the worship of women (at the center of which is the idolization of
patriarchal authority) has been the religion of the West since the
Romantic Movement of the Eighteenth Century. Again, the faith Jung
describes is one with which Fitzgerald sympathized and to which he
evidently subscribed; in an interview with the New York World. Fitzgerald
asserted that Goethe was one of the "fine types" who existed in the
Eighteenth Century when "The race had a mind..." (Salpeter 12).
Fitzgerald's romantic ideal, that of the medieval knight defending
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his lady, is the image Jung uses to dissect the religion of femininity.
Significantly, with Zelda's biographer, Sheilah Graham spoke of a
conversation in which Fitzgerald said he never loved Zelda as much as when
he fought for her (Milford 414). The knight, guarding his vulnerable
self, valorizes his own driving force (Jung 1982 5). Jung explains that
by sanctifying the icon of the valiant knight, Dante, and in our case
Fitzgerald, protected men's abilities to model the feminine (Jung 1982 5-
7).
The counterpart of the knight's lady, the opposite, evil witch, in
part represents men's fears about their souls as unconscious, unreachable
selves. Frequently, the word "fear" is used in the Bible to describe the
proper reverence believers must have for God. Certainly, the notion of
worship includes fear -- one must fear personalities defined as other and
more powerful than oneself. Thus, the key to the dynamic Jung describes
is that the woman defended be unattainable. Knights usually fought for
ladies they could not have. The woman in the image therefore resembles
the Virgin Mary, who must remain unviolated to keep her sacred position.
Excepting Jesus and other cultural instances of divinity in human form, a
human being could only worship another person if the other were not real.
Consequently, a worshipped woman who moves outside the parameters of the
definition bestowed on her is dangerous.
In the same way, a man who allows his creative soul to take over his
psyche is threatened by feminine envelopment; he must fear sexual
engulfment. Fitzgerald demonstrates that a man who loses control over his
image of a woman (as he eventually lost Zelda) loses his control over her
image of herself; she thereby threatens his authority. In the Jungian
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paradigm for male creativity in patriarchy, and as Fitzgerald's fiction
shows, when a man gets too close to a woman, he will begin to see that she
is different from the Daisy of his dreams. Fitzgerald's sexism is that he
does not permit women to be human. Daisy's perfection is an illusion that
in part has sustained Gatsby's dream; after Daisy abandons Gatsby, his
ideal woman is revealed to him as flawed.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. IV. A PANDERING MUSE: DAISY BUCHANAN OF
THE GREAT GATSBY
Like Jung, Fitzgerald evidently understood the male/female
relationship to be complementary; in his notebook, he summarizes:
The two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer--the charm of women and the courage of men. (Crack-Up 180)
Apparently, Fitzgerald also believed that the charm of Cinderella would
inspire the courage of Jack. Cinderella's appeal, her perfection as a
selfless woman, substantiates Jack's bold vision. Likewise, in The Great
Gatsby. Daisy is grist to Gatsby's mill of dreams. Gatsby is only a
figurative artist, but as such, he creates a world Daisy validates with
tears of aesthetic pleasure, as Nick Carraway recalls:
[Gatsby] took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them...before us...he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. 'They're such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed. . . 'It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.' (Gatsby 97-9)
Daisy is a muse for a commercial world. She summons Gatsby to construct
histower; he is the golden "beam and idea, girder and logarithm," Dick
Diver wants to be, and Gatsby builds his tower with Daisy to sustain his
emotion. In Fitzgerald's metaphoric world, Gatsby is an author; as
Carraway concludes, he has the semi-divine qualities of an artist: "The
truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his
Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God..." (Gatsbv 104).
21
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Gatsby has the authority of a prophet; he experiences tragedy
because he mirrors God's generative force, and his story reveals a harsh
truth. If Daisy had not called up Gatsby's desire, he would not have
raised a world for her; Nick highlights vulgar American materialism by
contrasting Gatsby's dream with Daisy's reality. Gatsby creates within
the precedent Aristotle sets in The Poetics: asserting that poetry is
mimetic, Aristotle advises poets to build Earth as the gods did (Aristotle
31-5; Gilbert and Gubar 5). Since fiction communicates through metaphor,
surely, it is not to be interpreted strictly; since Fitzgerald confessed
that his characters were himself (Heame 258), we may deduce that Gatsby
is a visionary.
An almost archetypal figure, Gatsby comes to symbolize the artist
possessed. John Tytell relates that, to the ancient Greeks,
.. .the possessed artist acts in unconscious obedience to some primal part of the self, some ancient, buried impulse that often dictates images and stories that the artist transcribes, signaling a message desperately through the flames of inner tribulation. (Tytell 7)
Distinctly illustrating Jung's tenet that, in venerating the feminine, men
worship their own generative powers, Gatsby's fantasy of a life with Daisy
becomes his nourishing religion; the mirage haunts him. Carraway
describes Gatsby as seemingly receiving spiritual messages from Daisy,
whom, the reader learns, the green light represents; he recollects:
[Gatsby] stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling...I glanced seaward--and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and faraway...When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. (Gatsby 21-2)
The unquiet darkness seemingly belongs to Gatsby; trembling with longing
for Daisy, Gatsby is more than inspired. A sprite, like the green signal,
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Daisy has only twinkling contact with reality. Only for a short while is
Daisy tangible in Gatsby's life, yet she sustains and enlarges Gatsby's
dreams. Before Gatsby meets Daisy, he only plans to become rich or
powerful; falling in love with Daisy, Gatsby is called to the grander task
of creating a world in which he can live for her.
As his paragon, Daisy appears to be the feminine, primal part of
himself. Daisy seems Gatsby's apparition. Prior to materializing before
Nick, Daisy leaves a spirit's trail of fluttering curtains and shadows.
First encountering her, one sees Daisy drift as a ghost into one's vision.
Nick describes Daisy and her companion, Jordan Baker, as:
...both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. (Gatsbv 12)
Although she is a flighty spirit, gravity temporarily hinders Daisy's
movement; Nick says she is "...buoyed up as though upon an anchored
balloon" (Gatsby 12). It seems believable that Daisy, the ghost of
youthful beauty, could do with Gatsby as she tells him she wishes: "I'd
like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you
around" (Gatsby 99). Similarly, Nick perceives that Daisy has a muse's
voice. She "murmur[s]...to make people lean toward her" (Gatsby 13). As
an image of Gatsby's soul, Daisy, like Gatsby, invites men to create their
own stories about her.
A figurative artist, Gatsby has a "heightened sensitivity to the
promises of life" (Gatsby 6). With Daisy as his ideal, Gatsby has created
a world commercial artists would envy -- "A universe of ineffable
gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked...," Nick
reports (Gatsby 105). Although readers can see that Gatsby's dream is
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vulgar, with its underworld money and amusement park quality, it is
splendid nevertheless. A production in itself, Gatsby's car sings; like
a Cubist painting, Nick recalls it being "...terraced with a labyrinth of
wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns" (Gatsby 68). The festivities he
directs are opalescent with "constantly changing light" (Gatsby 45).
Gatsby, b o m a poor Midwesterner, reproduces the vision he sees in Daisy
and her family's wealth. Daisy gives Gatsby his magic, as Nick concludes:
"...young men didn't...drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on
Long Island Sound" (Gatsby 54).
At Nick's, during his staged encounter with Daisy, Gatsby leans
against a broken clock. Catching the falling clock as he is reunited with
Daisy, Gatsby, godlike, seems to hold the promise of lasting artistic
power --he seems to grasp the possibilities his elusive "feminine" soul
offers. Observing Gatsby return the clock to its place "with trembling
fingers," Carraway foreshadows that the promise is not Gatsby's -- Daisy,
a phantom, is not meant for men to know. Gatsby, a "son of God" and
unlike the callous Tom Buchanan, is in danger of possessing the eternal
feminine.
After the tea, the Gatsby-Daisy story is almost a falling-off; Nick
decides:
Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. (Gatsby 98)
Until the very end, Gatsby does not seem to notice that the clock is
ticking. Nevertheless, Gatsby's magic distinctly evaporates after he
meets Daisy; after the meeting, Carraway reflects, "[Gatsby's] count of
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enchanted objects had diminished by one" (Gatsby 98). His bold vision
clearly sustains Gatsby; he gains Daisy only to lose her as she dwindles
into flesh. Just as the green breast of the new world did vis-a-vis the
Dutch sailors, Daisy "...pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of
all human dreams" (Gatsby 189): she betrays Gatsby's hope to author his
universe by her green light.
Gatsby's world might have continued if he could have preserved his
belief in his vision of Daisy, which her treachery with Tom, and her lack
of faith, had undermined. He might have been able, as Fitzgerald was, to
fight for his princess. Instead, Gacsby, resigned, waits for Daisy's
call. Just as the new world fails its expectant settlers, Daisy has only
transitory promise. She draws Gatsby to her shore seemingly to show him
that his vision is deceiving, it is only material; Nick reflects:
I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe [the call]would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. [It was a] new world, material without being real... (Gatsby 169).
Abandoning the knightly virtues of the old world to gain a "poor [ghost] ,
breathing dreams like air," Gatsby loses the medieval, masculine spirit
which allows him to substantiate his vision. Gatsby and his work are
destroyed after he attains his Daisy for a short moment; perhaps only in
the last seconds of his life, he acknowledges her false light.
The taint not on Gatsby is certainly on Daisy. Suggesting her
unscrupulousness, Nick points out that "...Gatsby turned out all right at
the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake
of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive
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sorrows and short-winded elations of men" (Gatsbv 6-7). Daisy, with her
illusory promises, has preyed on Gatsby. As one reason for his decline,
Daisy represents the false hopes inherent in any creative vision (such as
the dreams which led European sailors to the new world). Daisy also
symbolizes the destructive capacities of Goethe's "Eternal Feminine." In
her, Fitzgerald not only personifies his dread of sexuality, he also
represents in Daisy his sense that living a fiction is disastrous.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. V. THREE KINDS OF MARBLE: THE HISTORICAL
AND PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK OF
TENDER IS THE NIGHT
Using as his larger metaphor the green breast of the new world,
Fitzgerald seems to make Gatsby an American myth. Broader in scope than
is Gatsby. Tender is the Night includes within its compass the shattered
illusions of Western patriarchy. Of Tender. Zelda wrote:
[The book] is a swell evokation of an epoch and a very masterly presentation of tragedies sprung from the beliefs (or lack of them) of those times which bloomed from the seeds of despair planted by the war and of the circumstance dependent on the adjustment of philosophies--... (ZSF 1991 473)
Certainly, the change in Western philosophies included different patterns
in sexual standards. In the 1920's, substituting women's Victorian
costume, modeled for demureness, were stylishly immodest clothes
(Hollander 338). Fitzgerald evidently believed that changing mores
signified a deeper gulf between his generation and genteel late
nineteenth-century culture.
John Tytell writes that inconsistency does not bother Romantic
writers; he asserts, "To the Romantics, [inconsistency] was a
characteristic to be valued, even courted, as a wellspring for change and
renewal--which is a basic romantic drive" (Tytell 9). In many of his
attitudes, Fitzgerald was inconsistent: he lamented materialism, but he
relished the luxuries money could buy, writing such half-satiric pieces as
27
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"How to Live on $36,000 a Year." He once wrote, "There never was a good
biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people,
if he's any good" (Crack-Up 177).
Inconsistencyalso marked Fitzgerald's perspective on female
creativity; as we have seen, perhaps because he had invested his spirit in
Zelda, Fitzgeraldseriously hindered her ability to develop as a
professional artist. At the same time, Fitzgerald had lifelong
relationships with women writers -- Dorothy Parker and Gertrude Stein were
two of his friends; in a letter, he said, "My favorite American authors
are Dreiser, Hemingway, and the early Gertrude Stein" (Correspondence
484). Fitzgerald also respected Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
(Correspondence 78-9). To complicate the matter further, Fitzgerald's
Nicole, in Tender, hurt Zelda. Milford records a conversation with
Zelda's doctor; he remembers Zelda disturbed, saying ". . .that [Fitzgerald]
had made [Nicole] so awful and kept on reiterating how she had ruined his
life and I couldn't help identifying myself with her..." (Milford 342).
In the abstract and the intimate, it seems Fitzgerald feared a cultural
paradigm shift would undermine his authority to define the feminine.
After World War I , Fitzgerald digested the history being made around
him; he expressed personally his understanding of Western change (Tytell
4). It is not surprising that, commenting on Gatsby. Gertrude Stein
remarks, "You [Fitzgerald] are creating the contemporary world..."
(Correspondence 164). Tytell argues that Fitzgerald and other twentieth-
century Romantic writers became "...shock absorbers for the upheavals in
ideas, psychology, sexual relations and social dislocations that
demarcated the history of their century" (Tytell 4). As an author who
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interpreted the m o d e m world, Fitzgerald had much with which to contend.
Although American Civil War generals may have presaged the military
strategies of World War I, the "war to end all wars" was the first m o d e m
military conflict. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud
broke with Victorian mores and talked openly about human sexuality. In
1917, the Russian Revolution outfitted political science with a laboratory
for a new experiment in socialist government. In the United States, the
sexual revolution gained significant ground when the Nineteenth Amendment
to the Constitution was ratified in 1920.
A Romantic, Fitzgerald deals with change in a personal way. In his
article "One Hundred False Starts," Fitzgerald confesses that in writing,
"...I must start out with an emotion--one that's close to me and that I
can understand" (Afternoon 132). Relating his autobiography, Fitzgerald
admits, "Most of what has happened to me is in my novels and short
stories..." (Correspondence 484). In his fiction, Fitzgerald translates
his personal emotion into a new world. In a letter, Zelda astutely points
out Fitzgerald's tendency to view his life as an inevitable march toward
disintegration: "...you've worried -- and enjoyed doing it
thoroughly...you're so morbidly exaggerative" (Milford 73). For his
contemporary readers, Fitzgerald explained the shift in Western society by
generating a personal mythology of decline.
Undoubtedly, Fitzgerald did not view the transformation of Western
culture as positive. He told his companion Laura Guthrie Hearne,
There is Weltshmerz--the uncertainty of the world today. All sensitive minds know it now. There is a passing away of the old order we know and we wonder what there will be for us in the new--if anything. The future is dark. (Heame 257)
Perhaps different from a "shock absorber," Fitzgerald seems the prophet of
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doom. Far from muffling the jolt of change, Fitzgerald seems to hurl his
audience toward a bleak future, or warn them that hope is past. He
extends his personal opinion, "I think we are all a little sick but the
logic of history won't permit us to go backward," (Letters 433) into a
prognosis of terminal illness.
Clearly, Fitzgerald thought his crack-up was representative because
he saw humankind as an integrated organism. As suggested previously and
as others have established, at the time Fitzgerald wrote Tender, he was
deeply engrossed in the historical theories of Oswald Spengler (Moyer 110-
15; Letters 433). In a circa 1930/31 letter, Zelda distinctly groups
reading Spengler with Fitzgerald's favorite activities (Correspondence
256). Spengler asserts that the lives of states parallel the lives of
human beings (birth, expansion, prosperity, collapse) (Spengler I 3).
Significantly, Spengler believed that during his lifetime, the Western
world began to experience the final stage (collapse), and mirrored the
Classical Period in which Rome superseded in power the city-states of
Greece (Spengler 13, 26; Spengler II 416). It is surely no coincidence
that Fitzgerald has Dick's decline consummated in Rome, while Rosemary
Hoyt is acting in a movie called The Grandeur that was Rome. Spengler
reasons that "...Rome, with its rigorous realism--uninspired, barbaric,
disciplined, practical, Protestant, Prussian, will always give us, working
as we must by analogies, the key to understanding cur future" (Spengler I
26).
Assessing the Western world as headed toward decay, Spengler
verified Fitzgerald's sense of a dismal future; defining nations as quasi
human organisms, Spengler provided support for Fitzgerald's view that the
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personal was indicative of the collective. Perhaps Fitzgerald saw his own
emotions as suggestive of the whole because, as a writer, he had the power
to translate Spengler's views, and his own, into a fictional world. That
he saw his private decline as mirroring the disintegration of the West
must signify that he also believed the evolution of values would alter his
own manhood and authorship.
Gilbert and Gubar argue that with the word author. the words
"writer, deity, and nater familias are identified"; the writers quote
Edward Said to support their argument (Gilbert and Gubar 4). As Gatsby
demonstrates and as Said theorizes, authority traditionally implies a
masculine power to mimic God's dynamism -- this fact also appears evident
in Roman Catholic priesthood. However, it is necessary that "authority
maintains the continuity of its course" (Said 83). Said writes,
"Auctoritas is production, invention, cause, in addition to meaning a
right of possession...it means consciousness, or a causing to continue"
(Said 83). Auctoritas in the Western tradition of letters -- that is, the
male ability to build worlds -- was threatened during Fitzgerald's
lifetime. Using Spengler as a historical framework, Fitzgerald
interpreted the break in continuity as a sign of cultural decay.
Seemingly a force for male reaction, in his Fantasia of the
Unconscious. D.H. Lawrence decries discontinuity in male authority; he
asserts, "When man loses his deep sense of purposive, creative activity,
he feels lost, and is lost" (Lawrence 1960 151-2). Robert Sklar writes
that Fantasia was "...as important in Fitzgerald's development toward
Tender is the Night as was his concern over his wife's mental illness"
(Sklar 259). Lawrence, not unlike Jung, presents the sexes as polar
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opposites; he views men as built for action and he associates women with
the emotions (Lawrence 1960 141). Nevertheless, Lawrence maintains that
in the modern world,
...the male acts as the passive, or recipient pole of attraction, the female as the active, positive, exertive pole, in human relations.. .Man becomes the emotional party, woman the positive and active. (Lawrence 1960 132-4)
Significant to deciphering Tender. Lawrence suggests that sexual role
change inevitably means a categorical switch of opposite identities.
Apparently, to ensure the health of men, Lawrence believes the male and
female must act within their "native" emotional territories; importantly,
Lawrence also thinks that each sex is incomplete without the other. Thus,
to Lawrence, and by implication to Fitzgerald, any change which allowed
women to hold authority, even over their outward lives, meant that men
conversely had to relinquish authority (Lawrence 1960 145). When the man
is the emotional being, the woman must be the creative one; to Lawrence,
the converse also appears true.
Fitzgerald admonished Max Perkins not to miss Fantasia (Letters
222); in Fantasia. Lawrence, indicating that "good" women must live to
support male ingenuity, cautions women that men are destroyed when their
authority to create is diminished. Like Jung, Lawrence suggests that
female generative powers are nonexistent; apparently, to Lawrence, women
are to live as complementary, but lesser, beings. In The Rainbow.
Lawrence's Tom Brangwen says:
If we've got to be Angels, and if there is no such thing as a man nor a woman amongst them, then...a married couple makes one Angel.. .For.. .an Angel can't be less than a human being. And if it was only the soul of a man minus the man, then it would be less than a human being. (Lawrence 1989 129)
To Lawrence, the soul (which, as we have seen in Jung, is the feminine) is
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less than a human being. The feminine soul which creates cannot live
outside a man. Lawrence seems unwilling to acknowledge the human calling
to invent worlds, the human emotional life; arguably, to Lawrence, each
capacity is suitably housed respectively in the male and female.
That Fitzgerald also believed the sexes were interrelated polarities
seems clear in Tender. Fitzgerald seems to model some of Dick Diver's
thoughts on Lawrence's observations. Trying to recapture a hysterical
Nicole, Dick is tormented because he has failed to build a world with the
inspiration the feminine is supposed to give him. The narrator reports:
A wave of agony went over him. It was awful that such a fine tower should not be erected, only suspended, suspended from him. Up to a point that was right: men were for that, beam and idea, girder and logarithm; but somehow Dick and Nicole became one and equal, not apposite and complementary... (Tender 190)
Fitzgerald's narrator suggests that for Dick, a proper marriage is one in
which he becomes a complete man, with Nicole acting appropriately as a
Cypher onto which Dick can project his notions of the feminine. Dick
should provide the idea, while Nicole should flesh it out by playing the
muse. Dick would have built the tower in a pre-modem marriage -- the
narrator concludes that it is suspended from him because Nicole and Dick
have become equals. Although Nicole is still a woman "happy to exist in
a man's world" (Tender 52), Dick and Nicole are both centers of power.
Dick apparently controls the story of his marriage, but Nicole exercises
power through her riches and madness.
From reading Lawrence, it seems Fitzgerald was able to add a sexual
dynamic to his assessment of Western decline. Assimilating the theories
of Lawrence, Jung, and Spengler while he was writing Tender, it appears
that Fitzgerald intertwined the three philosophers' theories with an
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auCobiographical fiction (Moyer 130; Sklar 258-9). In a letter to Ernest
Hemingway, Fitzgerald asserts the strengths of composite characterization;
he used the method to create personae based on facets of real
personalities. In another light, the letter may provide clues that
Fitzgerald combined philosophical systems and built them into his fiction;
to Hemingway, Fitzgerald seems to reveal his attempts to enrich his
fiction with historical and philosophical concepts:
Think of the case of the Renaissance artists, and of Elizabethan dramatists, the first having to superimpose a medieval conception of science and archaeology, etc., upon the Bible story; and, in the second, of Shakespeare's trying to interpret the results of his own observation of the life around him on the basis of Plutarch's Lives and Holinshed's Chronicles. There you must admit that the feat of building a monument out of three kinds of marble was brought off. (Letters 308-9)
Significantly, in his correspondence, Fitzgerald discusses Elizabethan
dramatists as working within philosophical frameworks. Fitzgerald reveals
an aesthetic preference for writing within an ideological model. It may
also be meaningful that he speaks of three types of marble -- from Jung,
Lawrence, and Spengler, Fitzgerald apparently procured his three kinds of
marble.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. VI. FROM SUFFRAGE TO SUFFERING: THE ODDLY
BEVELLED MIRRORS OF A NEW WORLD
To reiterate, in Tender. Fitzgerald uses his historical perspective
to create an extended metaphor for the decline of Western man; he
integrates his social and psychological views into his metaphor. To
create a lasting impression, Fitzgerald employs the archetypal woman-as-
beast image, building a mythology of Western decline. Clearly,
Fitzgerald's mindset steers him away from believing that the sexes can
exist equally; like Jung, Lawrence, and Spengler, Fitzgerald lived in a
culture in which men and women, "good" and "bad" women, were defined as
antithetical. He tells Max Perkins that in contrast to Gatsby. with its
"purely masculine interest," Tender is "a woman's book" (Letters 247).
The setting is a community in which women try to gain power. Regrettably,
however, the women's world of Tender makes mockery of the culture for
which Fitzgerald is nostalgic.
To Fitzgerald, "...women...are, in their social aspect, children
with guile and sometimes wisdom, but still children" (Crack-Up 196). It
is not surprising, then, that in Tender. Fitzgerald satirizes women trying
to fill the shoes of men. Baby Warren, for example, decides how the
Warren fortune is to be invested (Tender 157). Becoming "...suddenly her
grandfather...," she "insolently" advises Dick to consider investing in a
psychiatric clinic (Tender 175-6). Fitzgerald ridicules Baby's strength,
calling her "wooden and onanistic" (Tender 150). Meaningfully, the second
35
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definition of onanism is "male masturbation" (Scribner-Bantam Dictionary
632). Resembling Elsie Speers, Baby symbolically adopts a male penis,
which both the sword and the pen represent as instruments of male power.
Like other women who attempt to author their lives, Baby is threatening;
she is "the American Woman" with "...the clean-sweeping irrational temper
that had broken the moral back of a race and made a nursery out of a
continent..." (Tender 233). Seemingly, to Fitzgerald, the best "man" a
woman can be is a self-absorbed tyrant.
In his so-called woman's book, many of Fitzgerald's feminine
characters assume traditionally masculine roles. One of Doctor Diver's
favorite patients is a syphilitic woman who lives "...as imprisoned as in
the Iron Maiden" (Tender 183). A painter, the woman is a symbolic
casualty of the battle between the sexes for artistic ground. Dick tells
the painter, "'You've suffered, but many women suffered before they
mistook themselves for men.'" Significantly, in her efforts to explore
male territory, she becomes sick; she questions Dick, "'...what was it I
had almost found?'" Characteristically, Dick replies, "'a greater
sickness.'" (Tender 184) Although he sees it is not quite that simple,
Dick apparently believes that part of his psychiatric mission is to
dissuade women from the abnormal desire to become artists. Sick, the
woman has endangered patriarchy by threatening to alter the creative
process.
In Tender, lesbianism also compromises the future of Western man.
To Fitzgerald, male homosexuality was repugnant; he once declared male
homosexuals to be "Nature's attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing
them" (Notebooks no. 1320). Ostensibly a lesbian, Lady Caroline Sibly-
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Biers, whose song is "There was a young lady from hell...," is "'the
wickedest woman in London'," the savage Tommy remarks (Tender 268-9). The
narrator explains that out of his habit to be loved, Dick decides to
rescue Lady Caroline when she is caught with Mary North Minghetti trying
to pick up young French girls. Lady Caroline and Mary Minghetti are
dressed as transvestites, they wear naval uniforms, when Dick meets them
at a local jail. Although Sibly-Biers and Minghetti are guilty of
deceiving and probably offending two women, Dick goes so far as to see in
Sibly-Biers' behavior an "...essence of the anti-social that, in
comparison, reduced the gorgings of New York to something like a child
contracting indigestion from ice cream" (Tender 302).
Dick is disgusted with Sibly-Biers and Minghetti; the narrator
reports that, "[Dick] was t o m between a tendency to ironic laughter and
another tendency to order fifty stripes of the cat and a fortnight of
bread and water" (Tender 301). Expressing either reaction, laughing
satirically or punishing the two women, Dick would show himself unable to
adapt to a changing world. Repulsed, Dick cannot understand how the new
"wickedest woman" can feel no remorse for her "crime." Having Lady
Caroline and Mary Minghetti appear together in the last chapter of the
novel, the narrator suggests that their homosexual relationship is
ongoing. Of course, since they can exclude men, female homosexual
relationships threaten patriarchy. Pivotal, the scene is placed
immediately before Dick's final dive into American obscurity. A world in
which homosexual women live, a society in which women imitate men, is not
for the genteel Dick -- that seems the message of the incident.
As the counterpoint to feminine characters who parade as men, Dick
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Diver symbolizes Western man in decline. By connecting Doctor Diver to
the larger political reality of his times, Fitzgerald makes Diver
emblematic. At the sight of World War I trenches, Doctor Diver feels
nostalgia for a lost world. The narrator asserts that although his friend
Abe North is a veteran, Dick Diver discerns the war more keenly than does
Abe (Tender 55); Dick, not North, interprets the war's meaning to his
friends. That Dick can feel "Non-combatant's shell shock" in a pre-
nuclear age is significant. A psychiatrist, Dick must be sensitive to
others' pain. Nevertheless, Dick's feelings seem to go deeper than
sympathy for the soldiers of World War I -- feeling in his soul the
calamity the war has caused, Dick appears to be the spirit of his
generation of men; he emerges as the priestly artist. Dick understands
how dramatically the war has changed Western mores; he says, "This [war]
took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact
relation that existed between the classes" (Tender 56). Dick has a dream,
the narrator reveals, in which the doctor actually sees how the war has
disrupted artistic genres; as a uniformed band plays the second movement
of Prokofiev's Love of Three Oranges, battle images blaze in Dick's mind
(Tender 179).
The sun of his universe, Dick's father, connects him to a long line
of strong Wsstem patriarchs. At his father's gravesite, Dick reflects,
These dead, he knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century. 'Good-by, my father--good-by, all my fathers.' (Tender 205)
Weary, Dick bids farewell to continuity in the line of male succession;
unlike the "souls of new earth," Dick's eyes do not flash with the promise
of a new frontier. Instead, the narrator reports that Dick yearns for the
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definite roles and manners of his father's time; at the Gstaad ski lodge,
Dick "relaxed and pretended that the world was all put together by the
gray-haired men of the golden nineties who shouted old glees at the
piano..." (Tender 173). Dick senses his place in the world is no longer
assured; he laments that, unlike himself, his father "had been sure of
what he was" (Tender 204).
In Tender, as Dick's heritage is swept from its foundation, the
patriarchal framework for creativity becomes adulterated. The Western
soul-worship Jung describes becomes grotesque. One knight cannot generate
the tribute due Nicole: thousands tithe to her. The narrator ironizes:
Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors... as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying... (Tender 54)
To construct the feminine, modern knights must enslave others for the
benefit of a few ladies. No longer heavenly, Fitzgerald's new muse saps
the strength of thousands to be the personified poem. In the new world,
the artistry the feminine promises is empty and salable; the taint is
vivid in Albert McKiscc's literary success.
Fitzgerald deftly critiques large-scale capitalism; however, that
Fitzgerald reverses the image of the muse to do so is not unusual. As
demonstrated earlier, images of saintly women are closely related to those
of witches. Like other traditional writers, Fitzgerald also uses Nicole's
demon-like persona to suggest that women's worlds are deadly for men.
Fitzgerald's feminine characters evolve from the lying muse that is Daisy
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to the inhuman figure Nicole becomes in Tender. Mingling Lawrence and
Spengler, to Fitzgerald, female autonomy was a symptom of cultural
disintegration following a tragic war in which "there was a century of
middle-class love spent" (Tender 56) . I hope to show that his opinion is
personified in Nicole. Vampire-like, she destroys Dick. The "planet to
Dick's sun," Fitzgerald's Nicole seems to represent how female control
destroys men.
In the plot of Tender. the narrator hints that Nicole and Baby
Warren hasten Dick Diver's decay. Although unwittingly, Baby hurries
Dick's decision to marry Nicole by asking Dick to accompany her to Zurich
(Tender 156); fulfilling Baby's request, Dick reflects, "[Nicole's]
problem was one they had together for good now" (Tender 156). Tellingly,
Kaethe Gregorovius remarks to Franz, "'I think Nicole is less sick than
any one thinks--she only cherishes her illness as an instrument of
power...'" (Tender 237-8). Kaethe notices Dick's alcoholism before her
husband does -- animal-like, Kaethe smells of the earth; perhaps she can
sniff out dissembling criminals. Without delay, Dick loses his self
esteem because, the reader may conjecture, "the Warren money" eliminates
his need to support Nicole financially (Tender 159). During her first
stream-of-consciousness passage, Nicole, unlike Baby, appears malevolent.
She forebodes that she will sap Dick's vitality, leading him into a life-
in-death existence:
You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated...(Tender 159)
From the text, it appears Nicole plans to ruin Dick's power in the
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generative male sphere; she seems to transfer to him the acute emotions of
insanity. With Nicole, Dick is no longer able to hide behind his rigid
male ego; as Lawrence writes, in the sexual struggle for autonomy, when
men become the emotional pole, the masculine ability to build worlds is
wrecked (Lawrence 1960 132-4, 151-2).
Nicole is fighting to win a battle in which, if she should succeed,
humanity would become emasculated. In Fantasia. Lawrence writes that,
"Americans must make a choice. It is a choice between serving man, or
woman. It is a choice between yielding the soul to a leader, leaders, or
yielding only to the woman, wife, mistress. or mother" (Lawrence 1960
145). Clearly, in his lexicon, Lawrence does not equate any version of
the word woman with the term leader. In the context of Fantasia. Lawrence
seems to believe that when women help guide humankind, meaningful
existence is not possible. Underlining the word man. Lawrence visibly
controls his readers' responses; Lawrence acts with masculine authority.
Fitzgerald seems similarly to manage his audience's reactions to Nicole.
Vying to make the world of their marriage female, even absent "Non-
combatant's shell shock," Nicole can ruin Dick.
In Book II, although the narrator demurs that Baby is an innocent
party to Dick's defeat (Tender 156), as she watches Dick leave his beach,
Baby seemingly admits to conspiring against him:
'We should have let him confine himself to his bicycle excursions,'...'When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.' (Tender 310)
Saying that she and Nicole should have let Dick alone, Baby implies that
they had the power to ensnare him. Baby seems to conclude that she and
Nicole trapped Dick in a foreign territory. Alleging a conspiracy,
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Fitzgerald's narrator seems to warn his audience that when women govern
they imperil civilized men like Doctor Diver. Baby and Nicole
conclusively represent relentless forces for negative change in the West.
Fitzgerald's narrator and Dick Diver permit the hero to succumb to
the implicit Warren collusion. Thrown together with Nicole at Caux, Dick
lacks the will to help himself. However, the narrator suggests that
Dick's personality screams, "Use me!" (Tender 300) Insinuating that, at
first, Dick is vaguely aware of his captivity, the narrator relates that:
He had lost himself--he could not tell the hour when, or the day of the week, the month or the year...Between the time he found Nicole flowering under a stone on the Zurichsee and the moment of his meeting with Rosemary the spear had been blunted. (Tender 201)
At first, Dick seems as hapless a victim as any destroyed in the war.
Ill-fated, he significantly connects his disintegration to Nicole and
Rosemary. Later, Dick evidently acknowledges to himself his unsought
fight to save Western culture from female domination. Dick thinks of
himself as a dying hero: "...when he had realized that he was the last
hope of a decaying clan.. .he had.. .chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison
and drank it" (Tender 300).
At the close of the novel, the reader realizes that Dick has tried
to implant in Nicole his genteel manner of living; the narrator recalls,
"Moment by moment all that Dick had taught her fell away and she was ever
nearer to what she had been in the beginning" (Tender 295). From a
conversation between Tommy Barban and Nicole, Fitzgerald's audience can
perceive that Nicole is instinctively barbaric; natural is the state in
which Barban prefers her:
'Why didn't they leave you in your natural state?' Tommy demanded presently. 'You are the most dramatic person I have known.'
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She had no answer. 'All this taming of women!' he scoffed. 'In any society there are certain--' She felt Dick's ghost prompting at her elbow but she subsided at Tommy's overtone... (Tender 290-1)
The narrator portends that in her "nascent transference" to Tommy, Nicole
will abandon her quiet ways (the "other face" of her psychosis). In an
effort to civilize Nicole, Dick Diver is destroyed by forces of change
which are more powerful than he.
In the same way Dick chooses the sweet poison when he marries
Nicole, when he transfers Nicole to Tommy, he must do so knowing that he
is relinquishing the last hope of a dying clan. Although feigning to
allow Nicole herself to choose Tommy, Fitzgerald's narrator curiously
implies that Dick has long intended to grant Nicole the freedom to pick
Tommy; Nicole asks herself, "Ha[s] [Dick] willed it all?" (Tender 298)
Of the third book of Tender. Fitzgerald told Max Perkins that he wanted
Dick to direct Niccle: "In the proof I am pointing up the fact that
[Dick's] intention dominated all this last part..." (Letters 241). Thus,
in Tender, Fitzgerald actually produces a world in which women believe
they have power, but in which they are ultimately subject to men; Dick,
transferring the feminine to the succeeding Tommy, merely acknowledges his
abdication. Ironically, Fitzgerald seems to assert that even in a
feminine world, women need men to make decisions for them; like Baby, Lady
Caroline Sibly-Biers, and Mary Minghetti, Nicole childishly asserts
herself.
An indulged child, Nicole inevitably makes an impulsive decision.
By the close of Tender. Dick, in crisis, tries to rescue himself (Tender
299). Weakened, he permits Nicole to choose Tommy. Seemingly incapable
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of critical thinking, Nicole falls without hesitation into the arms of the
uncivilized Tommy. He declares, "'...I am a hero...'" (Tender 268). Not
a courtly hero, Tommy concedes, "'I have ferocious courage, usually.
something like a lion, something like a drunken man.'" (Tender 268)
Boasting the fearlessness of a drunken man, Tommy has nothing akin to the
fortitude Dick exhibits trying to save his race. Tommy is demonic; the
narrator describes his looks: "...dark, scarred and handsome, his
eyebrows arched and upcurling, a fighting Puck, an earnest Satan" (Tender
292). Without Dick, Nicole is no longer "flowering on the Zurichsee";
instead, "Everything Tommy said to her became part of her forever" (Tender
291). With Tommy, Nicole is a barbarian's captive:
Symbolically she lay across his saddle-bow as surely as if he had wolfed her away from Damascus and they had come out upon the Mongolian plain...she was ever nearer to what she had been in the beginning, prototype of that obscure yielding up of swords that was going on in the world about her. Tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover. (Tender 295)
Importantly, Fitzgerald's narrator links Nicole with post-war chaos;
Nicole's decision is momentous. With Nicole's transference, the soul of
man is in the hands of a Hun.
Oswald Spengler writes that when nations are in decline, men of
civilization succeed men of culture in authority. Dominating states in
their golden ages, men of culture are rooted to the land and tradition;
similarly, Dick is tied to his almost feudal beach and his knightly
ancestors. In comparison, Spengler's men of civilization are barbaric men
without kingdoms; like Tommy, they have no loyalties because they are
divorced from feudal obligations. When fatigued, as Dick becomes, culture
men surrender authority to lusterless men of civilization (Spengler I 32;
Spengler II 103). Civilization men, like Tommy, are not necessarily more
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stalwart than culture men; a strong-man, Tommy is a thin-skull case;
Fitzgerald's narrator discloses:
Recently an eighth of the area of his skull had been removed by a Warsaw surgeon and was knitting under his hair, and the weakest person in the cafe' could have killed him with a flip of a knotted napkin. (Tender 196)
Placing Tommy's Achilles' heel in his brain, the narrator suggests he has
none of the intellectual strength of the cultured Dick. With an imposing
physique, Tommy appears the robust man of a new age; however, he lacks the
dynamism vital to true leadership. A mercenary, Tommy also lacks Dick's
near-clerical idealism.
Becoming a barbarian princess, Nicole is reborn when she gives
herself to Tommy. After their first sexual encounter, Tommy tells Nicole
as much when he says, "'You are all new like a baby'" (Tender 293).
Their second tryst in the sea continues their initiation into a new
reality; they emerge with, "...heads still damp,...skins fresh and
glowing..." (Tender 296). Dick, by contrast, is in a dying fall; with no
wife, he has little hope of ensuring the survival of his civilized clan.
Representative, as a twenty-nine-year-old woman, Nicole holds the promise
of generational succession.
The Eve to Dick's Adam, Nicole's lack of judgment seems typical. In
Nicole, Fitzgerald ostensibly aims to demonstrate that granting children
freedom guarantees disorder; his narrator relates, "Short of anarchy
[Dick] could not think of any chance that Nicole Warren deserved" (Tender
153). As Fitzgerald's narrator describes her, Nicole appears to belong to
a turbulent universe. Again, in Tender. Goethe's "Eternal Feminine" is
debased. Gilbert and Gubar describe the "Eternal Feminine" as presenting
"women from penitent prostitutes to angelic virgins in [the]...role of
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interpreters or intermediaries between the divine Father and his human
sons" (Gilbert and Gubar 21). Significantly, Nicole represents the
reverse image as an intermediary for demons. Unlike the repentant
Gretchen, she brings the Faust figure to damnation. By no means a
"penitent prostitute," Nicole feels most complete when she begins her
affair with Tommy (Tender 287).
Nicole, actively wrecking her husband's life, seems innately evil;
Rosemary reflects, "Nicole was a force--not necessarily well disposed or
predictable like her mother--an incalculable force. Rosemary was somewhat
afraid of her" (Tender 59). Nicole's destructive loss of her virginity is
ultimately what causes Dick's decline -- had she not been the victim of
incest, she probably would never have met him. After Nicole has each of
Dick's children, she experiences bouts of insanity (Tender 158-60).
Having Nicole experience madness, unlike Zelda, immediately after
childbirth, Fitzgerald seems to connect female sexuality, even unwilling
participation in the sex act, with beastliness. Similarly, in patriarchal
literature, feminine personae often undergo metamorphosis when giving
birth; Snow White's mother begins turning into the Evil Queen when she
pricks her finger and dreams of having a girl "as white as snow, as red as
blood, and hair as black as the wood of the embroidery frame" (Gilbert and
Gubar 37; Grimm 300).
Chronologically after Nicole's marriage and childbearing,
Fitzgerald's narrator begins to describe Nicole in animal terms. Nicole
moves earthward; declining toward Tommy, she is feral. The narrator
relates, "[Nicole] had thick, dark, gold hair like a chow's" (Tender 13).
In conversation, Nicole tends to "...seize the topic and run off with
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it...then bring it back and relinquish it...like an obedient retriever"
(Tender 25). Fitzgerald has Abe North watch Nicole, noticing her
"...animally counting [her children]--a cat checking her cubs with a paw"
(Tender 80). At one point, she feels her face "quiver like a rabbit's"
(Tender 297). Leaving Dick, Nicole is "...no longer...huntress of
corralled game"; instead, she fights Dick "...with her small, fine eyes,
with the plush arrogance of a top dog..." (Tender 299). Meaningfully, the
reader does not see Nicole's "flanks," her sexual body, until after she
awakens to her feelings for Tommy (Tender 288). The narrator possibly
implies that, when Dick succumbs to Tommy, Dick sees Nicole as the monster
who has ravaged him.
Although Fitzgerald must have seen sex inside marriage as
legitimate, and notwithstanding his need for sexual desire as fuel for
creativity, he once asserted that, "You can take your choice between God
and Sex. If you choose both, you're a smug hypocrite; if neither, you get
nothing" (Crack-Up 205). Very startling is Fitzgerald's mingling of two
strains of a bizarre conversation in Nicoise and Provencal. In the
dialogue, Fitzgerald clearly regards Nicole's sexuality as animal,
barbaric behavior; Nicole purposefully listens to the talk that the
narrator recounts:
'I laid her down here.' 'I took her behind the vines there.' 'She doesn't care--neither does he. It was that sacred dog. Well, I laid her down here--"
'Well, I don't care where you laid her down. Until that night I never even felt a woman's breast against my chest since I married- -twelve years ago. And now you tell me--' 'But listen about the dog--' (Tender 274-5)
The conversation is surreal, but it distinctly connects animals with
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Nicole's sexual activity. Overhearing the conversation and thinking it
"all right what they were saying," Nicole is involved in the exchange.
Herself alternately a chow, a golden retriever, a huntress, and a top dog,
perhaps Nicole is the sacred dog. The passage seems one of the darkest in
Book III; in it, Fitzgerald shows his audience a condemned world. Sadly,
what Fitzgerald appears to see as grotesque, female sexuality, is at the
heart of it.
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AN AUTHOR'S DYING CRY
Gertrude Stein -- remarking to Fitzgerald, "You are creating the
contemporary world much as Thackeray did in his Pendennis and Vanity Fair
and this isn't a bad compliment" (Correspondence 164) -- may have noticed
that beneath the apparent glamour Fitzgerald bestows on his female
personae, there is a bestial underside. In Vanity Fair. Thackeray bares
the dog that hides beneath the willful Becky Sharp:
In describing the siren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, . . .has [the author]. . .forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling around corpses; but above the water line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous... (Thackeray 617)
Like Becky Sharp, Daisy and Nicole emerge as duplicitous creatures. With
their beauty and wiles, they coax idealistic young heroes toward them;
sirens, Daisy and Nicole only inspire men to destruction. Daisy gives
Gatsby a false belief in the eternity of his vision. Indulging Nicole,
Dick dooms his tribe. Creating Daisy and Nicole, Fitzgerald seems to give
new lifeblood to images of female vampirism.
As fictional characters, Daisy and Nicole cannot be expected to
mirror all the facets of a human personality; "godlike" authors are not
God. However, despite the interjection, "It's only entertainment!" women
often feel offended when they see female personae depicted as monstrous,
recklessly destructive, or angelic. A reader's first response is usually
49
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to sympathize with the leading character of her sex. Alternatively, if we
first accept that female reality is largely absent from characters like
Nicole and Daisy, we can creatively translate Fitzgerald for female
readers. Judith Fetteriey explains why women must untangle their
responses to patriarchal literature; she writes:
Clearly, then, the first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting reader rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcising the male mind that has been implanted in us...While women obviously cannot rewrite literary works so that they become ours by virtue of reflecting our reality, we can accurately name the reality they do reflect and so change literary criticism from a closed conversation to an active dialogue (Fetteriey xxii-xxiii).
The least disturbing way to read Fitzgerald's fiction is to
recognize the patriarchy from which it issued. Still supreme in the early
twentieth century, male artists surely sensed that disruption in global
affairs would jar their authority. Intricate and philosophical,
Fitzgerald's fiction seems part of an intellectual reaction against
women's rights to authorship. Clearly, Jung, Lawrence, and Spengler fit
a philosophical paradigm familiar to Fitzgerald. Showing women to be
alternately close to the earth like Nicole or transiently attached to it
like Daisy, he created within a tradition of Biblical proportions. Lilith
and the Virgin Mary are as much parts of Fitzgerald's work as is the
"Eternal Feminine."
Kings of human minds, traditional authors have enjoyed the sovereign
power to tell readers, through forceful narrators, how to interpret
stories. Surely, to Fitzgerald, women's participation in the world of
letters signalled a change in narrative structures. In his fiction,
Fitzgerald expresses, perhaps unintentionally, a fear that women want more
than equality with men; apparently, he worries that female artists want to
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destroy male generative powers. In a similar fashion, established rulers,
sensing political threats, often react. believing their rebellious
underlings may kill for control. When Union soldiers enforced the words
of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal," white
Southerners feared coexistence with people they had defined as less than
h u m a n . Explored in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a common symbol of
Southern racism is the myth that African-American men have powerful sexual
drives that lead them to rape white women (thus debasing the ideal
feminine). Successful revolutions can engender counter revolutions; as
the early feminist movement occasioned the reactionary (anti-woman)
Fantasia, so Reconstruction begot Jim Crow (Woodward 100-7).
Fitzgerald, responding to cultural signals, irreversibly harmed
himself by trying to live a fiction. Although his real-life story was
complex, in his fiction, he used many of the metaphors of patriarchy.
Perhaps the ultimate flaw in fiction is that, like the cinema, it
sometimes deceives its audience into using it as a sort of Bible. Tytell
writes that Fitzgerald, outwardly living the role of the tortured Romantic
writer, self-destructed; he says,
Comparing modern writers to gods and their works to magical rites ignores the reality that lives are not lived as ritual reenactments of myths. The paradox lies in the intoxication of creative productivity and the destabilizing psychic costs to the writers themselves and to the people who lived with them. (Tytell 7).
In the end, it appears Fitzgerald admitted to himself the high cost of
striving to be a living myth. A story which preceded Tender in its
emotion and plot, "One Trip Abroad" shows a couple, the Nelsons, on the
road toward decay (Bruccoli 362, 464). Along the way, they see another
couple whom they first admire but later avoid. The other couple, like the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. picture of Dorian Gray, disintegrates over time, revealing the sickness
that comes from empty living. Finally, the Nelson's exclaim, "They're us!
They're us! Don't you see?" (Afternoon 165). Leaving his audience with
the cutting emotion of those cries, the reader can see Fitzgerald's pain
and self-sacrifice at the feet of the muse.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Joan. Candles and Carnival Lights: The Catholic Sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: New York University Press, 1978.
Aristotle. On the Art of Poetry. Aristotle/Horace/Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism. Trans. T.S. Dorsch. London: Penguin Books, 1965.
Brown, Norman 0. "Daphne." Mysteries. Dreams and Religion. Ed. Joseph Campbell. New York: Dutton, 1970. 93.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. and Margaret M. Duggan, eds. Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1980.
. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Carol & Graf Publishers, 1993.
Codrescu, Andrei. "The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans." The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. 194-99.
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