Abstract: This paper examines the previously unconsidered use and representation of dance in the early writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In doing so its aim is to illuminate and illustrate the complex and subtle ways dance and Modernist literature intertwine to engage with issues of female subjectivity in the early twentieth century. The study of dance in Modernist literature is a relatively new area of inquiry, with almost all academic research on the topic published within the last ten years. This paper, in its selection of an American writer, intendeds to bridge a gap identified in these recent studies which have tended to focus on the mainly British context of ‘High’ Modernism and so this paper aims to expand considerations of dance and Modernism beyond the confines of British, Irish, and French literary works. Fitzgerald is regularly credited as the chronicler of the “Jazz Age” and the creator of the feminine ideal of the 1920s— the flapper or ‘mental baby vamp.’ This paper examines the subtle but nonetheless significant relationship between this form of female identity and social dancing in Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise and his short story ‘Bernice Bobs her Hair,’ both published in 1920. It illustrates how social dance is central to the construction of the flapper as a female identity and examines the implications of this identity for female subjectivity. Key words: American Literature, Modernism, Dance, Gendered Identities, Feminism We find the young woman of 1920 flirting, kissing, viewing life lightly, saying damn without a blush, playing along the danger line in an immature way ­ a sort of mental baby vamp. . . . Personally, I prefer this sort of girl. Indeed, I married the heroine of my stories. (F. Scott Fitzgerald qtd. Courbin 26) F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely acknowledged as the chronicler of the 1920s which he himself christened the “Jazz Age.” The young woman he describes in the above epigraph became symbolic of that age, and the popularity of his writing ensured his ‘mental baby vamp’, more commonly known as ‘the flapper’, became an American archetype. Her combination of an almost childlike narcissism and knowing eroticism, which fuelled her uncompromising carpe diem attitude, made her the perfect symbol for a generation emerging deliriously triumphant from the war to end all wars. However, as those familiar with his writing may be aware, Fitzgerald has the remarkable ability to hold two contradictory viewpoints simultaneously, and his view of the flapper was no exception; not only did she embody “a new philosophy of romantic individualism, rebellion, and, liberation” (Sanderson 143), she also represented “moral anarchy and lack of direction… social disorder and conflict” (Sanderson 143). Rena Sanderson, an American critic who has written extensively on American expatriate writers of the early twentieth century, particularly on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, outlines the effect Fitzgerald’s ambivalence has had on the majority of critical work attempting to uncover his ‘true’ attitude towards his female characters, and in turn, women in general. She notes how “while some see him as a sympathetic spokesman for modern women, a large majority read the author’s works as outright condemnations of women for their failure to live up to the male hero’s romantic dreams.” (Sanderson 144). Both these views, as Sanderson suggests, are problematic for the same reason: “they depend on one­sided and polemical interpretation of the evidence” (144). To wholly embrace one attitude at the expense of the other is to deny that which arguably makes Fitzgerald such an enduring and interesting writer— his oscillation “between a romantic side and a pragmatic/judgemental side” (Sanderson 144). While Sanderson, by tracing the development of his female characters, goes on to argue for a reading of Fitzgerald as a writer possessing an androgenous creativity, the intention of this study is not to offer a definitive reading of his attitude towards women. It is, instead, to examine how the identity of the ‘mental baby vamp’ is constructed in his writing, with a particular focus on the role social dancing plays in this construction. This paper will aim to illustrate the role social dancing plays in constructing the flapper as a desirable feminine identity. It will begin by examining how social dance is figured in Fitzgerald’s early writing, focusing mainly on his first novel This Side of Paradise, and, his short story ‘Bernice Bobs her Hair’, both published in 1920. It will suggest that social dance is figured as an ideal stage upon which a certain class of young women could ‘perform’ the identity of the flapper. It will then examine how social dancing, by providing these young women with an opportunity for flirtation and self expression, offers them a sense of freedom and agency. However it will then go on to demonstrate the fleeting nature of this independence, and so will examine how Fitzgerald, in quite a similar way to another Modernist writer, Katherine Mansfield, employs social dancing as a means to illustrate the limited nature of this supposed freedom. While providing young women with a space for self­expression, the social dance, and in turn the flapper persona, indivisible from the transient state of youth, are simultaneously impermanent spaces between childhood and adulthood, between father and husband. Social dance during the 1920s underwent rapid change, becoming a site where tradition and modernity explicitly clashed. To dance socially had been a long standing tradition of the middle­ and upper­middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic. Rishona Zimring, writing on the complicated relationship the female members of the Bloomsbury group had with social dancing, notes how “Girls who became Bloomsbury women… received dance instructions at an early age and were expected to come out (make their social debut) at balls” (95). This experience of social dance was shared by their American counterparts, in particular the Southern belle, the kind of high society girls who would become Fitzgerald heroines. While the tradition of presenting debutantes at society balls remained largely intact during the 1920s, the rules governing one’s conduct at them, particularly the conduct of young women, changed utterly. “Traditional regulations of the gender system [had been] undermined by sexual dissonances inspired by the New Woman…, [by] the organized struggles for women’s suffrage and birth control; by women’s experiences of socialism, their participation in war, and entry into the culture and commerce of modernity” and this could all be felt on the dancefloor (Scott 536). It became a site to ‘play along the danger line’, and to illustrate just how lightly you viewed life. This combination of tradition and rebellion is one of the reasons Zimring considers social dance a poignant metaphor for modernity. It could be experienced by young women simultaneously as “as a form of discipline and social control, or simply as the pleasure of shaping one’s behaviour into a pattern. [As well as this] it... involved feelings of intimacy and connection, as well as of erotic excitement and physical release” (Zimring, Social Dance 6). The seemingly contradictory experience of social dancing as both a form of social control and resistance echo, as Zimring also acknowledges, the formal and thematic problems of fragmentation and wholeness common to Modernist texts (Social Dance 6). Fitzgerald’s writing exhibits a deep preemptive understanding of the performative nature of gender seventy years prior to the formalisation of such observations by theorists such as Judith Butler. Pearl James, an American academic whose work is concerned with American Modernism and gender, succinctly phrases this observation in her essay ‘History and Masculinity in F Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise’: “Fitzgerald's novel betrays a suspicion that character, in the sense that it held for nineteenth­century writers, no longer seems tenable. Instead, identity is performed and relatively unstable” (3). Although as the title suggests, James’s essay examines the representation of masculinity in Fitzgerald’s first novel, she offers an alternative understanding of how femininity is figured in the text. Noting how “Fitzgerald repeatedly conveys femininity as a script”, James suggests that rather than condemn women for this ‘inauthenticity’, as many feminist critics suggest he does, Fitzgerald views this malleability of character as desirable, and so “women and their repertoire are to be envied and imitated, desired not in themselves as objects, but in the mobility and modernity that their way of being seems to enable” (James 12). This admiration is not constant however. Whenever the male protagonist feels out­performed by these expert social actors, his admiration rapidly turns to jealousy and anger, followed by self­pity. This is one of the reasons Sanderson’s observation that Fitzgerald “provided in his fiction both manuals on the construction of… [femininity] and sermons condemning its duplicity” is accurate (147). If, as James suggests, femininity in Fitzgerald’s writing is a ‘script’ then it is logical to assume women required a stage to perform on. As mentioned previously, this study will suggest that in Fitzgerald’s early work the most significant of social stages for a young woman is the social dance. Fitzgerald, in figuring the dance floor as such, not only reflects, but contributes to a wider social understanding of social dancing; that dancing is, as Zimring observes, “an ideal activity through which to discover the meanings and implications of everyday performance and performativity” (Social Dance 8). Zimring also makes a useful link between the social dance as a stage for young women and the burgeoning celebrity culture of the 1920s. Of particular relevance is the concept of the ‘It’ girl, credited to the British expatriate romance author and Hollywood screenwriter, Elinor Glyn. ‘It’, as Zimring describes it, is the rare combination of “strange magnetism, unselfconsciousness, self­confidence, physical attractiveness, fascination, mystery, and elusiveness” (Social Dance 10)1. She goes on to suggest that the dance floor naturally provides a perfect place in which to foster such characteristics. It is, as she explains, “an ideal location for public intimacy, where one enjoys the frisson of erotic play in flirtation, while being gazed at by potential admirers, rivals, or bored observers caught off guard, suddenly fascinated by the spectacle of you” (Social Dance 10). This is quite clearly how the social dance is figured in the early work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, his short story, ‘Bernice Bobs her Hair’, provides a clear example of his writing as simultaneously manual for, and critique of, the flapper. Captured explicitly in its opening sentences is the sense of the dance floor as a stage for the performance of gender and youth: [The balcony] consisted of the circle of wicker chairs that lined the wall of the combination club­room and ballroom. At these Saturday night dances it was largely 1
A popular rhyme which circulated widely at the time can give the reader a sense of the scandalousness yet appeal attached to Glyn’s concept of ‘It’: Would you like to sin
with Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin?
Or would you prefer
to err with her
on some other fur? (qtd.Merriman “Elinor Glyn”) feminine; a great babel of middle­aged ladies with sharp eyes and icy hearts behind lorgnettes and large bosoms. The main function of the balcony was critical. It occasionally showed grudging admiration, but never approval, for it is well know among ladies over thirty­five that when the younger set dance in the summer­time it is with the very worst intentions in the world, and if they are not bombarded with stony eyes stray couples will dance weird barbaric interludes in the corners, and the more popular, more dangerous, girls will sometimes be kissed in the parked limousines of unsuspecting dowagers. But after all, this critical circle is not close enough to the stage to see the actors’ faces and the subtler by­play… It never really appreciates the drama of the shifting, semi­cruel world of adolescence (my emphasis). (“Bernice” 3) Along with highlighting the performative element of gender, the extract’s description of the middle­aged women is also striking and raises an issue that will be returned to later in this chapter. Firstly however, how certain girls establish themselves as ‘popular’ and ‘dangerous’ through their participation in the drama of the ‘semi­cruel world of adolescence’ and social dance will be examined. Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise, writes in a letter to a friend: “God! Tom, I hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic” (130). Though expressed here by a male character, this sense of dread towards the perceived inescapability of domesticity that comes with aging is common to all of Fitzgerald’s ‘baby vamps’. Zimring, in her analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, in particular ‘Her First Ball’ and ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’, identifies a similar attitude towards, what could be described as the trappings of marriage in her female protagonists. Considering this, it is no surprise that social dance underscores in Fitzgerald’s writing the same limited and short­lived opportunities for the exercise of female agency by providing “a stage for flirtation which empowers women to reject the couple (indeed, marriage and domesticity)” (Zimring, Social Dance 58). The act of flirtation is central to this limited freedom. The work of Georg Simmel, a German sociologist, writing at the same time as Fitzgerald is particularly illuminating as it explicitly articulates attitudes towards, and, an understanding of the social significance of flirting which is depicted in a much more implicit way by Fitzgerald. Unsurprisingly flirtation, as figured by Simmel, takes place between a heterosexual pairing, and in his theorisation he delineates the female as the more powerful of such a pairing. Simmel asserts that, through the act of flirting, “women are able to dominate, to assert the role they enjoy in the ‘animal kingdom’, that is, in the Darwinian system of sexual selection: that of the chooser. In saying no and saying yes, in surrendering and refusing to surrender, women are the masters” (140). Simmel’s suggestions provide an insight into why flirting was a crucial tool for Fitzgerald’s ‘mental baby vamp’. In Fitzgerald’s writing, the reader witnesses Simmel’s theory in action. However Fitzgerald’s texts also illustrate how not all young women are automatically privy to the power afforded via flirting. In order to wield the power of choice in gender relations a young woman first had to establish herself socially as the ‘Popular Daughter’. This is a term he uses interchangeably with ‘baby vamp’ in ‘Bernice Bobs her Hair’ and This Side of Paradise. As both these texts illustrate, social dancing was key to young woman securing this title. In both This Side of Paradise and ‘Bernice Bobs her Hair’ Fitzgerald, echoes the Darwinian tone of Simmel’s theory. In This Side of Paradise the reader is informed that the ‘Popular Daughter’ “is selected by the cut­in systems at dances, which favours the survival of the fittest” (57). In ‘Bernice Bobs her Hair, Fitzgerald makes clear that “No matter how beautiful or brilliant a girl may be, the reputation of not being frequently cut in on makes her position at a dance unfortunate” (6). The three ‘Popular Daughters’ of the short story are: Bernice’s cousin and ‘mentor’, Marjorie Harvey, Genevieve Ormonde and Roberta Dillon, and, Fitzgerald links the popularity of all these girls to their behaviour at social dances: There was Genevieve Ormonde, who regularly made the rounds of dances, house parties and football games at Princeton, Yale, Williams, and, Cornell; there was black­eyed Roberta Dillon, who was quite as famous to her own generation as Hiram Johnson or Ty Cobb; and, of course, there was Marjorie Harvey, who besides having a fairylike [sic] face and a dazzling, bewildering tongue was already justly celebrated for having turned five cart­wheels in succession during the past pump­and­slipper dance at New Haven. (“Bernice” 4) Bernice’s disappointing experience at the first dance she attends serves as an example of how central social dancing is to a young woman wishing to establish herself as attractive in the eyes of the opposite sex. Despite her physical beauty being widely acknowledged, to her surprise and dismay, Bernice finds herself never being cut in on whilst dancing. Bernice’s transformation, under Marjorie’s tutelage, from unsophisticated, dowdy, out­dated, country ‘belle’ to ‘Popular Daughter’ illustrates the performative nature of this identity, as well as the importance of a ‘Popular Daughter’s’ ability to flirt. One of the primary lessons Bernice learns from Marjorie is regarding the ‘sad birds’. ‘Sad birds’, according to Marjorie, are the less attractive, socially inept young men whom women, having no romantic interest in them, tend to ignore at social gatherings. Marjorie explains to Bernice how desire operates among young men, and, stresses that these ‘sad birds’ can prove useful tools in highlighting to the more attractive men just how desirable a young lady is: If you go to a dance and really amuse, say, three sad birds that dance with you; if you talk so well to them that they forget they’re stuck with you, you’ve done something. They’ll come back next time, and gradually so many sad birds will dance with you that the attractive boys will see there’s no danger of being stuck ­ then they’ll dance with you. (“Bernice” 14) Flirting well, or convincing men that you are romantically interested in them, ensures you are cut in on regularly at social dances, the more you are cut in, the more visible your status as desirable is to those around you, the most desirable girls are unquestionably the ‘Popular Daughters’. Isabelle, Amory’s first love in This Side of Paradise, is an accomplished ‘baby vamp’ who “had walked with an artificial gait at nine” (This Side 63). She illustrates the crucial blend of performance, flirtation and dance, in the establishment of oneself as a Popular Daughter: Boys cut in on Isabelle every few feet and then squabbled in the corners with ‘You might let me get more than an inch!’ and, ‘She didn’t like it either— she told me so the next time I cut in.’ It was true—she told everyone so, and gave every hand a parting pressure that said: ‘You know that your dances are making my evening.’ (This Side 63) The evolution of Bernice in Fitzgerald’s short story serves as an accelerated version of the evolution of wider society’s feminine ideal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fitzgerald describes the process in This Side of Paradise, noting how “The ‘belle’ had become the ‘flirt’, the ‘flirt’ had become the ‘baby vamp’” (58). He also further elaborates the distinction between the ‘baby vamp’ and her predecessor, the ‘Southern belle’, explaining how: The ‘belle’ had five or six callers every afternoon. If the PD [sic], by some strange accident, has two, it is made pretty uncomfortable for the one who hasn’t a date with her. The ‘belle’ was surrounded by a dozen men in the intermission between dances. Try find the PD between dances, just try to find her. (This Side 58) It is when placed in direct comparison with her more conservative and passive predecessor that the potentially empowering aspects of the ‘baby vamp’ as a female identity become obvious. As the quote from This Side illustrates, the main difference between the two female archetypes is the ability to exercise choice; where the ‘belle’ serves only as an object of others’ desire, the ‘baby vamp’ refuses to deny a sexual appetite of her own. She dictates who may call to see her and when. She disappears at dances, kissing whom she wants when she wants. This expression of physical affection is no longer a promissory gesture or assurance of love or loyalty. Rosalind, the ‘baby vamp’ who breaks Amory’s heart in This Side of Paradise, articulates this new found sense of independence: There used to be two kinds of kisses: first when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there’s a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr Jones of the nineties bragged he’d kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr Jones of 1919 brags the same everyone knows it’s because he can’t kiss her anymore. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays. (This Side 151) The identity of the ‘baby vamp’ in Fitzgerald’s early work is figured as a rather violent reactionary response to the ‘belle’ of the previous generation. In an effort to free herself from the inhibiting and repressive concept of femininity from which the ‘Southern belle’ arose, which she misguidedly attributes to women and not patriarchy, she regularly voices her vitriolic distaste for other women and her preference for the company of men. In ‘Bernice Bobs her Hair’ the reader is informed that Marjorie “had no female intimates—she considered girls stupid,” that she “never giggled, was never frightened, seldom embarrassed, and in fact had very few of the qualities which Bernice considered appropriately and blessedly feminine” (7). Similarly Rosalind in This Side of Paradise “had been disappointed in man after man as individuals, but she had great faith in man as a sex. Women she detested. They represented qualities that she felt and despised in herself ­ incipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and, petty dishonesty” (This Side 144). While she remains young and popular with men, the ‘baby vamp’ sees no need for female friendships, attributing the attitude of other women towards her to jealousy. Marjorie upon hearing of another girl gossiping about her flippantly notes: “I’ll bet she consoles herself by thinking that she’s very virtuous and that I’m too gay and fickle and will come to a bad end. All unpopular girls think that way… I’ll bet she’d give ten years of her life and her European education to … have three or four men in love with her and be cut in on every few feet at dances” (“Bernice” 8). The realisation that her own identity, like that of the ‘belle’ before her, is perhaps no more than a patriarchal creation with its own trappings and mechanisms of repression, comes too late. This is something Fitzgerald articulates in his second novel The Beautiful and Damned. The symbiosis between dance and social performativity and their role in shaping Fitzgerald’s ‘baby vamp’ culminate in This Side of Paradise in the form of Rosalind, the young woman, who breaks Amory’s heart with her refusal to marry him. Unlike Isabelle who came before her, Rosalind’s performance as a ‘baby vamp’ is almost natural, with Fitzgerald noting how “her vivid, instant personality escaped that conscious, theatrical quality AMORY had found in ISABELLE… She was perhaps the delicious, inexpressible, one­in­a­century blend” (This Side 144). This makes her a worthy co­star for Amory, who by this stage in the text has proved himself a distinguished social actor. Rather aptly their first encounter is structured as a dramatic script. This takes place immediately prior to Rosalind’s debutante ball at which Amory is a guest of her brother’s, in a chapter entitled ‘The Debut’. Consisting mainly of the pair’s high­paced, flirtatious verbal to­and­fros, the structure heightens the significance of the performative act of gender. It also explicitly illustrates how the act of courtship is dependent upon each participant playing their role, and can even be read as an almost verbal dance, preceding the actual dancing which the pair will partake in. Despite the increasing intensity of their relationship and their mutual declarations of love Rosalind ultimately refuses to marry Amory on account of his lack of means. Her decision displays the fact that while women’s behaviour had changed, the economic and social realities governing their decisions had not. Believing that Rosalind would marry him regardless of his income, this rejection and apparent deceit wound Amory’s ego. Enacting a behavioural pattern common to the male protagonists of Fitzgerald’s writing, Amory drowns his self­pity in alcohol. For Amory then, having received the ‘new’ third kind of kiss mentioned by Rosalind earlier, social dancing and the romantic engagements it facilitated can be read as representing sites “of accelerated modernity and fragmentation in which women with new but limited powers could disturb and provoke anxiety” (Zimring, Social Dance 14). While ‘baby vamps’ like Rosalind could disturb and provoke masculine anxiety, their own experience of modernity was “vexed and contradictory, holding out and then withdrawing promises of freedom, knowledge, and power” (Zimring, Social Dance 18). The limited and unstable sense of freedom, knowledge, and, power experienced by these young women is perhaps symptomatic of the limited and unstable identity of the ‘baby vamp.’ Inextricably bound to youth, the identity of a ‘baby vamp’ was temporally limited. Zelda Fitzgerald, upon whom many of her husband’s ‘baby vamps’ are based, acknowledges this fact in one of her essays, “What Became of the Flappers?”. She outlines how “flapperdom is a necessary brief period in a young woman’s development that will better prepare her to be safely settled as wife and mother” (Prigozy 8). Along with the unsustainability of flapperdom, Zelda also indicates the limited freedom of the ‘baby vamp’ depicted by Fitzgerald in his books; flapperdom, in the same way Zimring figures social dancing in Katherine Mansfield, provides a temporary space for young women between childhood and the inevitability of marriage. Domesticity and aging are linked, dreaded, and represented as unavoidable in the writing of both the Fitzgeralds. To return then to the opening description of the balcony at the dance in ‘Bernice Bobs her Hair’, Fitzgerald notes how: “At these Saturday night dances it was largely feminine; a great babel of middle­aged ladies with sharp eyes and icy hearts behind lorgnettes and large bosoms. The main function of the balcony was critical” (“Bernice” 3). Once youth and beauty has faded, the picture Fitzgerald paints is a bleak one; post­flapperdom it would appear, is a depressing existence where a woman’s begrudgery of the young grows in tandem with her waistline. As mentioned previously, the ‘baby vamp’, in her virulent rejection of the ‘Southern belle’, fails to recognise either identity as a patriarchal construct; though potentially disturbing, the ‘baby vamp’ is just another in a long line of idealised versions of femininity. Simultaneously sexualised and infantalised, she is a declawed femme fatale, who after her bout of momentary freedom is expected to willingly retreat into the private sphere as wife and mother. Fitzgerald however, unlike the majority of male authors of his generation is strikingly self aware, and in This Side of Paradise, acknowledges the masculine prerogative of figuring female identity. Though Amory is not explicitly criticised for doing so, Fitzgerald’s narrator does bring the issue of masculine figuring of a female character, in this case Isabelle, to the attention of the reader: “He took sombre satisfaction in thinking that perhaps all along she had been nothing except what he had read into her” (This Side 85). Amory’s tendency to project his idealised conceptions of femininity onto the women he claims to love arises again during his relationship with Rosalind. This is expressed clearly in a short but telling comment made by Rosalind towards the end of their romance: “We’re you— not me” (This Side 157). This paper, through its focus on social dance, has established the patriarchal underpinnings and fleeting nature of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘mental baby vamp, ’and thus its deficiency as a form of female identity. Bibliography Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. "dance". Encyclopædia Britannica. 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