Sport Culture As Social Analysis in the Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Digital Repository at the University of Maryland ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: SPORT, STATUS, NARRATIVE, AND NATION: SPORT CULTURE AS SOCIAL ANALYSIS IN THE FICTION OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Jarom Lyle McDonald, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Professor Jackson R. Bryer Department of English This dissertation examines the ways that F. Sco� Fitzgerald saw organized, spectator-based sports working to help structure concepts of status, community, and nationhood. With ]such an assumption, I argue that Fitzgerald sees the development of local and national spectatorship as a revealing and o�en paradoxical phenomenon in the interaction between the cultural narratives told by sport and the complex social relationships in America. Chapter one situates my arguments in the landscape of the late nineteenth/ early twentieth centuries by exploring how cultural stories of the modern American sports scene—those of a�ending ballparks, reading or listening to media, being a “fan”—cultivates communities of spectatorship inseparable from ideologies of status and hierarchy. Each of the next three chapters then takes this framework and explores how Fitzgerald’s literature, conversing with sport culture historically and literarily, expresses the complexities of American class formations. Chapter two considers the “intense and dramatic spectacle” (to use Fitzgerald’s words) of college football in This Side of Paradise as a lens for exploring links between spectatorship, emulation, and ideology. Chapter three continues to look at college football, this time in various short stories, in order to scrutinize relationships between the performative aspects of sports and the performative aspects of social status-groups. Chapter four scrutinizes how The Great Gatsby reveals the ways that romantic ideologies that label baseball as “America’s Game” are undermined by the real class tensions surrounding baseball’s spectator culture. Spectatorship creates a public arena for relating to “heroes” of sport and to fellow fans, emphasizing adulation and identification—even to the point of national identification. But at the same time, Fitzgerald’s fiction demonstrates the necessity of allowing for criticism of these institutions. Through close, textual reading augmented with new historicist research and analysis, I examine why Fitzgerald’s understanding of American sport culture helps us be�er realize how sport perpetuates American ideologies of status while simultaneously belying inherent ironies in American class stratification. SPORT, STATUS, NARRATIVE, AND NATION: SPORT CULTURE AS SOCIAL ANALYSIS IN THE FICTION OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD by Jarom Lyle McDonald Dissertation submi�ed to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2005 Advisory Commi�ee: Professor Jackson R. Bryer, Chair/Advisor Professor Jonathan Auerbach Professor Marilee Lindemann Professor Peter Mallios Professor Lawrence Mintz This work is licensed under the Creative Commons A�ribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit h�p://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ or send a le�er to Creative Commons 559 Nathan Abbo� Way Stanford, CA 94305 for Heather, my inspiration, always and forever ii Acknowledgments In my efforts to write down all those to whom I need to express gratitude, I realize that the dissertation is much more the cumulative total of a wide range of influences than it is any significant accomplishment on my own part. I may put my name on it, but it bears the marks of all those below and many more who, while going unnamed, are not unremembered. With that in mind, I’d like to begin by acknowledging the efforts of my commi�ee chair, Jackson Bryer. His faith in my topic and in my ability to see it through to fruition provided the encouragement I needed when I more than once was ready to abandon the work. His advice and mentoring were invaluable at all stages, and I feel privileged to have been able to labor under such an esteemed figure. I’d also like to acknowledge Jonathan Auerbach, for his sometimes frustrating but always needed guidance in pushing me to articulate my thoughts at a level that the dissertation requires. The other members of my commi�ee, Marilee Lindemann, Peter Mallios, and Larry Mintz, were all instrumental at one time or another during my progress towards this stage, and I thank them for their time and assistance. I’m indebted to Martha Nell Smith for the chance to receive funding through working at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, an opportunity that allowed me to pursue my studies as a student and a scholar. My work at MITH has also been inestimable in its ability to prepare me for an academic career in a field that lets me fuse my love of humanities inquiry with the exciting and cu�ing-edge technological advancements that I was able to be a part of. My family and friends, for their encouragement and support, are to be commended for their ability to keep me focused while not le�ing me ignore the iii many other important things I’ve been involved with. I’m especially grateful that my two boys, Camden and Brighton, have been patient enough with me to allow me to work but have also reminded me how much greater the joy is in being with them. I hope they know that I’ll never be too busy to make time for all that they desire to do. And last of all, nearly at a loss for words I acknowledge my wife and best friend, Heather. I don’t think she can every completely know how she has helped me through and given me things to work towards. How lucky I am that, though this chapter in our life is now over, our love will never be. I’m excited for where we go from here. iv Contents Introduction: Fitzgerald, Sport, and Social Interaction 1 Chapter I: “We Are a Very Special Country” : The 10 Narrativization Sport and the Fiction of a Classless Nation Chapter II: Gridiron Paradise : Princetonian Football, 50 American Class Chapter III: “Idol of the Whole Body of Young Men”: 101 Football, Heroes, and the Performance of Social Status Chapter IV: “Perfunctory Patriotism”: Tom Buchanan, 150 Meyer Wolfshiem, and America’s Game Coda: Of Habitus and Homecoming 194 Works Cited 200 v Introduction: Fitzgerald, Sport, and Social Interaction Sport has o�en been a common motif in literature, functioning as theme, as se�ing, as allusion, and as metaphor. As spectator sports moved to the forefront of American consciousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, major and minor literary figures turned to sport as a way of comprehending some of the radical changes occurring in American life. While different authors reacted to sport in their own ways, F. Sco� Fitzgerald is unique among American authors in his approach to the relationship between sport and literature. Fitzgerald is among the first of American authors to see sport, as a social institution, fi�ing into larger concepts of social relationships, both relationships of immediate community as well as those of national identification. Fitzgerald’s literary methodologies, engaging with history, nationhood, and the relationship between citizens of different class and/or status, provide a distinctive position from which to analyze the cultural context of spectator sports. One cannot talk about the significance of F. Sco� Fitzgerald’s fiction without understanding the role that notions of social class and social status played in Fitzgerald’s personal and literary life. Among other things, Fitzgerald treated his literary endeavors as a way to comprehend and understand be�er the class distinctions, class consciousness, and social mobility (or lack thereof) he saw in the modern American lifestyle. To interrogate issues of class and status, Fitzgerald would o�en focus on character types or conventions of se�ing and plot that served as microcosms of or homologies for much broader social systems. Much of his early literature consistently reworked tropes such as the poor young boy or girl losing out to wealthier counterparts or the talented figure hampered by economic and social constraints or boundaries. As he matured as a writer, Fitzgerald recognized deeper complexities and questions in such 1 social situations and struggled to figure out how ideologies of class relate to ideologies of nationhood, race, religion, and gender. Everything became, for Fitzgerald, types of the social world: college and education, personal and family relationships, political happenings, the expatriate lifestyle, emerging media. Yet while sport, in some ways, functions similarly to some of these other institutions in terms of its relationship to social systems, it also provides Fitzgerald a particular insight that these other social microcosms do not. Fitzgerald may not have found the answers about social mobility that he was in search of in his literature. But he returned to sports o�en in search of them, and as he sought to comprehend the system of social stratification in which he lived, spectator sports were an essential influence on his representation (or representations) of the American way of life. Moreover, his insights into the narratives of sport provide a center of examination that is invaluable to understanding the way some of the other cultural institutions function. In this dissertation, as I examine how Fitzgerald probed the roles of sport in American social formations, I will also read fictional narratives as responses to or conversations with some of other narratives of sport. By doing so, I investigate the degrees of similarity in Fitzgerald’s understanding of how sport works as well as the ways in which he perceives sport differently from some of the figures behind other forms of cultural rhetoric.

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