Download F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise: A Journey from Personality to Persona and more Exams Poetry in PDF only on Docsity!
This Side of
Paradise
Paige Davis
Brigham Young
University-Idaho
In this portfolio, I examine This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The highlighted sections in the table of contents indicate sections to draw your attention to particular skills. The section highlighted in yellow demonstrates my ability to summarize and evaluate a secondary critical source. The section highlighted in green exhibits my skill in analyzing quotes from the text. The blue section displays my capacity to consider questions about the text in a broader critical analysis using a variety of lenses.
This Side of Paradise Paige Davis Table of Contents Preface 2 Author Chronology 3 Critical Summary 5 Discussion of Literary Elements 6 T-Analysis 10 Ghosts of Personality versus Persona 13 More Critical Applications 17 Works Cited 19
Writer’s Chronology
BecauseThis Side of Paradise is a semi-autobiography of F. Scott, Fitzgerald, it is helpful to
understand the author’s life—particularly that of the earlier years up until the point when the book was published. September 24, 1896 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald born to Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald in
St. Paul, Minnesota. Named after distant relative and composer of “The Star Spangled Banner ”.
1908 (age 12) Father, Edward Fitzgerald, loses job as salesman for Procter &Gamble in New York, so family moves to back St. Paul to live on mother’s inheritance. F. Scott attends St. Paul Academy and publishes first work in school newspaper. 1911-1913 Fitzgerald attends Catholic prep school, Newman School, in Jew Jersey. Fitzgerald is encouraged by Father Sigourney Fay to follow “his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement” (Bruccoli). 1914-1917 Fitzgerald attends Princeton University, but ignores classes andassignments, in favor of writing scripts for the Princeton Triangle
Club, a theatre group, and working with thePrinceton Tiger, a
comedic student paper, and theNassau Literary Magazine. Fitzgerald
never graduates due to his academic probation.
1917 Fitzgerald joins the army, and is “commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry” (Bruccoli). Writes the first part toThis Side of
Paradise as novel in the form of “The Romantic Egotist”, which was
rejected from publishing. June 1918 Fitzgerald is stationed in Montgomery, Alabama, where he meets Zelda Sayre, which pushes him to revise and submit “The Romantic Egotist” again, but is rejected once more. 1919 World War I ends before F. Scott is sent overseas, resulting in hisdischarge. In search of fortune in order to marry, he goes to New York. Zelda became impatient for him to find fortune and breaks off engagement. July 1919 Fitzgerald quits advertising job in New York, and returns to “St. Paul
to rewrite his novelThis Side of Paradise”. The novel is “accepted by
editor Maxwell Perkins of [Charles] Scribners [splice] [Sons]” (Bruccoli). Fall-Winter 1919 Fitzgerald works on short stories to publish in mass-circulating
magazines, includingSaturday Evening Post.
March 26, 1920(age 23) This Side of Paradise published, and Fitzgerald discovers instantfame, and marries Zelda Sayre in New York.
Summer 1920 WritesThe Beautiful and the Damned.
October 1921 Zelda gives birth to Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, their only child.
Fall 1922 Fitzgeralds move to Great Neck, Long Island after success ofVegetable on Broadway, but the play fails. Fitzgerald writes shortThe
stories to get out of debt. Also worsen alcoholic habits, but writes
Spring 1924 sober.Fitzgeralds go to France, where Fitzgerald writesThe Great Gatsby.
Marriage is damaged by Zelda’s affair with a French naval aviator.
Winter 1924-1925 Fitzgeralds go to Rome, where he edits and revisesThe Great Gatsby.
On their way to Paris, the novel is published. 1926 Fitzgeralds alternate between Paris and the Riviera. F. Scott forms close friendship with Earnest “unconventional behavior became increasingly eccentric” (Bruccoli). Hemingway, while Zelda’s Spring 1927- Spring 1929
Family moves back to the states, making smaller trips back to France. Zelda decides to become a professional dancer. F. Scott tries his handat screenwriting in Hollywood. Spring 1929-Fall 1931 Family moves to France so Zelda can go to a professional balletschool. The intense practices damage her health, when she has her first breakdown. She is treated at a clinic in Switzerland. F. Scott returns to writing short stories to cover the psychiatric treatment costs. Fall 1931 Family moves back to states. F. Scott tries unsuccessfully at screenwriting again. Zelda suffers a relapse in Feb. 1932, and spends
“ writes the autobiographythe rest of her life as a resident or outpatient of sanitariums.” SheSave Me the Waltz as “a patient at Johns
Hopkins,” which distances the couple even further (Bruccoli).
1934 Fitzgerald publishesTender is the Night, about a psychiatrist and “his
marriage to a wealthy mental patient” (Bruccoli). 1936-1940 F. Scott is deeply in debt, and sends Scottie to boarding school, where she adopts a surrogate family, the Obers. He works in Hollywood, where he gets several contracts, eventually earning $91,000 fromMGM, which gets him out of debt. He also “fell in love with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and completed a screenplay, Three Comrades, a year later” (Teisch).Zelda is at in Highland Hospital. He goes to North Carolina, where December 21, 1940 (age 44)
F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment. Zelda died eight years later in a fire in Highland Hospital.
Discussion of Literary Elements
This Side of Paradise explores the milieu of the Lost Generation. Amory Blaine serves as a
sketch of Fitzgerald himself in America during the Jazz Age. Amory Blaine is a young man on a quest of self-discovery. He serves as a sketch of F. Scott Fitzgerald himself during the same period of his life. Amory’s childhood describes his friendship- type relationship with his mother, Beatrice, who raises and educates him to know the elegance of high society. When he enters into school in Minneapolis, he finds his peers and professors dull, and they find him too sophisticated. He determines that his “first philosophy, a code to live by… was a sort of aristocratic egotism,” considering himself superior in every capacity than everyone around him (18). He carries this attitude with him as he continues on to St. Regis, a boarding school in New England, where he struggles with his individualism and his desire to conform to the conventions of society around him. While there, he forms a significantly close bond to Monsignor Darcy, a clergyman and close friend of Beatrice. Amory enrolls into Princeton, where he carries his egotism and sophistication with him. He eventually drops out of Princeton on academic probation, and enrolls in the military as World War I starts. He then spends his time picking up small jobs and falling in love. Amory Blaine has a unique personality, which strongly influenced the events of his life. His laziness, acquired in his younger years with his mother, frequently inhibits his ability to reach exactly what he wants in life though: he struggles academically because of his arrogance and lack of self-discipline and socially due to his egotism and vanity. When he gets to Princeton, he makes several close friends, with whom he continually discusses the ideas of a social caste system, and a desire to be among the elite, but says, “I hate to get anywhere by working for it” (Fitzgerald, 46). He finds success in athletics, specifically football, until he is injured, and must seek elite status elsewhere. He does finds small success in reading poetry of higher thinking—again setting himself
apart from his peers—and writing poetry for thePrincetonian, the college paper. After becoming
ineligible to publish in the school paper because of his grades, he discards his dreams of becoming an elitist, and seeks to find the basic elements of himself: The fundamental Amory. He finds himself continually falling in and out of love with different girls, discovering that his confidence and looks have the power to charm most any girl he chooses. In college, his first love is Isabelle Borgé, to whom he writes constantly, falls in love more “with his idea of himself as a conqueror” (92). He continues to fall in love with Clara, a clear, witty, young widow, who was an equal in mental capacity to Amory. Then he returns from the military only to meet college cohort Alec’s sister, Rosalind, at her very traditional and impractical début. They fall deeply in love, and are engaged for several weeks. He gets a job so as to have a better prospect when they get married, but she became impatient for him to gain his fortune, and breaks off the engagement in favor of another wealthier young man. (Amory’s failed engagement is a sketch of Fitzgerald’s own originally failed proposal to Zelda.) Afterward, Amory has a period in which he continually drinks alcohol to alleviate the sorrow, until the Prohibition eliminates this source of comfort. Then, he has one last fling with Eleanor, a young, carefree, and unconventional girl who almost gets herself killed in “a crazy streak” (240). Amory’s life follows that of Fitzgerald, chronicling his own personal experiences of the times. Amory’s family is well to do in the beginning, with a large budget for Beatrice and her son to travel to Europe regularly during his youth. Her health requires her to leave Amory in the hands of an aunt and uncle in Minnesota for several years. When they meet again two years later, Amory insists that convention dictates that sophisticated boys his age of that time should go to boarding school. After attending a fictitious boarding school in New England called St. Regis, Amory goes to Princeton, as Fitzgerald did. He remarks on his parents finances, which serve as a rough representation of the general society’s view of money. He discusses how his father, who remains
Rosalind and then being rejected for lack of wealth, Amory develops a deep alcohol problem, which the “advent of prohibition with the ‘thirsty-first’ put a sudden stop to the submerging of Amory’s sorrows, and when he awoke one morning to find that the old bar-to-bar days were over, he had neither remorse for the past three weeks nor regret that their repetition was impossible” (208). Amory’s behavior during those three weeks serves as an explanation of how significantly alcoholism had struck America and how the law impacted society’s Amory serves as a reflection of Fitzgerald in America during the economic decline leading to the Great Depression, the impact of World War I on that generation, and the changes in society’s moral code.
T-Analysis How do ghosts become the archetypal symbol to represent change? Quote Interpretation “He granted himself personality, charm, dominating all contemporary males, themagnetism, poise, the power of gift of fascinating all women” (18).
From his childhood education of higher class elegance and education from Beatrice, Amorybelieves himself to be superior to his contemporaries. From this superiority, he creates a very bold, arrogant, and egotistical personality. “Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground…. He liked knowing that Gothic architecture with itsupward trend, was peculiarly appropriate to universities, and the idea became personal to him” (53-54).
This first mention of ghosts is followed by the comment about adopting the theory of Gothic architecture belonging to universities. This entire episode shows a shift for Amory from egotism toan anti-transcendentalist view, in which he begins to write poetry. “He lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often accompanies beauty in men and women; thing, and it was not in his power to turnhis personality seemed rather a mental it on and off like a water faucet” (60).
This is Amory’s first conscious acknowledgement that his personality is all in how he thinks- in his thoughts.
“He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming in his mind…” (85).
Amory describes his mental capacity in terms of what is almost there, and what has the potential tobecome great. This is also right before they discover Dick Humbird’s body, foreshadowing the transition from life to death, and symbolizing thetransition from almost complete thought to a tangible, visible, and written poem. ** “A personality is what you thought you were… Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on… But while a next thing.’ Now a personage, on the^ personality is active, it overrides ‘the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done” (104). ***
M. Darcy says this in an effort to emphasize to Amory that as a personality, he is merely a physicalbeing, but as a personage, he can become a spiritual, mental force which has a much more powerful influence over others in their mentalcapacities and decisions. As a personage, he would be remembered as more than just a charming egotist, but a man who changed the world in someway, whether it is through his writing, a discovery, or product.
dreams…. And he could not tell why the determined to use the utmost himself^ struggle was worth while, why he had and his heritage form the personalities he had passed… ‘I know myself,’ he cried, ‘but that is all’” (282).
Observation: Ghosts represent Amory’s conscious and unconscious shifts from a personality to a personage.
Ghosts of Personality versus Persona Amory Blaine and Monsignor Darcy have a multitude of discussions throughout the novel
This Side of Paradise about the difference between being a personality and being a persona. The
novel then follows his course on his path from becoming a personality to a persona.This Side of
Paradise highlights Amory’s transitions from being a personality to a persona through the
archetypal idea of ghosts. Ghosts are naturally symbolic of change and transition, particularly from one stage of life to the next, and most commonly from death to trapped spirit in limbo. While Amory never physically dies in the novel, he is continuously experiencing shifts from personality to persona. The idea of shifting from a personality to a persona, especially in the context of ghosts, implies a physical matter to a spiritual or mental matter. Monsignor Darcy first discusses the differences between a personality and a persona when he tells Amory: A personality is what you thought you were… Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on… But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done (104). A personality is more of a mask, or outward appearance, for individuals. As personalities, we change depending on the people we are around or the situations we are in. Personalities change and are subject to their emotions. Amory is conscious of this during the first part of the novel, admitting that “he was slave to his own moods” (19). His main concern throughout the first part is his image to other people. He desires to look superior to everyone else, and prides himself in such superiority and sophistication. When he decides what his first philosophy is, he determines that it is “a code to live by, which, as near as it can be named, was a sort of aristocratic egotism” (18). As
After this point in Amory’s life, his personality fades; he is no longer the superior, egotistical, arrogant person that he once was. Between having his love rejected, his parents die, watching his friends die in the war, and losing his fortune to the poor economic climate, he is haunted by these ghosts of love, pasts, death, and hunger. Amory finds his persona after he has lost his personality with Rosalind’s rejection. Monsignor Darcy writes him after the broken engagement, warns that, “the secret of success, when we find it, is the mystical element in us: something flows into us that enlarges our personalities, and when it ebbs out our personalities shrink; I should call your last two letters [about Rosalind] rather shriveled. Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman” (220). He makes a number of remarks about how his generation is lost because of the war, or at least changed beyond repair. When Amory and Alec, one of his college cohorts, talk for the last time before they leave Princeton for the military, one says, “’the grass is full of ghosts tonight’” and the other responds “’the whole campus is alive with them’” (153). This paradox highlights the loss of a generation of young men who have gone off to war and will never be the same. Though death will not take all of them and turn them into ghosts of physical death, the ones who will return will become ghosts of the memory of death. When his father dies while Amory is at Princeton, the only influence this death has is on his allowance and access to money. However, Amory’s father’s financial situation is an expression of the economic death and collapse around the family, which was occurring everywhere. This economic death is highlighted further with Beatrice’s death, and after Amory quits his job at the advertising company, he begins to feel his own personal economic death to the point of delirious starvation. He has an episode of disoriented thoughts, depicting his frantic and disparate thoughts as he considers what little the future holds. He is no longer a personality, but a persona of himself as he talks himself through what to do and where to go next. He is alone with his thoughts until the
man with the goggles and the small man give him a ride. During their ride, they reach the height of his persona because he is extending his ideas to someone else. While his thoughts are still disparate and quite radical, he has reached his potential persona by saying things which make the man with the goggles think, and sparking his own thought processes, telling Amory that his radicalism “”puzzle[s]” him. He reached the height of persona, influencing another being to think and to do something on those thoughts. The novel does not describe the change to come from the man with the goggles, but Amory’s change from a personality to a persona is drastic and permanent.
Women play a dominant role in Amory’s youth. Starting with Beatrice, his childhood education and image of self was shaped by the way she put specific influences in his path, such as Europe and Monsignor Darcy. The next major influence was Isabelle, in whom he fell in falls in love “with his idea of himself as a conqueror” (92). Rosalind was the next major female influence, which made him into the man he could become, as well as destroying him emotionally. His last influence was with Eleanor, who scared him out of love once more.
How does our modern knowledge of the Great Depression to come change how we read the text, full of characters and written by an author who does not see the economic collapse, but only the decline? Reading about the lives of Americans leading up to the Great Depression was an interesting perspective. The sense of the lack of money was more highlighted to me, knowing that the Great Depression was soon to come. Being aware of the collapse, I saw each mention of poverty and speculation as an unknown foreshadowing of what was to come, and felt some concern and fear for the characters, and curious about where each character would end up.
How doesThis Side of Paradise express the conflict between the pros and cons of creating
class caste systems?
Works Cited
Bruccoli, Matthew J. "A Brief Life of Fitzgerald." 4 Dec 2003.University of South Carolina: F.
Scott Fitzgerald Centenary. Web. 17 Jul 2012.
http://www.fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org/biography/index.html.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott.This Side of Paradise. New York: Kessinger Legacy Reprints, 1920.
Monk, Craig. "The Political F. Scott Fitzgerald: Liberal Illusion and Disillusionment in 'This Side
of Paradise' and 'The Beautiful and Damned'." 1995.Academic Search Premier. Web. 19
Jul 2012.
Teisch, Jessica. "F. Scott Fitzgerald." Sept./Oct. 2004.Bookmarks. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 16 Jul
