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Dan Brown
Prof. Dando
Senior Seminar: Glamour
“All Wise Women Conform to the Man’s Lead ”:
Insert Witty Title Here...something about Glamour
Thesis: When confronting the world around them after World War I, Modernists like Fitzgerald were disillusioned by the ways in which Glamour portrayed reality. The elevation of women’s status provided a means of seeing how these women had accomplished what the Modernists could not, maintaining their artistic integrity while enjoying commercial success. This anxiety is represented in Fitgerald’s Tender is the Night.
F. Scott Fitzgerald emerged as a writer on the American Literary scene with the publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26th, 1920. Like most writers during the time, he confronted a world in flux. Fitzgerald’s world was one reacting to the events of the first Great War, a war in which millions of men died in a new kind a warfare, a mechanized slaughterhouse that erased the gallantry of older tactics of open field fighting replacing them with trenches, gas, and the machine-gun. The first World War can be seen not only as a turning point for military tactics, but also a key event in Literature, where Modernism, a movement in literature that Fitzgerald subscribed to, responded to the disillusionment created by the traumatic after effects of the war.
Modernists considered themselves part of the avant-garde, a trend in Literature moving to expel the notions of Realism and previous schools of thought, experimenting with form and structure rather than concerning themselves with urbane tradition of popular Romanticism that was a literary partiality remaining from before the war (WorldBook 2005). In the post World War I era, Modernists found themselves confronting the rapidly changing social and economic structures that came into play in the American popular culture, especially concerning gender roles in society. As Tiffany Joseph found, “The era between the wars is marked by an intensified attention to gender issues that, in the eyes of many, worked to overturn repressive gender identities” (Joseph 64). “With so many men away at the front, women assumed roles previously denied them and made household and economic decisions usually reserved for the ‘men of the house’” thus leading to a blurring of gender roles in society, and in the 1920s, seeing “rising hemlines, increasing sexual openness, and voting rights for women” (Joseph 65). We can view these changing periods in terms of the gender roles that it created and replaced. Before the first World War, Modernists were confronting a genteel tradition in Romanticism that can be described as a maternal ego, one which is a doting caregiver to society which replaced reality with an illusion of the aesthetic. After World War I, the Modernists confronted a new feminine character: The woman who was both femnine and masculine. This is the woman is represented by Rosemary Hoyt and in some parts Nicole Diver of whom Dick Diver finds himself lost when confronting his new gender relation to these women.
The postwar popular culture saw the rise of women, women who had possession of both economic stability and sexuality, enabling them to embrace both masculinity and femininity as interchangeable ideals. These ideals and performances allowed a fluid movement through the economic and social spheres of glamourous lifestyles. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night highlight such women and the men who struggle with the reassignment of gender roles in their relationships with these women who have transcended socially constructed gender norms. The character relationships that are present in Fitzgerald’s novels also reflect this anxiety of “emasculation” prevalent among the Modernists, holding on to their elitist patriarchal movement while embracing the “American-fueled consumer paradise that succeeded the Great War”: a feminized and glamorized culture (Nowlin 58).
Through the character of Dick Diver, we can see how this man has become a castrated handbag owned by the more powerful feminine characters of Fitzgerald’s novels, where Glamour is “represented as a relatively affordable quality, providing one makes the right consumption choice. Through its visual power, the industry of luxury goods spells its magic to create unattainable myths inspiring desires whose fulfillment is forever deferred”, and which are inaccessible to the men in these novels because of their strict adherence to traditional gender roles. Dick Diver is a character who struggles with Glamour because he is either excluded from it or in possession of it (Soley-Beltran 323). He can not be fully excluded from it as well as in possession of it like the emerging “new” woman as defined by the changing times. He loses his traditional gender role and become a victim of the glamourous lifestyle that surrounds him. In attaining “Glamour” which is represented by the feminine and commercial success, one must lose their masculinity. Micheal Nowlin comments discusses Dick Diver’s predicament in the Fitzgerald novel, Tender is the Night when he states, “the problem Fitzgerald was uniquely positioned to engage when he developed the story of Dick Diver: this is, the problem of an ‘artistic conscience’ demanding resistance to the feminization of culture while proving incapable of supplanting a maternal superego demanding, in its turn, tribute to the desiring ‘feminine’ other” (Nowlin 67).
While Fitzgerald and the other Modernists referred to themselves as the “avant-garde,” it did not necessarily mean that the they had escaped all previously held social notions and cultural ideals. A majority of the Modernist writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, worked within the constructed concepts of gender. “Femininity” and “masculinity” were important conceptions both used in the drafting of Modernists texts, poems and other representatives of literature and in the way it was discussed critically where Francis Kerr states that “Ezra Pound described the true poetic act as metaphorical sex in which the male poet revitalizes a lethargic feminine culture. Writing good poetry was, he said, like ‘driving any new idea in the great passive vulva of [literary] London’” (Kerr 405). Fitzgerald saw his own writing process in the same idea as Pound; he wanted to be Pound’s “male poet,” achieving commercial success through his writing, becoming well received by the glamourous “feminine culture.”
The “feminine culture” that Francis Kerr discusses is the popular culture that existed after the first World War, specifically American popular culture that embraced consumerism which fed on the luxurious and glamourous lifestyles for those who took advantage of the postwar economic boom during the “Roaring Twenties.” These “glamourous lifestyles” included what one might suspect from an opulent lifestyle: the nice car, spacious apartment or mansion with a beautiful spouse and children at your call when traveling to exotic and distant locations. But these notions of consumerism fostered by glamour are what worried the Modernists. These glamorized lifestyles represented the feminized and consumerized lifestyles that the Modernist writers wanted to distance themselves from in their art. As Virginia Postrel notes, “Glamour is not just beauty or luxury. It is not a style by an effect, a quality on the play of imagination...glamour includes the risks but omits the tedium, the sore feet, the dirt, the accounting. Glamour is never boring” (Postrel 24). As Postrel states, glamour forgoes the negative aspects of life and replaces them with a shining monolith to consumption. The kind of world that glamour and consumerism culture exhibited was one in which a war like the first World War could never take place. The war is a distant thought relegated to the silver screen of Hollywood which always represents the glamourous side of war: the heroic man saving the day and ending the night with a beautiful woman. The typical scenario of the hero getting the girl and driving off into the sunset of some distant European countryside, far from the bombs and bullets. Glamour choses not to represent the trenches, only the lustrous screen of Hollywood and aesthetic excesses of the wealthy.
The relationship that existed between the Modernist avant-garde and the “feminine culture” of the creative writing process was one of a rigid dichotomy between embracing and rejecting the notions of the popular American culture at the time. Fitzgerald and other Modernists, as to be cliché, “wanted their cake and to eat it too.” In this drive towards success, Fitzgerald shows us the problem that most of the Modernist elite faced; they wanted commercial success; they wanted themselves to become glamourous but in becoming glamourous, one must become emasculated as in Pound’s “feminine culture,” one must sell out a portion of his artistic integrity by adopting the consumerized and glamorized culture. The artistic integrity is the maintencance of Modernist ideals through the representation of reality as a disillusionment in the previous maternal ego of Romanticism. Michael Nowlin relates Ann Douglas’ arguments in Terrible Honesty which shows this dichotomy between commercialism and modernist rational:
Douglas describes as matricidal American modernism’s radical repudiation of sentimental and censorial idealism and its self-conscious effort to ‘masculize’ a culture too long overseen by genteel sensibilities. Douglas reminds us that, despite the elitism implicit in avantgardist rhetoric, the self-dramatizing American ‘orphans’ of the ‘lost generation’ helped usher in the American century and took full advantage of the new popular culture industry that money and technical wizardry made flourish. The assault on the “Victorian” matrons inseparable from the shell shocked children’s ethos of ‘terrible honesty’ had widespread appeal; but only so far as ‘terrible honesty’ was ironically compatible with the pleasure principle by which popular culture is governed (Nowlin 59).
This quotation from Nowlin concerning Ann Douglas’ work further explains the ironic predicament of the F. Scott Fitzgerald, when beginning a new novel, Fitzgerald had boasted “to Maxwell Perkins in 1925 about the new novel he was beginning to write: ‘it is something really NEW in form, idea, structure -- the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find” (Nowlin 58). Here we see Fitzgerald’s anxiety concerning artistic integrity while still becoming seduced by the glamour and illusion of popular culture. Douglas touches upon the notion of the Modernists maintaining their artistic integrity through the movement away from the form and function of previous movements in Literature that relished in the precursor to Glamour which was the maternal ego of portraying reality as an illusion, preferring that which portrayed the world realistically, unglamorously, letting those who viewed their work the ability to see “the textures of life, and the skill and effort behind its own achievement” (Postrel 29).
Joyce and Stein represent other Modernist writers, like Fitzgerald, who were trying to revolutionize Western prose through experimentation in the appearance and subject matter. In stating that this novel was to be “the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for,” Fitzgerald is asserting his status as a writer who is as talented as, if not more than Joyce and Stein in terms of literary “greatness”. Here we can define “greatness” as one who has maintained his or her artistic integrity; the masculine attributes of the writing process. As Nowlin continues to describe it, the novel was to be about: “a Hollywood technician who murders his domineering mother after becoming enchanted by a circle of American expatriates living on the French Riviera. Fitzgerald worked on this material intermittently for over seven years, but was oddly unable to deliver a novel about matricide. What emerged, but not until 1932, was the story of Dick Diver” (Nowlin 58). The story of Dick Diver is the resulting Fitzgerald novel, Tender is the Night. In concerning himself with the “Hollywood” subject, Fitzgerald is doing exactly what Douglas notes in her essay. Hollywood represents the new mediums and subjects that the Modernist were experimenting with, it represented the “money and technical wizardry”(Nowlin 59). This is a continued flirtation with the feminine as Fitzgerald is using the notion of Hollywood and the glamourous lifestyle that goes along with the subject for his novel.
Looking at the text critically with considerations towards Ann Douglas’ notes on Modernism's’ aim to “masculine a culture too long overseen by genteel sensibilities” and the anxiety of “effeminization” held by Modernists writing to the “feminine” audience, we see how Fitzgerald tries to “redeem the character of paternal authority in the American-fueled consumer paradise that succeeded the Great War” (Nowlin 58.) Fitzgerald is unsuccessful in this quest, as is the character of Dick Diver. Both struggle with feminine glamour; with Fitzgerald and his character Dick Diver, it is represented by their struggle with commercial success and a glamourous lifestyle (the feminine) versus their artistic integrity (the masculine).
His inability to write the epochal work he projects, the Attempt of a uniform and pragmatic classification of the neuroses and psychoses...that would justify his reputation as a prodigy and justify the faith invested in him by his superiors. Dick finds it easier to be an entertainer: he prefers giving back a flattering idea of themselves, and in exchange receiving their love and devotion” (Nowlin 59).
In Tender is the Night, Dick is searching for a means to write a book of psychology, “the attempt of a uniform and pragmatic classification of the neuroses and psychoses” that would allow him to distinguish himself from everyone else. However, as Nowlin states, “Dick finds it easier to be an entertainer.” Dick is seduced by the easy life which is afforded him by Nicole’s wealth where he has now taken on the role of a doting motherly figure instead of the usual male role of provider taking care of Nicole when she is suffering from her own psychoses. He has taken on a feminine role in two ways. The first is the way in which it is used in the Modernist discussion of the writing process. Dick has allowed himself to become commercialized, he is softened by the easier living that goes along with the glamourous lifestyle of summers of the French Riviera, large parties and homes as well as vacations on a whim. The second use of the feminine that Dick exhibits is his role reversal in the relationship with Nicole. He has become the wife to Nicole’s wealth and provision. Even though Nicole is not working, she is still the providing member of the family. As the story evolves, Nicole in some aspects realizes this and begins to recover from her mental illness as she becomes aware that she does not need Dick. She has usurped his role.
This is the similar story of Fitzgerald’s frustration, his own search for a novel that would set him apart from the rest of the Modernists, or at least place him at the forefront. Dick’s “the world’s rarest work” is the same as Fitzgerald’s novel, they are both looking to set their place in the world through their own masculine art of writing, of creating.
While the story of Dick Diver does not adhere to the original story of matricidal tendencies enacted upon the Hollywood ideal, Tender is the Night does contain a Hollywood figure which is just as ruthless in terms of her relations with Dick as Fitzgerald might have intended between the characters of the original matricide text. That character is Rosemary Hoyt and she is responsible for the “death” of Dick Diver. Now certainly the character of Dick is not killed in Tender is the Night, but his masculinity is, or rather his performance of masculinity. Through Rosemary’s interactions with the Divers, Fitzgerald reveals that the character of Dick was never a masculine one in that he never fully adheres to the constructed gender roles assigned to him by society. Typically, one might think of the male role in a family as that of a provider, one who brings home the means to support the family. However, Dick isn’t the person who occupies this role in the Diver family; this role belongs to Nicole. This revelation of Dick’s inadequatecy comes through the character of Rosemary where Fitzgerald is commenting upon his own frustrations with glamour and consumerism within this context of relationships in Tender is the Night.
Rosemary represents a woman who has ascertained both masculine and feminine roles in society. She is able to switch between each role depending on the situation as easily as one might put on clothes. As I have mentioned before, America during the period after the first world war culture saw the elevation women’s status. These women had dominion over both “economic stability and sexuality, their own means of embracing both masculinity and femininity as interchangeable ideals, ideals and performances that allowed a fluid movement through the economic and social spheres of glamourous lifestyles.” Rosemary was one of these women.
As an actress, she is afforded the ability of being compensated for her time in a generous manner as well as the ability to have a large amount of time between films to take extravagant vacations as is the case in Tender is the Night where we are introduced to her after her starring role in “Daddy’s Girl.”
This is glamorous in its own sense as we see how the profession of an actress evokes glamour through its illusionary art of acting as well as the lifestyle that is established through the art. Postrel notes that “for glamour to survive, the high heels must never pinch, the roof never leak, the furniture never need dusting, the car never get stuck in traffic, the star never have a runny nose or a bad hair day. Or so we must believe” (Postrel 29). In Rosemary’s world, you do not see the hardships, only the success. To Fitzgerald, she represents what women during this period could achieve and what Modernists had a hard time grasping. Through her profession as an actress, she is able to provide for herself and live a lifestyle that is financially stable. Fitzgerald writes:
You were brought up to work--not especially to marry. Now you’ve found your first nut to crack and it’s a good nut--go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him--whatever happens, it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl (Fitzgerald 40).
In this conversation with her mother, Elsie Speers, Rosemary is allowed to pursue an inappropriate relationship with Dick because she is immune to the ramifications of an adulteress affair. As Elsie says, “wound yourself or him--whatever happens, it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl” (Fitzgerald 40). Because of her ability to use both gender roles to her advantage, she is able to rely on one gender role when the other “fails.” Failure, in this sense is the wound that Speers discusses. Certainly Rosemary could wound herself through her own emotional attachments to Dick through the affair, but she would not falter as one would suspect as she has her acting career to fall back on. Rosemary can leave herself open to this wound because she can easily don the fashion of masculinity and provide for herself rather than seeking out the typical male providing role that Dick, as she might percieve it, would exhibit. Michael Nowlin discusses the way in which gender has performative characteristics, must like acting.
The most fundamental implication is that ‘masculinity’ is as much a masquerade as ‘femininity,’ and that women stand better positioned to exploit this knowledge because by usage they are more practiced in the art of masquerading (Nowlin 65).
The “masquerading” of femininity and masculinity is similar to that of glamour’s illusionary characterisitics. As glamour relies on the illusion of a polished visage of beauty and form to present reality, gender performance relies on the same illusion. In her movie, “Daddy’s Girl,” Rosemary relies on the performative nature of gender to sell her feminity. She achieves commercial success that affords her a glamourous lifestyle by using her youth and beauty, qualities which glamour are fed off of, through acting. Her audience is “an ideal Hollywood spectator, whose willing suspension of disbelief implies a knowledge that what she is assenting to is an illusion” (Nowlin 65). Fitzgerald describes the scene in which the characters in the novel review the movie of “Daddy’s Girl.” He writes, in reference to Rosemary’s role in the movie, “Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and curruption rollwed away; nay, the very march of destiny stopped...women would forget the dirty dishes at home and weep” (Fitzgeralds 69). Here, glamour dispells “destiny,” instead destiny is in the hands of the Hollywood notion of feminine innocence while enjoying its financial succsses. Rosemary is both a male in terms of economically stability and a female in her sexuality. The movie Both provide her the means to live glamourously.
The character of Rosemary Hoyt further elaborates Fitzgerald and the Modernists relationship with the masculine writing process and commercial success. As I had mentioned, glamour provided a polished reality that did not reflect the actual reality of the world that the Modernists confronted. The world as they knew it had just seen the end of the first World War, a rather unglamourous event to say the least. Rosemary, and women like her, could live in such a world because they could easily move between notions of masculinity and feminity. They could provide for themselves in ways that they couldn’t before the events of the first World War but they could also rely on their feminine gender to enjoy success such as lavish lifestyles and the break down of traditional family structures and values. As is the case of Rosemary, we see how she is able to manipulate the character of Dick Diver and enter into the sort of self-destructing relationship that becomes of their affair because she was more apt to handle the consequences than Dick. While Rosemary recovers from the relationship, Dick is ruined.
But like Nick Carraway, Dick comes to feel a crippling nostalgia for paternal law after being seduced by images of an easier and happier life that inform the iconography of popular culture and the advertising industry symbiotically bound to it (Nowlin 59).
“Douglas calls Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, Dorothy Parker, and Marianne Moore among others “high lowbrows,” “eager to capture mass acceptance and elite adulation in a single stroke...Not one of them initially ruled out the possibility--the artist’s version of the American dream--that (s)he could be at once status-soaked elite author, conscientious craftsperson, and mass artist or mass image” (Nowlin 60).
Fitzgerald [had] vital material for exploring the polarities of masculine desire--the desire, on the one hand, to be desired by women, and, on the other hand, to repudiate feminity through some form of violence (physical or discursive) (Nowlin 67).
“Well I’m a soldier,” Barban answered pleasantly. “My buisness is to kill people. I fought against the Riff because I am a European, and I have fought the Communists because they want to take my property from me” (Fitzgerald 35).
Writing his own tragic heroic narrative in advance, Dick foresees that he cannot restore patriarchal order to a gendered world gone askew in the wake of the war and in the post-war boom period without acknowledging the lack entailed by his own masculinity (Nowlin 64).
“Watching his father’s struggles in poor parishes had wedded a desire for money to an essentially unaquisitive nature. It was not a healthy necessity for security -- he had never felt so sure of himself, more thoroughly his own man, than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. Yet he had been swallowed up like a gigalo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults” (Fitzgerald 201).
***
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Modernist avant-garde found it difficult to confront the ways in which gender relationships were changing after World War I. Specifically with Fitzgerald, his book Tender is the Night reflects his, as well as the other Modernist writers, own anxiety towards women taking on more “masculine” roles which were increased freedom of sexuality and economic stability.
At the heart of this, the men were jealous of the women, as there was an ability on the women’s behalf to move more freely within gender roles while the Modernists found themselves still constricted by “social norms.” This is obvious in their discussions concerning the writing process, where the art of writing itself was a masculine endeavor while the audience that received the product of the writing was a “feminine culture”. The glamour is not in the lifestyles but rather in the Modernists flirtation with the feminine. They wanted to remain men in their work but enjoy the success in the feminine and all the notions of a glamorous lifestyle that went along with commercial success. The women are glamourous to the men because they have attained something that the men (the Modernists) cannot: both the masculine and feminine points of the writing process which are artistic integrity, represented by their adherence to feminine gender norms within there work but male economic stability, and
Works Cited
Churchwell, Sarah. "'$4000 a Screw': The Prostituted Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway." European Journal of American Culture 24.2 (2005): 105-29.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner, 2004.
Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki, and Tatiani Rapatzikou. "Editorial: The American Culture-Industry of Image-Making; Part II." European Journal of American Culture 24.2 (2005): 87-90.
Joseph, Tiffany. ""Non-Combatant 's Shell-Shock":Trauma and Gender in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night." NWSA Journal 15.3 (2003): 64-81.
Kerr, Frances. "Feeling `half Feminine': Modernism and the Politics of Emotion in the Great Gatsby." American Literature 68.2 (1996): 405.
Michael Plante, Ph.D., Jessie J. Poesch. ""Modernism"." Apple World Book (2005) . April 12 2006.
Nowlin, Michael. `The World's Rarest Work': Modernism and Masculinity in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Vol. 25. College Literature, 1998.
Soley-Beltran, Patrícia. "Modelling Feminity." European Journal of Women's Studies Vol. 11.Issue 3 (Aug2004): p309-326.
Outline
-Introduction
-Modernists and their relation with World War I
-Modernists: Who were they, what did they do.
-Modernists and the rising status of Women
-Fitzgerald and the struggle with the “glamourous” woman and feminized culture
-Modernist writing process
-Feminine culture/glamour
-Modernist dichotomy: artistic integrity vs commericial success
-Fitzgerald/Dick: Struggle for defining work: Escaping Women Providers
-Hollywood, Intro Rosemary
-Rosemary, Glamourous Woman
-Acting as glamourous, “masquerading”
-Modernists, Fitzgerald and Rosemary
-Intro Dick: Glamourous Soldier?
-Dick: Not So Brave Now?
-World War I: Lack of Manliness
-Quotes left to engage
-Conclusion
Prof. Dando
Senior Seminar: Glamour
“All Wise Women Conform to the Man’s Lead ”:
Insert Witty Title Here...something about Glamour
Thesis: When confronting the world around them after World War I, Modernists like Fitzgerald were disillusioned by the ways in which Glamour portrayed reality. The elevation of women’s status provided a means of seeing how these women had accomplished what the Modernists could not, maintaining their artistic integrity while enjoying commercial success. This anxiety is represented in Fitgerald’s Tender is the Night.
F. Scott Fitzgerald emerged as a writer on the American Literary scene with the publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26th, 1920. Like most writers during the time, he confronted a world in flux. Fitzgerald’s world was one reacting to the events of the first Great War, a war in which millions of men died in a new kind a warfare, a mechanized slaughterhouse that erased the gallantry of older tactics of open field fighting replacing them with trenches, gas, and the machine-gun. The first World War can be seen not only as a turning point for military tactics, but also a key event in Literature, where Modernism, a movement in literature that Fitzgerald subscribed to, responded to the disillusionment created by the traumatic after effects of the war.
Modernists considered themselves part of the avant-garde, a trend in Literature moving to expel the notions of Realism and previous schools of thought, experimenting with form and structure rather than concerning themselves with urbane tradition of popular Romanticism that was a literary partiality remaining from before the war (WorldBook 2005). In the post World War I era, Modernists found themselves confronting the rapidly changing social and economic structures that came into play in the American popular culture, especially concerning gender roles in society. As Tiffany Joseph found, “The era between the wars is marked by an intensified attention to gender issues that, in the eyes of many, worked to overturn repressive gender identities” (Joseph 64). “With so many men away at the front, women assumed roles previously denied them and made household and economic decisions usually reserved for the ‘men of the house’” thus leading to a blurring of gender roles in society, and in the 1920s, seeing “rising hemlines, increasing sexual openness, and voting rights for women” (Joseph 65). We can view these changing periods in terms of the gender roles that it created and replaced. Before the first World War, Modernists were confronting a genteel tradition in Romanticism that can be described as a maternal ego, one which is a doting caregiver to society which replaced reality with an illusion of the aesthetic. After World War I, the Modernists confronted a new feminine character: The woman who was both femnine and masculine. This is the woman is represented by Rosemary Hoyt and in some parts Nicole Diver of whom Dick Diver finds himself lost when confronting his new gender relation to these women.
The postwar popular culture saw the rise of women, women who had possession of both economic stability and sexuality, enabling them to embrace both masculinity and femininity as interchangeable ideals. These ideals and performances allowed a fluid movement through the economic and social spheres of glamourous lifestyles. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night highlight such women and the men who struggle with the reassignment of gender roles in their relationships with these women who have transcended socially constructed gender norms. The character relationships that are present in Fitzgerald’s novels also reflect this anxiety of “emasculation” prevalent among the Modernists, holding on to their elitist patriarchal movement while embracing the “American-fueled consumer paradise that succeeded the Great War”: a feminized and glamorized culture (Nowlin 58).
Through the character of Dick Diver, we can see how this man has become a castrated handbag owned by the more powerful feminine characters of Fitzgerald’s novels, where Glamour is “represented as a relatively affordable quality, providing one makes the right consumption choice. Through its visual power, the industry of luxury goods spells its magic to create unattainable myths inspiring desires whose fulfillment is forever deferred”, and which are inaccessible to the men in these novels because of their strict adherence to traditional gender roles. Dick Diver is a character who struggles with Glamour because he is either excluded from it or in possession of it (Soley-Beltran 323). He can not be fully excluded from it as well as in possession of it like the emerging “new” woman as defined by the changing times. He loses his traditional gender role and become a victim of the glamourous lifestyle that surrounds him. In attaining “Glamour” which is represented by the feminine and commercial success, one must lose their masculinity. Micheal Nowlin comments discusses Dick Diver’s predicament in the Fitzgerald novel, Tender is the Night when he states, “the problem Fitzgerald was uniquely positioned to engage when he developed the story of Dick Diver: this is, the problem of an ‘artistic conscience’ demanding resistance to the feminization of culture while proving incapable of supplanting a maternal superego demanding, in its turn, tribute to the desiring ‘feminine’ other” (Nowlin 67).
While Fitzgerald and the other Modernists referred to themselves as the “avant-garde,” it did not necessarily mean that the they had escaped all previously held social notions and cultural ideals. A majority of the Modernist writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, worked within the constructed concepts of gender. “Femininity” and “masculinity” were important conceptions both used in the drafting of Modernists texts, poems and other representatives of literature and in the way it was discussed critically where Francis Kerr states that “Ezra Pound described the true poetic act as metaphorical sex in which the male poet revitalizes a lethargic feminine culture. Writing good poetry was, he said, like ‘driving any new idea in the great passive vulva of [literary] London’” (Kerr 405). Fitzgerald saw his own writing process in the same idea as Pound; he wanted to be Pound’s “male poet,” achieving commercial success through his writing, becoming well received by the glamourous “feminine culture.”
The “feminine culture” that Francis Kerr discusses is the popular culture that existed after the first World War, specifically American popular culture that embraced consumerism which fed on the luxurious and glamourous lifestyles for those who took advantage of the postwar economic boom during the “Roaring Twenties.” These “glamourous lifestyles” included what one might suspect from an opulent lifestyle: the nice car, spacious apartment or mansion with a beautiful spouse and children at your call when traveling to exotic and distant locations. But these notions of consumerism fostered by glamour are what worried the Modernists. These glamorized lifestyles represented the feminized and consumerized lifestyles that the Modernist writers wanted to distance themselves from in their art. As Virginia Postrel notes, “Glamour is not just beauty or luxury. It is not a style by an effect, a quality on the play of imagination...glamour includes the risks but omits the tedium, the sore feet, the dirt, the accounting. Glamour is never boring” (Postrel 24). As Postrel states, glamour forgoes the negative aspects of life and replaces them with a shining monolith to consumption. The kind of world that glamour and consumerism culture exhibited was one in which a war like the first World War could never take place. The war is a distant thought relegated to the silver screen of Hollywood which always represents the glamourous side of war: the heroic man saving the day and ending the night with a beautiful woman. The typical scenario of the hero getting the girl and driving off into the sunset of some distant European countryside, far from the bombs and bullets. Glamour choses not to represent the trenches, only the lustrous screen of Hollywood and aesthetic excesses of the wealthy.
The relationship that existed between the Modernist avant-garde and the “feminine culture” of the creative writing process was one of a rigid dichotomy between embracing and rejecting the notions of the popular American culture at the time. Fitzgerald and other Modernists, as to be cliché, “wanted their cake and to eat it too.” In this drive towards success, Fitzgerald shows us the problem that most of the Modernist elite faced; they wanted commercial success; they wanted themselves to become glamourous but in becoming glamourous, one must become emasculated as in Pound’s “feminine culture,” one must sell out a portion of his artistic integrity by adopting the consumerized and glamorized culture. The artistic integrity is the maintencance of Modernist ideals through the representation of reality as a disillusionment in the previous maternal ego of Romanticism. Michael Nowlin relates Ann Douglas’ arguments in Terrible Honesty which shows this dichotomy between commercialism and modernist rational:
Douglas describes as matricidal American modernism’s radical repudiation of sentimental and censorial idealism and its self-conscious effort to ‘masculize’ a culture too long overseen by genteel sensibilities. Douglas reminds us that, despite the elitism implicit in avantgardist rhetoric, the self-dramatizing American ‘orphans’ of the ‘lost generation’ helped usher in the American century and took full advantage of the new popular culture industry that money and technical wizardry made flourish. The assault on the “Victorian” matrons inseparable from the shell shocked children’s ethos of ‘terrible honesty’ had widespread appeal; but only so far as ‘terrible honesty’ was ironically compatible with the pleasure principle by which popular culture is governed (Nowlin 59).
This quotation from Nowlin concerning Ann Douglas’ work further explains the ironic predicament of the F. Scott Fitzgerald, when beginning a new novel, Fitzgerald had boasted “to Maxwell Perkins in 1925 about the new novel he was beginning to write: ‘it is something really NEW in form, idea, structure -- the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find” (Nowlin 58). Here we see Fitzgerald’s anxiety concerning artistic integrity while still becoming seduced by the glamour and illusion of popular culture. Douglas touches upon the notion of the Modernists maintaining their artistic integrity through the movement away from the form and function of previous movements in Literature that relished in the precursor to Glamour which was the maternal ego of portraying reality as an illusion, preferring that which portrayed the world realistically, unglamorously, letting those who viewed their work the ability to see “the textures of life, and the skill and effort behind its own achievement” (Postrel 29).
Joyce and Stein represent other Modernist writers, like Fitzgerald, who were trying to revolutionize Western prose through experimentation in the appearance and subject matter. In stating that this novel was to be “the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for,” Fitzgerald is asserting his status as a writer who is as talented as, if not more than Joyce and Stein in terms of literary “greatness”. Here we can define “greatness” as one who has maintained his or her artistic integrity; the masculine attributes of the writing process. As Nowlin continues to describe it, the novel was to be about: “a Hollywood technician who murders his domineering mother after becoming enchanted by a circle of American expatriates living on the French Riviera. Fitzgerald worked on this material intermittently for over seven years, but was oddly unable to deliver a novel about matricide. What emerged, but not until 1932, was the story of Dick Diver” (Nowlin 58). The story of Dick Diver is the resulting Fitzgerald novel, Tender is the Night. In concerning himself with the “Hollywood” subject, Fitzgerald is doing exactly what Douglas notes in her essay. Hollywood represents the new mediums and subjects that the Modernist were experimenting with, it represented the “money and technical wizardry”(Nowlin 59). This is a continued flirtation with the feminine as Fitzgerald is using the notion of Hollywood and the glamourous lifestyle that goes along with the subject for his novel.
Looking at the text critically with considerations towards Ann Douglas’ notes on Modernism's’ aim to “masculine a culture too long overseen by genteel sensibilities” and the anxiety of “effeminization” held by Modernists writing to the “feminine” audience, we see how Fitzgerald tries to “redeem the character of paternal authority in the American-fueled consumer paradise that succeeded the Great War” (Nowlin 58.) Fitzgerald is unsuccessful in this quest, as is the character of Dick Diver. Both struggle with feminine glamour; with Fitzgerald and his character Dick Diver, it is represented by their struggle with commercial success and a glamourous lifestyle (the feminine) versus their artistic integrity (the masculine).
His inability to write the epochal work he projects, the Attempt of a uniform and pragmatic classification of the neuroses and psychoses...that would justify his reputation as a prodigy and justify the faith invested in him by his superiors. Dick finds it easier to be an entertainer: he prefers giving back a flattering idea of themselves, and in exchange receiving their love and devotion” (Nowlin 59).
In Tender is the Night, Dick is searching for a means to write a book of psychology, “the attempt of a uniform and pragmatic classification of the neuroses and psychoses” that would allow him to distinguish himself from everyone else. However, as Nowlin states, “Dick finds it easier to be an entertainer.” Dick is seduced by the easy life which is afforded him by Nicole’s wealth where he has now taken on the role of a doting motherly figure instead of the usual male role of provider taking care of Nicole when she is suffering from her own psychoses. He has taken on a feminine role in two ways. The first is the way in which it is used in the Modernist discussion of the writing process. Dick has allowed himself to become commercialized, he is softened by the easier living that goes along with the glamourous lifestyle of summers of the French Riviera, large parties and homes as well as vacations on a whim. The second use of the feminine that Dick exhibits is his role reversal in the relationship with Nicole. He has become the wife to Nicole’s wealth and provision. Even though Nicole is not working, she is still the providing member of the family. As the story evolves, Nicole in some aspects realizes this and begins to recover from her mental illness as she becomes aware that she does not need Dick. She has usurped his role.
This is the similar story of Fitzgerald’s frustration, his own search for a novel that would set him apart from the rest of the Modernists, or at least place him at the forefront. Dick’s “the world’s rarest work” is the same as Fitzgerald’s novel, they are both looking to set their place in the world through their own masculine art of writing, of creating.
While the story of Dick Diver does not adhere to the original story of matricidal tendencies enacted upon the Hollywood ideal, Tender is the Night does contain a Hollywood figure which is just as ruthless in terms of her relations with Dick as Fitzgerald might have intended between the characters of the original matricide text. That character is Rosemary Hoyt and she is responsible for the “death” of Dick Diver. Now certainly the character of Dick is not killed in Tender is the Night, but his masculinity is, or rather his performance of masculinity. Through Rosemary’s interactions with the Divers, Fitzgerald reveals that the character of Dick was never a masculine one in that he never fully adheres to the constructed gender roles assigned to him by society. Typically, one might think of the male role in a family as that of a provider, one who brings home the means to support the family. However, Dick isn’t the person who occupies this role in the Diver family; this role belongs to Nicole. This revelation of Dick’s inadequatecy comes through the character of Rosemary where Fitzgerald is commenting upon his own frustrations with glamour and consumerism within this context of relationships in Tender is the Night.
Rosemary represents a woman who has ascertained both masculine and feminine roles in society. She is able to switch between each role depending on the situation as easily as one might put on clothes. As I have mentioned before, America during the period after the first world war culture saw the elevation women’s status. These women had dominion over both “economic stability and sexuality, their own means of embracing both masculinity and femininity as interchangeable ideals, ideals and performances that allowed a fluid movement through the economic and social spheres of glamourous lifestyles.” Rosemary was one of these women.
As an actress, she is afforded the ability of being compensated for her time in a generous manner as well as the ability to have a large amount of time between films to take extravagant vacations as is the case in Tender is the Night where we are introduced to her after her starring role in “Daddy’s Girl.”
This is glamorous in its own sense as we see how the profession of an actress evokes glamour through its illusionary art of acting as well as the lifestyle that is established through the art. Postrel notes that “for glamour to survive, the high heels must never pinch, the roof never leak, the furniture never need dusting, the car never get stuck in traffic, the star never have a runny nose or a bad hair day. Or so we must believe” (Postrel 29). In Rosemary’s world, you do not see the hardships, only the success. To Fitzgerald, she represents what women during this period could achieve and what Modernists had a hard time grasping. Through her profession as an actress, she is able to provide for herself and live a lifestyle that is financially stable. Fitzgerald writes:
You were brought up to work--not especially to marry. Now you’ve found your first nut to crack and it’s a good nut--go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him--whatever happens, it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl (Fitzgerald 40).
In this conversation with her mother, Elsie Speers, Rosemary is allowed to pursue an inappropriate relationship with Dick because she is immune to the ramifications of an adulteress affair. As Elsie says, “wound yourself or him--whatever happens, it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl” (Fitzgerald 40). Because of her ability to use both gender roles to her advantage, she is able to rely on one gender role when the other “fails.” Failure, in this sense is the wound that Speers discusses. Certainly Rosemary could wound herself through her own emotional attachments to Dick through the affair, but she would not falter as one would suspect as she has her acting career to fall back on. Rosemary can leave herself open to this wound because she can easily don the fashion of masculinity and provide for herself rather than seeking out the typical male providing role that Dick, as she might percieve it, would exhibit. Michael Nowlin discusses the way in which gender has performative characteristics, must like acting.
The most fundamental implication is that ‘masculinity’ is as much a masquerade as ‘femininity,’ and that women stand better positioned to exploit this knowledge because by usage they are more practiced in the art of masquerading (Nowlin 65).
The “masquerading” of femininity and masculinity is similar to that of glamour’s illusionary characterisitics. As glamour relies on the illusion of a polished visage of beauty and form to present reality, gender performance relies on the same illusion. In her movie, “Daddy’s Girl,” Rosemary relies on the performative nature of gender to sell her feminity. She achieves commercial success that affords her a glamourous lifestyle by using her youth and beauty, qualities which glamour are fed off of, through acting. Her audience is “an ideal Hollywood spectator, whose willing suspension of disbelief implies a knowledge that what she is assenting to is an illusion” (Nowlin 65). Fitzgerald describes the scene in which the characters in the novel review the movie of “Daddy’s Girl.” He writes, in reference to Rosemary’s role in the movie, “Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and curruption rollwed away; nay, the very march of destiny stopped...women would forget the dirty dishes at home and weep” (Fitzgeralds 69). Here, glamour dispells “destiny,” instead destiny is in the hands of the Hollywood notion of feminine innocence while enjoying its financial succsses. Rosemary is both a male in terms of economically stability and a female in her sexuality. The movie Both provide her the means to live glamourously.
The character of Rosemary Hoyt further elaborates Fitzgerald and the Modernists relationship with the masculine writing process and commercial success. As I had mentioned, glamour provided a polished reality that did not reflect the actual reality of the world that the Modernists confronted. The world as they knew it had just seen the end of the first World War, a rather unglamourous event to say the least. Rosemary, and women like her, could live in such a world because they could easily move between notions of masculinity and feminity. They could provide for themselves in ways that they couldn’t before the events of the first World War but they could also rely on their feminine gender to enjoy success such as lavish lifestyles and the break down of traditional family structures and values. As is the case of Rosemary, we see how she is able to manipulate the character of Dick Diver and enter into the sort of self-destructing relationship that becomes of their affair because she was more apt to handle the consequences than Dick. While Rosemary recovers from the relationship, Dick is ruined.
But like Nick Carraway, Dick comes to feel a crippling nostalgia for paternal law after being seduced by images of an easier and happier life that inform the iconography of popular culture and the advertising industry symbiotically bound to it (Nowlin 59).
“Douglas calls Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, Dorothy Parker, and Marianne Moore among others “high lowbrows,” “eager to capture mass acceptance and elite adulation in a single stroke...Not one of them initially ruled out the possibility--the artist’s version of the American dream--that (s)he could be at once status-soaked elite author, conscientious craftsperson, and mass artist or mass image” (Nowlin 60).
Fitzgerald [had] vital material for exploring the polarities of masculine desire--the desire, on the one hand, to be desired by women, and, on the other hand, to repudiate feminity through some form of violence (physical or discursive) (Nowlin 67).
“Well I’m a soldier,” Barban answered pleasantly. “My buisness is to kill people. I fought against the Riff because I am a European, and I have fought the Communists because they want to take my property from me” (Fitzgerald 35).
Writing his own tragic heroic narrative in advance, Dick foresees that he cannot restore patriarchal order to a gendered world gone askew in the wake of the war and in the post-war boom period without acknowledging the lack entailed by his own masculinity (Nowlin 64).
“Watching his father’s struggles in poor parishes had wedded a desire for money to an essentially unaquisitive nature. It was not a healthy necessity for security -- he had never felt so sure of himself, more thoroughly his own man, than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. Yet he had been swallowed up like a gigalo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults” (Fitzgerald 201).
***
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Modernist avant-garde found it difficult to confront the ways in which gender relationships were changing after World War I. Specifically with Fitzgerald, his book Tender is the Night reflects his, as well as the other Modernist writers, own anxiety towards women taking on more “masculine” roles which were increased freedom of sexuality and economic stability.
At the heart of this, the men were jealous of the women, as there was an ability on the women’s behalf to move more freely within gender roles while the Modernists found themselves still constricted by “social norms.” This is obvious in their discussions concerning the writing process, where the art of writing itself was a masculine endeavor while the audience that received the product of the writing was a “feminine culture”. The glamour is not in the lifestyles but rather in the Modernists flirtation with the feminine. They wanted to remain men in their work but enjoy the success in the feminine and all the notions of a glamorous lifestyle that went along with commercial success. The women are glamourous to the men because they have attained something that the men (the Modernists) cannot: both the masculine and feminine points of the writing process which are artistic integrity, represented by their adherence to feminine gender norms within there work but male economic stability, and
Works Cited
Churchwell, Sarah. "'$4000 a Screw': The Prostituted Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway." European Journal of American Culture 24.2 (2005): 105-29.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner, 2004.
Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki, and Tatiani Rapatzikou. "Editorial: The American Culture-Industry of Image-Making; Part II." European Journal of American Culture 24.2 (2005): 87-90.
Joseph, Tiffany. ""Non-Combatant 's Shell-Shock":Trauma and Gender in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night." NWSA Journal 15.3 (2003): 64-81.
Kerr, Frances. "Feeling `half Feminine': Modernism and the Politics of Emotion in the Great Gatsby." American Literature 68.2 (1996): 405.
Michael Plante, Ph.D., Jessie J. Poesch. ""Modernism"." Apple World Book (2005) . April 12 2006.
Nowlin, Michael. `The World's Rarest Work': Modernism and Masculinity in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Vol. 25. College Literature, 1998.
Soley-Beltran, Patrícia. "Modelling Feminity." European Journal of Women's Studies Vol. 11.Issue 3 (Aug2004): p309-326.
Outline
-Introduction
-Modernists and their relation with World War I
-Modernists: Who were they, what did they do.
-Modernists and the rising status of Women
-Fitzgerald and the struggle with the “glamourous” woman and feminized culture
-Modernist writing process
-Feminine culture/glamour
-Modernist dichotomy: artistic integrity vs commericial success
-Fitzgerald/Dick: Struggle for defining work: Escaping Women Providers
-Hollywood, Intro Rosemary
-Rosemary, Glamourous Woman
-Acting as glamourous, “masquerading”
-Modernists, Fitzgerald and Rosemary
-Intro Dick: Glamourous Soldier?
-Dick: Not So Brave Now?
-World War I: Lack of Manliness
-Quotes left to engage
-Conclusion
