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Fitzgerald in the Late 1910S: War and Women Richard M Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2009 Fitzgerald in the Late 1910s: War and Women Richard M. Clark Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Clark, R. (2009). Fitzgerald in the Late 1910s: War and Women (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/416 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FITZGERALD IN THE LATE 1910s: WAR AND WOMEN A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Richard M. Clark August 2009 Copyright by Richard M. Clark 2009 FITZGERALD IN THE LATE 1910s: WAR AND WOMEN By Richard M. Clark Approved July 21, 2009 ________________________________ ________________________________ Linda Kinnahan, Ph.D. Greg Barnhisel, Ph.D. Professor of English Assistant Professor of English (Dissertation Director) (2nd Reader) ________________________________ ________________________________ Frederick Newberry, Ph.D. Magali Cornier Michael, Ph.D. Professor of English Professor of English (1st Reader) (Chair, Department of English) ________________________________ Christopher M. Duncan, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts iii ABSTRACT FITZGERALD IN THE LATE 1910s: WAR AND WOMEN By Richard M. Clark August 2009 Dissertation supervised by Professor Linda Kinnahan This dissertation analyzes historical and cultural factors that influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s portrayal of women in three of his early works. In ―Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge,‖ This Side of Paradise, and ―Head and Shoulders,‖ women act as usurpers and destroyers, infiltrating male territory and taking on traditionally male roles. Fitzgerald reacts to changes in the status of women that had been occurring since the late 1800s. But the late 1910s, when the author composed these works, witnessed a hastening of women‘s progress and an intensification of the male anxiety resulting from these changes. Repercussions of the war in Europe did much to exacerbate men‘s fears. Here, I examine the many ways in which the war influenced American culture and how Fitzgerald, something of a self-appointed voice of his generation reflected the male panic resulting from changes in gender relations. To do so, I attempt to recover and reconstruct the zeitgeist of the late 1910s through an extensive reading of period print media. iv Chapter 1 treats ―Sentiment,‖ one of the few Fitzgerald works to deal directly with the war. American periodicals published many articles dealing with European—and especially British—reactions to the war. ―Sentiment‖ dramatizes controversies surrounding changes in fashion, ―war babies,‖ ―khaki fever,‖ and eugenics. In chapter 2, I discuss Fitzgerald‘s portrayal of the automobile in Paradise. Fitzgerald documents the new freedoms that young men and women of the 1910s enjoyed and the role the ―devil wagon‖—as period sources called the automobile—played in this liberation. The print media of the 1910s celebrated the motor vehicle‘s role on the battlefield and the woman driver‘s contributions to the war effort, thus creating an association between women, cars, and battlefield death. In the novel, the car becomes a vehicle of moral and physical destruction. Finally, I read ―Head‖ as a commentary on gender role reversals during the war, when women invaded traditionally male territory in the workplace. This usurpation of male roles went all the way to the White House: Edith Wilson secretly made important political decisions as her husband Woodrow lay incapacitated after a stroke. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...iv Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..…1 1 ―What could she mean?‖: Sex and ―Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge‖……………..18 2 Dick Humbird and the Devil Wagon of Doom: Cars, Carnivores, and Carnality in This Side of Paradise……………………………………………………………….….67 3 Sandra Pepys and the Presidentress: Women, Work, and Role Reversal in ―Head and Shoulders‖.………………………………………………………………….......115 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...165 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….175 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………..189 vi 1 Introduction This dissertation undertakes to dig for the roots of Fitzgerald‘s bitter portrayal of women in three of his early works. In ―Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge,‖ This Side of Paradise, and ―Head and Shoulders,‖ women act as usurpers and destroyers, infiltrating male territory and taking on traditionally male roles. Women seduce and discard men, drive them into oblivion, and, perhaps worst of all, demonstrate that they can support themselves financially. Fitzgerald reacts to changes in the status of women that had been occurring since the late 1800s. A powerful, well-organized women‘s lobby, along with greater opportunities in education and the workplace in a rapidly industrializing country, spearheaded this movement. But the late 1910s, when the author composed these works, witnessed a hastening of women‘s progress and an intensification of the male anxiety resulting from these changes. As any scholar studying the period would point out, repercussions of the war in Europe did much to exacerbate fear. Here, I examine the many ways in which the war influenced American culture and how Fitzgerald, something of a self-appointed voice of his generation, reacted to and reflected—whether consciously or unconsciously—the male panic resulting from changes in gender relations. To do so, I attempt to recover and reconstruct the zeitgeist of the late 1910s through an extensive reading of period print media. In the preface to his 1969 study of ‘60s radicalism, The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak warns that, ―if one gets down to scrutinizing the microscopic phenomena of history […] one tends only to see many different people doing many different things and thinking different thoughts‖ (xi). Certainly, Roszak‘s concern has merit, but he qualifies this statement by adding, ―that elusive conception called ‗the spirit 2 of the times‘ continues to nag at the mind and demand recognition, since it seems to be the only way available in which one can make even provisional sense of the world one lives in.‖ He recommends embracing ―these persuasively ectoplasmic Zeitgeists‖ but ―with a certain trepidation, allowing exceptions to slip through the sieve of one‘s generalizations in great numbers, but hoping always that more that is solid and valuable will finally remain behind than filters away‖ (xi). Like Roszak, I seek the dominant opinions and reactions. Newspapers and magazines offer a means through which to understand, to make some semblance of sense, of a bygone era. I choose sources like the New York Times and miscellanies like Current Opinion and Living Age, which reprint articles from other popular periodicals, to reproduce the mainstream American conversation of the day. The entire country heard this conversation, not just an educated elite like Fitzgerald‘s Ivy League peers; and the ambitious young writer sought popular success and the money it would bring: he wanted his novels to sell and to publish his stories in the most widely read magazines of the time, as his longstanding professional relationship with The Saturday Evening Post would attest. Fitzgerald, too, filtered out the ―exceptions,‖ as Roszak calls them, and paints portraits of the middle-class everyman dealing with the everywoman of his time. I found Roszak through Rob Kirkpatrick‘s 1969: The Year that Changed Everything, a study, like mine, of a period marked by war and great cultural upheaval. Kirkpatrick ―set[s] out not just to tell the story of 1969 in America, but also to examine the zeitgeist—literally, the ‗time spirit‘—of this iconic, tumultuous, cataclysmic year‖ (xvii). I attempt to perform a similar feat with the tumult and cataclysm of the First World War era in the United States. I peruse the types of news stories and features read 3 by Fitzgerald—indeed every American—and examine how they must have affected him. In other words, I look at how the hopes and fears of a ―lost generation‖ manifest themselves in Fitzgerald‘s early works. So, here, I hope to conjure the spirit of 1917– 1919 in an attempt to comprehend a soon-to-be quite famous young author‘s angst-ridden depiction of gender relations. In the process, I offer a new slant on Fitzgerald‘s much-maligned and oft-ignored early work. Scholars have relegated ―Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge‖ and ―Head and Shoulders‖ to the dustbin of Fitzgerald‘s oeuvre, and nobody has provided a thorough examination of the role of the automobile in This Side of Paradise, especially in relation to gender and war. I hope that this study will spur interest in Fitzgerald‘s forgotten tales and alert history-minded critics to possible new directions for Paradise scholarship because, as I essay to demonstrate in the pages that follow, the non-canonical tales have much to contribute to our portrait of the author and his times. We have precious little scholarship on Fitzgerald‘s reaction to World War I, but the three works I deal with in this dissertation provide a window into his thinking. In addition, these texts offer a view of the war from the homefront, specifically that of an able-bodied, military-age male noncombatant, a perspective forgotten amidst that of male fiction writers who did get overseas, and even the works of female writers whose works involved with World War I have enjoyed something of a scholarly renaissance in recent decades. Scholars, and even Fitzgerald himself, discarded, maligned, and ignored these works. ―Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge,‖ originally appeared in the author‘s college literary magazine, but he never attempted to rewrite or republish the tale, instead harvesting a few passages from the story for his first novel, This Side of Paradise.
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