F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise
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Dedicated to all of the world’s great readers —and to those of us who are just good.
© 2012 Rori Spivey All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was created by Rori Spivey in the Washington University in St. Louis Communication Design BFA program. This book is a creative and student piece not intended for sale or reproduction. Extensive excerpts from The Project Gutenberg’s Ebook edition of This Side of Paradise by F . Scott Fitzgerald are included. All photographs were appropriated from the internet. The book is typeset in Univers, Stymie, Adobe Caslon Pro and Baskerville by the publisher and printed in the United States.
TABLE OF CONTENTS 1
Learn the History
2 4
Timeline Places in the Novel
Read the Novel
6
Using Your Lighthouse Book
11
Epigraph & Dedication
14
Book One
46 90 100
116
Interlude
126
Book Two
146 158 178 190
i ii iii iv
i ii iii iv v
Analyze the Novel
233
Theme Appearance Masculinity Disillusion War Beauty & Sex Romance Evil The End
235
Works Cited
219 221 223 225 227 229 231
1909
NAACP founded by W. E. B. Du Bois.
1913
Federal Reserve
Beside the date November 1917 System in hisis established. personal ledger, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the words 1910
The Mann Act passed and used to criminalize forms of consensual sexual behavior.
Began novel‌ World War I hostilities begun when the Archduke of Austria and his wife, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were killed by Serb nationalist in Sarajevo.
World War I
1914
Apr 1917
The United States Congress declares war on Germany and joins the allies in WWI.
Prohibition
1913
The Sixteenth Amendment is ratified, empowering Congress to levy income taxes.
The Seventeenth Amendment is ratified, allowing for the direct election of U.S. Senators instead of through state legislators.
The Original Dixieland Jass Band makes the first ever jazz recordings.
Renowned dancer and fashion trendsetter Irene Castle introduced her "bob" hairstyle to a receptive American audience.
Jun 1919
Attends St. Paul Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota
Dec 1917
On academic probation and close to flunking out of Princeton, Fitzgerald takes a commission as an infantry second lieutenant in the U.S. Army and leaves school to report for duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He never graduates from Princeton.
Fitzgerald meets Ginevra King, his first serious love interest.
Attends the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey Attends Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey
During his school years, Fitzgerlad wrote thirteen short stories, two one-act plays, five book reviews, six poems, four full length plays and written lyrics for three musical comedies
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
Nov 1917
1914
1915
1916
Jan
1917
Feb
Mar
Apr May Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Began Novel
Nov Dec
Jan
1918
Feb
Ma
3
Jazz Age The period in the US characterized as a time of carefree hedonism, wealth, freedom and youthful exuberance 1920
Women are given the right to vote when the 19th Amendment to the United States constitution grants universal women’s suffrage.
First radio concert is recorded
Nov 1918
For the first time, the 1920 census indicated a population in the United States of over 100 million people. A majority of the American population now lives in cities.
Armistice Day, WWI ends
The 18th Amendment, advocating prohibition of alcoholic beverages throughout the United States, is sent to the states for passage by the United States Congress.
Jan 1919
Jan 1918
ar Apr
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre, the future love of his life, meet at a country club dance in Montgomery, Alabama.
Novel revised and resubmitted Initally rejected by publisher
Novel, originally titled The Romantic Egotist submitted to Charles Scribner’s Sons for the first time
May Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Fitzgerald is discharged from the Army. Hoping to marry Zelda, who is concerned about his financial stability, he takes an advertising job in New York.
Jun 1919
Rejected again by publisher
Nov Dec
The first sound on film motion picture Phonofilm is shown in the Rivoli Theatre in New York City by Lee de Forest.
A week after his novel is published, Fitzgerald and Zelda marry in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.
Under the strain of their long-distance relationship and Fitzgerald’s repeated failures as a writer, Zelda breaks up with him.
Fitzgerald thought of his novel as a chance to win two all-important things — success and love. Fitzgerald decides to stake everything on his novel, now entitiled This Side of Paradise and returns home to St. Paul to write seriously
1924
1924
The Fitzgeralds set France. They spend next seven years in predominantly in Pa
The Fitzgeralds' first and only child is born, a daughter named Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald.
Scribners accepts This Side of Paradise for publication
These two desires were inextricably bound together First short story collection in his mind, because for him success wasFlappers impossible and Philosophers is published without the golden girl. Under these powerful, self-imposed pressures Fitzgerald delivered, just as The Beautiful and Damned is published he would so often do in later life. 1920 Published Novel By March of 1920, he wrote the novel, placed it with a prestigious house, saw it succeed, won the girl and made a name for himself in literature. Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 1920 1923 1921 1922 1924 1919
The Great G is published
1925
192
Lake Geneva, WI Part 1 Chap 1
Princeton, NJ Part 1 Chap 2 Part 1 Chap 3
Asbury Park, NJ Part 1 Chap 2
Chicago, IL Part 1 Chap 2
Part 2 Chap 4
Minneapolis, MN
Part 2 Chap 5
Part 1 Chap 2
Memphis, TN Part 1 Chap 2
Brest, Germany Interlude
PLACES IN THE NOVEL 5
Long Island, NY Part 1 Chap 2 Interlude
New York, NY Part 1 Chap 2 Part 2 Chap 1 Part 2 Chap 2 Part 2 Chap 5
Atlantic City, NJ Part 2 Chap 4
Philadelphia, PA Louisville, KY
Part 1 Chap 2
Part 1 Chap 2
Maryland Part 1 Chap 2
Theme Graph Explanation Every chapter opens with a circle chart that graphs the appearance of major themes throughout the section. The themes are color coded and also highlighted by significant events.
Masculinity
chapter beginning thematically significant event
Disillusion
theme appearance
War
Beauty & Sex
Romance
Evil
Types of Footnotes
Epigraph Dedication Literary Reference Term Definition Historical Note Style
chapter end
USING YOUR LIGHTHOUSE BOOK 7
the good stuff (novel text)
your notes
THE NOVEL 9
This Side of Paradise F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Epigraphs
These two epigraphs express a skeptical attitude towards one of the novel’s primary themes, masculine coming of age. Fitzgerald uses Brooke’s poetry and the death it recalls to signify romantic masculine heroism. 1. “Tiare Tahiti” 1914 2. Lady Windermere’s Fan 1894
11
1.
... Well this side of Paradise!... There’s little comfort in the wise. —Rupert Brooke
2.
Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes. —Oscar Wilde
Dedication
Fitzgerald meets Signourney Fay while a student at the Newman School. He served as inspiration for the character Monsignour Darcy in the novel and encouraged Fitzgerald’s writing until his death.
13
To Sigourney Fay
BOOK ONE 15
The Romantic Egotist
CHAPTER 1 Notes
Amory , Son of Beatrice CHAPTER 1
Theme Graph
Chapter 1 Start
End
Masculinity Disillusion War Beauty & Sex Romance Evil
A
mory Blaine inherited from his
mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible
few, that made him worth while.
His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his
Chapter 1
Historical Reference
Johannes BrahmsGerman composer and pianist who was one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period.
family’s life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t understand her. But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father’s estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin , or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent—an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had— her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud. In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married him—this almost entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome season and brought into the world on a spring day in ninety-six. When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father’s private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphere—especially after several astounding bracers. So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored or read to from “Do and Dare,” or “Frank on the Mississippi,” Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.
21
“Amory.” “Yes, Beatrice.” (Such a quaint name for his mother; she encouraged it.) “Dear, don’t think of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous. Clothilde is having your breakfast brought up.” “All right.” “I am feeling very old to-day, Amory,” she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands as facile as Bernhardt’s. “My nerves are on edge—on edge. We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.” Amory’s penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about her. “Amory.” “Oh, yes.” “I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.” She fed him sections of the “Fetes Galantes” before he was ten; at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother’s apricot cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy. This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction. Though this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and became part of what in a later generation would have been termed her “line.” “This son of mine,” he heard her tell a room full of awestruck, admiring women one day, “is entirely sophisticated and quite charming—but delicate—we’re all delicate; here, you know.” Her hand was radiantly outlined against her beautiful bosom; then sinking her voice to a whisper, she told them of the apricot cordial. They rejoiced, for she was a brave raconteuse, but many were the keys turned in sideboard locks that night against the possible defection of little Bobby or Barbara…. These domestic pilgrimages were invariably in state; two maids, the private car, or Mr. Blaine when available, and very often a physician. When Amory had the whooping-cough four disgusted specialists glared at each other hunched around his bed; when he took scarlet fever the number of attendants, including physicians and nurses, totalled fourteen. However, blood being thicker than broth, he was pulled through. The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the
Notes
Chapter 3
Blaines of Lake Geneva; they had quite enough relatives to serve in place of friends, and an enviable standing from Pasadena to Cape Cod. But Beatrice grew more and more prone to like only new acquaintances, as there were certain stories, such as the history of her constitution and its many amendments, memories of her years abroad, that it was necessary for her to repeat at regular intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be thrown off, else they would sweep in and lay siege to her nerves. But Beatrice was critical about American women, especially the floating population of ex-Westerners. “They have accents, my dear,” she told Amory, “not Southern accents or Boston accents, not an accent attached to any locality, just an accent”—she became dreamy. “They pick up old, moth-eaten London accents that are down on their luck and have to be used by some one. They talk as an English butler might after several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.” She became almost incoherent— “Suppose—time in every Western woman’s life—she feels her husband is prosperous enough for her to have—accent—they try to impress me, my dear—” Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she considered her soul quite as ill, and therefore important in her life. She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude. Often she deplored the bourgeois quality of the American Catholic clergy, and was quite sure that had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome. Still, next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport. “Ah, Bishop Wiston,” she would declare, “I do not want to talk of myself. I can imagine the stream of hysterical women fluttering at your doors, beseeching you to be simpatico”—then after an interlude filled by the clergyman—”but my mood—is—oddly dissimilar.” Only to bishops and above did she divulge her clerical romance. When she had first returned to her country there had been a pagan, Swinburnian young man in Asheville, for whose passionate kisses and unsentimental conversations she had taken a decided penchant—they had discussed the matter pro and con with an intellectual romancing quite devoid of sappiness. Eventually she had decided to marry for background, and the young pagan from Asheville had gone through a spiritual crisis, joined the Catholic Church, and was now—Monsignor Darcy. “Indeed, Mrs. Blaine, he is still delightful company— quite the cardinal’s right-hand man.”
165
“Amory will go to him one day, I know,” breathed the beautiful lady, “and Monsignor Darcy will understand him as he understood me.” Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally—the idea being that he was to “keep up,” at each place “taking up the work where he left off,” yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. What a few more years of this life would have made of him is problematical. However, four hours out from land, Italy bound, with Beatrice, his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier. You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent. After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his aunt and uncle. There the crude, vulgar air of Western civilization first catches him— in his underwear, so to speak.
A Kiss for Amory His lip curled when he read it. “I am going to have a bobbing party,” it said, “on Thursday, December the seventeenth, at five o’clock, and I would like it very much if you could come. Yours truly, R.S.V.P. Myra St. Claire. He had been two months in Minneapolis, and his chief struggle had been the concealing from “the other guys at school” how particularly superior he felt himself to be, yet this conviction was built upon shifting sands. He had shown off one day in French class (he was in senior French class) to the utter confusion of Mr. Reardon, whose accent Amory damned contemptuously, and to the delight of the class. Mr. Reardon, who had spent several weeks in Paris ten years before, took his revenge on the verbs, whenever he had his book open. But another time Amory showed off in history class, with quite disastrous results, for the boys there were his own age, and they shrilled innuendoes at
Notes
CHAPTER 2 Notes
Spires and Gargoyles CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3 Notes
The Egotist Considers CHAPTER 3
BOOK TWO
The Education of a Personage
CHAPTER 3 Notes
Young Irony CHAPTER 3
Theme Graph
Masculinity Disillusion War Beauty & Sex Romance Evil
End
Chapter 3 Start
For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes. With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then that they could see the devil in each other. But Eleanor—did Amory dream her? Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from
Chapter 3
their souls never to meet. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say: “And Amory will have no other adventure like me.” Nor will she sigh, any more than he would sigh. Eleanor tried to put it on paper once:
Literary Reference
Don Juana legendary fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors
“The fading things we only know We’ll have forgotten... Put away... Desires that melted with the snow, And dreams begotten This to-day: The sudden dawns we laughed to greet, That all could see, that none could share, Will be but dawns... and if we meet We shall not care. Dear... not one tear will rise for this... A little while hence No regret Will stir for a remembered kiss— Not even silence, When we’ve met, Will give old ghosts a waste to roam, Or stir the surface of the sea... If gray shapes drift beneath the foam We shall not see.” They quarrelled dangerously because Amory maintained that sea and see couldn’t possibly be used as a rhyme. And then Eleanor had part of another verse that she couldn’t find a beginning for: “... But wisdom passes... still the years Will feed us wisdom.... Age will go Back to the old— For all our tears We shall not know.” Eleanor hated Maryland passionately. She belonged to the oldest of the old families of Ramilly County and lived in a big, gloomy house with her grandfather. She had been born and brought up in France.... I see I am starting wrong. Let me begin again. Amory was bored, as he usually was in the country. He used to go for far walks by himself—and wander along reciting “Ulalume” to the corn-fields, and congratulating
35
Poe for drinking himself to death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency. One afternoon he had strolled for several miles along a road that was new to him, and then through a wood on bad advice from a colored woman... losing himself entirely. A passing storm decided to break out, and to his great impatience the sky grew black as pitch and the rain began to splatter down through the trees, become suddenly furtive and ghostly. Thunder rolled with menacing crashes up the valley and scattered through the woods in intermittent batteries. He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally, through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a rift in the trees where the unbroken lightning showed open country. He rushed to the edge of the woods and then hesitated whether or not to cross the fields and try to reach the shelter of the little house marked by a light far down the valley. It was only half past five, but he could see scarcely ten steps before him, except when the lightning made everything vivid and grotesque for great sweeps around. Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song, in a low, husky voice, a girl’s voice, and whoever was singing was very close to him. A year before he might have laughed, or trembled; but in his restless mood he only stood and listened while the words sank into his consciousness: “Les sanglots longs Des violons De l’automne Blessent mon coeur D’une langueur Monotone.” The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a quaver. The girl was evidently in the field and the voice seemed to come vaguely from a haystack about twenty feet in front of him. Then it ceased: ceased and began again in a weird chant that soared and hung and fell and blended with the rain: “Tout suffocant Et bleme quand Sonne l’heure Je me souviens Des jours anciens Et je pleure....” “Who the devil is there in Ramilly County,” muttered Amory aloud, “who would deliver Verlaine in an extempo
Notes
THEME APPEARANCE 37 37
Masculinity Disillusion War Beauty & Sex Romance Evil
THEME 1 39 219
Masculinity
THEME 4 225 41
Beauty & Sex
THEME 5 225 227 43
Romance
WORKS CITED 235 45
Information Sources Burhans, Clinton S. “Structure and Theme in This Side of Paradise.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 68.4 (1969): 605-24. JSTOR. Web. 24 Jan. 2012. “F. Scott Fitzgerald: Career Timeline.” PBS. PBS. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/ fitzgerald _ f _ timeline _ flash.html Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. The Project Gutenberg. Web. 15 Jan. 2012. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. SparkNote on This Side of Paradise. 20 Jan. 2012. www.sparknotes.com/lit/paradise Kahn, Sy. “This Side of Paradise: The Pageantry of Disillusion.” The Midwest Quarterly VII (1966). Academic Search Alumni Edition. Web. 20 Jan. 2012. Monk, Craig. “The Political F. Scott Fitzgerald: Liberal Illusion and Disillusion in This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned.” American Studies International 33.2: 60. Academic Search Premier. Web. 23 Jan. 2012. Pearl, James. “History and Masculinity in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 51.1 (2005): 1-33. Project MUSE. Web. 23 Jan. 2012. Shain, Charles E. “This Side of Paradise: The Pageantry of Disillusion.” University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers 15 (1961). Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Jan. 2012. West, James L. W. The Making of This Side of Paradise. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1983. Print.
Image Sources “Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford” www.publicdomainclip-art. blogspot.com/2011/06/doug-fairbanks-mary-pickford.html “Bessie Love” www.jotsuba.tumblr.com “Clara Bow” www.theyhadfaces-silentfilmblog.blogspot. com/2011 _ 05 _ 22 _ archive.html “Dead Flower” www.faustinoaguilara.wordpress.com “Spain _ 030” www.lavidanocturna.tumblr.com www.demo.magusine.net/spip.php?article41&lang=fr www.pixelnews.com.ua/?tag=vtoraya-mirovaya-voyna www.statelibraryofiowa.org/about/history/photos/bldg1/image _ view _ fullscreen www.greensleevestoaground.wordpress.com/2012/02/03 www.1920sclub.deviantart.com/favourites www.pwplaviation.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/fom243.jpg “Princeton” http://www.deanshu.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/princeton.jpg http://www.infomercantile.com/blog/labels/outdoors.html “Vladimir Rosing” www.upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/thumb/e/e9/Vladimir _ Rosing _ Portrait _ 1920s. jpg/327px-Vladimir _ Rosing _ Portrait _ 1920s.jpg “Princeton” http://nyulocal.com/national/2011/12/15/beenthere-done-that-occupy-princeton-takes-on-campus-recruiters
“This Side of Paradise haunted the decade like a song — popular, but perfect.” Glenway Wescott
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