ELTWeekly Vol. 4 Issue#51 | December 17, 2012 | ISSN 0975-3036
This paper is submitted by Mrs. Seema Chaudhary, Ph.D Scholar, Meghalaya University, Shillong, Assistant Professor, Bharati Vidyapeeth University Institute of Management & Research, New Delhi.
ABSTRACT
The aim of this article is to establish Fitzgerald as the novelist of manners with suitable examples from the four novels of Fitzgerald : This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934) . Looking at the various novels the conclusion is that Fitzgerald was successful in creating simultaneously a type of protagonist who could be romantic in chasing his own illusions, and at the same time providing a social concern about the Jazz generation with its mass production, installment purchasing, a stream of social scandals and crimes altogether, a restless decade denouncing old values and unsuccessful in finding any new set of values.
He created individual characters like Amory Blaine, Jay Gatsby and Dick Driver who are representatives of his own romantic view of life. In effect , Fitzgerald’s works present a fine blend of an ironical picture of the Jazz age society and the romantic vision of individual protagonists. In this blend , if the primary characters are romantically inclined, the secondary characters represent the bootlessness underlying the brilliant surface of Post War Society. Undoubtedly, the fact is that Fitzgerald looked with a critical eye at his time , the Twenties, towards the manners and values of the younger generation.
Key Words: Novelist of manners, social concern , ironical picture, jazz age, post war society, set of values.
INTRODUCTION
Scott Fitzegerald projects the foibles, vanities , conventional attitudes and other short comings of people of human character in the hope of their being corrected. Social problems were given great prominence even during the eighteenth century when the English novel started developing with Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding,. Richard Chase rightly says: ‘’Jane Austen is if not the greatest, at least the purest novelist of manners, her kind of novel being the archetype ofthe form1.’’ . On the other hand , a novelist like Thomas Hardy alternates between short stretches of dialogue and long descriptive commentary in scenes and situations. In the case of modern novelists such as James Joyce, it is an attempt to read deep into the human consciousness in a novel like Ulysses. Fitzgerald as a novelist of manners confirms to the American tradition of concentrating on men more than on society as he pays attention to the individual characters and the various hidden shades of behavior.
Critical Perspective Of Various Novels Of Fitzegerald
The Great Gatsby: A Social Comedy
This novel provides a satirical account of the lost generation with its misplaced values. The emphasis is evenly distributed between the comic environment and Gatsby’s single-minded pursuit of a romantic vision. Daisy emerges as the most reprehensible character in the novel, a picture of selfishness in sharp contrast to the self sacrificing Gatsby. Tom Buchanan satisfies his vanity both ways. Nick, the narrator, is a fine creation, a mixture of a critic and an objective observer of life. It is Nick who builds up a contrast between an unethical immoral, crude, sensual atmosphere and a sensitive, refined, sentimental soul breathing in this atmosphere. In the words of Trilling, his fiction ‘’keeps fresh because it is so specifically conscious of its time—its continuing power comes from the courage with which it grasps a moment in history as a great moral fact.2”
[2] This Side of Paradise:
Romance and realistic Power:
The romantics strain in his novels can be perceived mainly by his novel —This Side of Paradise. Even, Arthur Mizener aptly states in his essay, ‘Scott Fitzgerald and the 1920’s” that Fitzgerald was remarkable in the sense that ‘’he was not a historian, even of ideas, he was a poet, a man who experienced this idea, felt it a-new and as if no one had ever experienced it before, and felt it therefore wholly in terms of the world he lived in3.’’Neither the author nor his characters aim at achieving wealth as a means of achieving social importance and romance. Class, money and display of money is secondary to him. The way in which people reacted to one another and to their surroundings during that crucial Inter-War period is what Fitzgerald projects in his novels as there is no bitterness in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. For Amory, ‘’if living isn’t a seeking for the grail it may be damned amusing game.4’’ .
[3] The Beautiful and Damned :
Projection of prevailing values
This novel projects only three characters, Antony Patch, Maury Noble and Dick Caramel, and a prominent heroine Gloria Gilbert . the fiction , in which the two protagonists simply reduce themselves to at life of luxury and dissipation. Mizener makes a biting remark: ‘’They (Antony & Gloria) are pitiful and silly rather than beautiful and damned5.’’ Though the novel has been considered as an aberration by many critics , even then the three books of the novel progressively trace the development in the two protagonists way of life from their complete abandonment to dreams and to a discovery that their dreams have turned to nothing else but only nightmares. Fitzgerald’s aim was to make this novel a satire on the wealthy set of people haunting theatres, restaurants, cabarets and luxurious hotels.
[4] Tender is the Night:
Projection of American society.
Set in the Americanized Riviera, the novel, as Maxwell Geismer puts it ‘’is probably overloaded with references to the American empire, American men and women, American manners, clothes, faces and even American trains- absorbed as they are in an intense destiny of their own6’’.
Dick Diver is presented as a symbol of America, dynamic, young, strong and innocent. Fitzgerald’s portrayal of Nicole and Dick symbolizes the two extremes, Nicole symbolic of the corrupt and exploiting society and Dick- the natural idealist, is determined to realize his dreams. His devotion to Nicole parallels to that of Gatsby’s devotion to Daisy and while both men are destroyed by their meaningless lives .
Conclusion
The First World War with its widespread violence, terror and blood-shed had left humanity deeply scarred.
The sensitive psyche of the writer in the twenties revolted against the deplorable state of affairs. Thus appeared on the literary scene in America such novelists as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Possos, who each in his own way became a genuine spokesman of that age-an age that came to be popularly termed as ‘the Jazz age. Fitzgerald is an author, who is a representative figure of his age, mirroring in his works the Twenties, a significant period of social disintegration. A regular study of sociology cannot so successfully mirror a society as a novel can. The novel by virtue of its bulk, presents a very detailed picture of society from both the individual and the collective points of view. In this sense, Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby give a more intimate knowledge of the Twenties than any descriptive book by a sociologist. Brian Way calls Fitzgerald ‘A Social novelist’, with no reliance on ideology, myth or symbol. ‘’For Fitzgerald the most significant kind of reality is to be found in the observed manners of the immediate social group.7” His novels are truly committed to, ‘’render reality closely and in comprehensive detail,’’ and thus we find in his novels a complete report of the manners of men in his times.
Bibliography
- 1Richard Chase: The American Novel and its Tradition (Ludhiana, Kalyani Publishers, 1973), p.158.
- 2 Lionel Trilling, Liberal Imagination. Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking Press, 1933).P.163
- 3Arthur Mizener: ‘’Scott Fitzgerald and The 1920’s’’ In Kenneth E. Elbe (ed). F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Criticism: (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), pp.99-100.
- 4.F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, (London: Penguin Book Ltd., 1977), p.60.
- 5Arthur Mizerner, The Far Side of Paradise (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1951), p142
- 6Maxwell Geismer, The Last of Provincials: The American Novel 1915-1925, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Vo., 1947), p.329
- 7Brian way, Scott Fitzgerald and the art of social fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1980) pp.2-3.