Anticipative Feminism in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Flappers and Philosophers

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English Volume 14 | Issue 1 Article 4 2012 Anticipative Feminism in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Flappers and Philosophers Andrew Riccardo Messiah College Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/tor Part of the American Literature Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Riccardo, Andrew (2012) "Anticipative Feminism in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Flappers and Philosophers," The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English: Vol. 14 : Iss. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/tor/vol14/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact . Anticipative Feminism in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Flappers and Philosophers Keywords F. Scott Fitzgerald, Feminism, This Side of Paradise, Flappers and Philosophers This article is available in The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/tor/vol14/iss1/4 26 Anticipative Feminism in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Flappers and Philosophers Andrew Riccardo Messiah College “Y ou’ve got a lot of courage to carry around a pink book,” my friend said to me one day. She referred to the paperback of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Flappers and Philosophers clasped loosely in my hand, back cover awash in fuchsia, front adorned with the portrait of a lady staring moodily off into the distance. Some might have reckoned the design merely the isolated interpretation of the good people at Pocket Books, paying the matter no second thought. A quick scan over my other Fitzgerald books, however, revealed a steady trend. My Barnes & 27 Noble edition of The Beautiful and Damned bathed itself in soft pink hues, while others dressed themselves in violet elegance. A commercially-minded reading of Fitzgerald might lend itself toward exploiting the stereotypically romantic side of his work. Compared to writing friend Ernest Hemingway’s terse grunts on bullfighting, Fitzgerald comes off markedly more loquacious and sentimental. His short stories fill themselves with young insecure adolescents and haughty debutantes. Keeping this in mind, I never felt intimidated by the publishers’ decision to feminize the exterior of Fitzgerald texts. When I was younger, I had enough blind faith in my masculine interpretation of Fitzgerald to disregard interpretations of him which said otherwise. I related strongly to the picaresque, boyhood image of Fitzgerald; men often play the role of hero in Fitzgerald’s novels. Frequently, the conflicts of his novels involve said males feeling profoundly slighted by their female counterparts, forced to deal with the trauma of feminine betrayal. At times, his female characters can come across less deserving of sympathy. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan ultimately chooses the boorish Tom over the titular Jay. In Tender is the Night, Dick and Nicole Divers’ marriage disintegrates—she running off with family friend Tommy Barban. In Fitzgerald’s final unfinished piece, The Love of the Last Tycoon, protagonist Monroe Stahr’s fall from Hollywood production power is precipitated in part by the entrance of his star-crossed love interest Kathleen Moore. Though readings evoking empathy with or attributing moral 28 high ground to males hardly stand as the absolute aesthetic responses all readers glean from Fitzgerald, I did not have to look far to find people who interpreted him in “my” way. Even my own brother, who had read only Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” in high school, suggested discussing the story in this paper, since character Judy Jones “is a real [expletive]” to protagonist Dexter Green. However, as my worldview continues to broaden and I meet vantage points completely antithetical to my own, I have to reevaluate the decision to clothe Fitzgerald in a flowery dress. Perhaps the front of Flappers and Philosophers contains an idly sitting woman not merely to sell a classic to the female demographic but because she truly belongs there. One critic has said that studying the “gender implications” of Fitzgerald’s texts has made him question the notion of Fitzgerald as “anti-feminist” (Schiff 2659). Another critic argued that the earlier mentioned Judy Jones of “Winter Dreams” has been “consistently misread and woefully shortchanged” as “irresponsible,” claiming she is “so subtle and probing that… hasty commentators miss the point entirely” (Martin 161, 160). When scrutinizing Fitzgerald from outside a hyper-masculine lens, I begin to concede that his male characters are not always blameless. Perhaps his female characters ought to be vindicated for their actions, empowered as they are through the demeanor and choice Fitzgerald grants them, even if he grants them such liberty unconsciously. Was Fitzgerald anticipating future decades’ heightened standards for gender equality? When readers orient Fitzgerald’s work in the context of 29 mid-twentieth century feminist ideals and ethics, his unwitting anticipation of feminist goals hardly seems an illfitting stretch. Of course, if people posit that an author anticipates later feminist aims, then they must provide a better definition for how they intend to use the word and fully explain the cultural context, historical period, and particular movement from which they draw the term. Unless otherwise noted, the term “feminism” will refer in this paper to second-wave feminism. First-wave feminism refers to the movement which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and spanned roughly until 1920, associated with figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott (Dicker 21, 29). While members of this wave would lobby and petition for equal educational opportunities for both genders, reproductive rights, Prohibition, and wardrobe liberties, they would predominantly fight for political equality in the form of women’s suffrage, culminating in the United States with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 (Dicker 26, 31, 52, 54). This landmark achievement marked the close of the first wave. In contradistinction, second-wave feminism began roughly in the early 1960s, as women began to realize the long-term effects of leaving their World War II factory jobs and returning to their roles as wives and housekeepers. Feeling suddenly unable to find satisfaction in the domestic sphere, many women p (...truncated)