F Scott Fitzgerald
... ever thought possible. He believes that his relationship with Judy was his fault and that he was not good enough for her, until he speaks to a fellow businessman. He tells Dexter that after Judy settled down and started a family she lost all of her gay beauty and became a normal old woman. At hearing this Dexter cries for himself because he believed that Judy would forever stay a sparkling ray of sunshine for him to desire forever. Men like Dexter Green do not cry easily; his tears and the language explaining them therefore point either to melodrama or to a complex significance. It seems clear that he is not mourning a new loss of Judy herself, the final extinction of lingering hope nor has he lost the ability to feel deeply. Devlin, Dexter’s fellow businessman, has taken from Dexter’s image of Judy the same things he would have lost had he in fact married her (Burhans, “Magnificently Attuned to Life” 217). Dexter no longer has such a good vision of his “winter dream” and therefore is no longer able to dream as he was as a child and a young man, showing that during the Jazz Age, men and women could not so often rely upon all that seems glitzy and good (Eble 90). F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Ice Palace” was written in May of 1920 at the height of the 1920s. This story was one of the first that Fitzgerald wrote which compared social differences in the North and South. Written with great energy from Fitzgerald’s own past experiences, “The Ice Palace” expresses many day to day tensions and trials one might have encountered in the 1920s such as the potato famine, poverty, cold, rich against poor, and passion (Eble 57). Fitzgerald is able to write such a story which contrasts the south and the north as such extremes because he grew up as a child of the “energetic” north while at the same time he was able to identify with the “lazy” south (Walton 100). The main character, Sally Carrol Harper, is a young girl with high aspirations of leaving her small southern hometown of Tarleton, Georgia and moving the big city. She seems quite happy in her small town, and yet she has decided against staying there forever because she wants to make something better of herself. She decides that when she marries it will not be to someone who lives in the town, but someone who will take her away to where she wants to be. Sally Carrol meets a young man with whom she becomes engaged. This boy, Harry Bella, is from New England where the weather is a frightful difference from the nice warm temperature in Georgia. When Sally Carrol arrives in New England she meets her husband Harry at the train station and he brings her to his nice home where he lives with his mother and father. She asks him if it would be okay if she smoked and so she did. When Harry’s mother saw her smoking she was appalled and could not keep her mouth from saying that Sally was a poor mannered young girl. Sally is a free spirit and because of her poor traits does not get along too well with Harry’s mother. During the 1920s, dancing at parties was the height of fun and in Fitzgerald’s “The Ice Palace” this is expressed to the extreme. Every night that Sally and Harry go out there is always much dancing and Sally sometimes feels awkward. When Sally is first introduced to this lifestyle she is not very sure what to expect and is quite excited, but as time continues, she finds the life dull and monotonous. One night Harry and some of his friends decide to take Sally to a nice winter carnival where they can see the famous “Ice Palace”. Sally is not sure what to expect and is excited as she waits to see the brilliant sculpture. When they arrive at the building they see ice everywhere in the form of a giant castle. This makes Harry fabulously happy, but Sally does not see it through his eyes. As the night progresses there are many Jazz bands playing throughout the “Palace” and a lot of eyes ogling about at the ice. Harry pulls Sally to another room just as an announcer states that the lights will soon be turned off. Sally is tired and cold and wants just to leave, but Harry pulls her along anyway. Soon Harry gets ahead of Sally and all of a sudden the lights are turned off. Sally does not know what to do, she does not know in which direction she had come and she is not sure how to get out. She sits down on the cold ice and passes out. Sally wakes up in Harry house and decides right then and there that she is going home. She screams at Harry and states that she hates the cold and she hates New England. When Sally is at home, she is just the same as she was before she left. The difference is that now she knows that staying in her hometown is good enough for her and that trying to be something that you are not is just a big joke. Toward the beginning of the story, Sally wanted to live in a big town and become a big someone, but now she understands that life is not all about what you become, but where you truly belong. In Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, references to the 1920s class struggle are more abundant than in “Winter Dreams” and “The Ice Palace”. The title itself gives the reader some information about the story without having to read the entire thing. This story gives the reader information about a flapper. A flapper is a woman of the 1920s who wears short skirts, has short bobbed hair, smokes, drinks alcohol, and dances provocatively. It is plain to see from the title that Fitzgerald is referring to a flapper in his writing. Other things that relate to the 1920s in this short story are big dances during the summer months, and a “jazz nourished generation” (Cowley 42). This story was “one of the first controversial stories which Fitzgerald wrote and which caused a great flow of feedback” (Eble 98). This quote shows how much of an impact Fitzgerald’s story had on the youth and even the older generation during the 1920s and 1930s. The beginning of the story shows what most women over thirty-five years of age thought and felt about a flapper during the 1920s. They thought that girls should have more pride and not be so carele...