Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Beautiful and Damned. 1946, Princeton University Press; 2002, Random House. Print.
“…irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended on him” (3).
Irony is defined as “a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave” (4).
He is motherless young, at five years old (5).
“one of those men devoid of the symmetry of feature essential to the Aryan ideal, he was yet, here and there, considered handsome–moreover, he was very clean, in appearance and in reality, with that especial cleanness borrowed from beauty” (8).
In a David and Bathsheba scene, he sees a girl in a red negligé “drying her hair by the still hot sun of late afternoon” (16). “He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful, then, of a sudden, he understood: it was her distance… The woman was standing up now; she had tossed her hair back and he had a full view of her. She was fat, full thirty-five, utterly undistinguished” (16). She is beautiful because of her distance, the presence of children, and the potential for order that she represents.
DICK: Going to the theatre?
MAURY: We intend to spend the evening doing some deep thinking over of life’s problems. The thing is tersely called ‘The Woman.’ I presume that she will ‘pay.” (19). Woman = problem (Irigaray’s invocation of Freud)
In the middle of Anthony Patch’s chapter is “A Flash Back in Paradise” section – by whom? for whom?
“beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a breathless hurried star…. It became known to her, at length, that she was to be born again” (23). One of the characteristics of the terrible world into which beauty comes is that “ugly women control strong men” (23). Beauty is aghast.
“You will be disguised during your fifteen years as what is called a ‘susciety gurl'” (24). Beauty only lasts 15 years. (Diderot in Rich: you should all die at 15…)
Beauty will be “paid” in “love” (24).
He feels “empty as an old bottle,” and Gloria arrives to fill him up (47).
Beauty’s job is to “render thoughtless” – both men and the women it inhabits (49).
Gloria knows that “the biography of every woman begins with the first kiss that counts, and ends when her last child is laid in her arms” (53). She determines that she “[doesn’t] want to have responsibility and a lot of children to take care of” (53).
gloria knows she has in her a “streak of what you’d call cheapness” that relates her to the “giggling, over-gestured, pathetically pretentious women, who grow fat […] bear too many babies, and float helpless and uncontent in a colorless sea of drudgery and broken hopes” (58-9). Beauty’s lifework is to combat this.
“What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding…I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one’s unwanted children. What a fate – to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers… Dear dream children, howe much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children flutter) on golden, golden wings – Such children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the wedded state” (125). She rejects real children. Part of the maternal function is to leave the feathered babies to the father’s idealization.
She writes FINIS in her journal the night before her marriage. It’s the end for her. 125.
Anthony is horrified by the animality of sex, and neither of them really want to be tied to the “business of life” (127).
Gloria realizes that her body is her only extra-marital currency, and fears that giving birth will take that away from her. It violates her rule to “never give a damn” (171). Motherhood is the necessity of giving a damn. Motherhood would be an “indignity” (171).
lots of cats in here
While Anthony is at war having his affair with Dot, Gloria “bought a doll and dressed it…” (312). What would a child have done to her and them? That absence haunts the novel. The novel is in some ways structured around Gloria’s resistance to fertility and the narrative absence of a marriage-codifying child
“She knew that in her breast she had never wanted children. The realty, the earthiness, the intolerable sentiment of child-bearing, the menace to her beauty – had appalled her. She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving itself. Her sentimentality could cling fiercely to her own illusions, but her ironic soul whispered that motherhood was also the privilege of the female baboon. So her dreams were of ghostly children only – the early, the perfect symbols of her early and perfect love for Anthony” (330). She recognizes that children are symbols and rejects the job of tending the symbolic flame. She knows that motherhood comes at the expense of self-preservation and refuses it
This book has a disappointing moral ending, vs. its equivalent Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. We are happy for Gloria, kind of, but she (and especially Anthony) should have been punished ($ will feed alcoholism and buy fur rather than charity.) Inertia wins in the end: sometimes inertia goes in your favor. We have to recognize our own moralism, despite our own ironic temperament. The ending is brilliant.
A. L. Duck 