1

Prof.dr.Rodica Mihaila
Course 5
20th Century American Literature
3rd Year
Spring Semester 2009

Alternatives to naturalism: Aestheticism

(Fitzgerald and Nabokov)
Two instances of Aestheticism: Fitzgerald, Nabokov
Three instances of Modernism: Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos.

Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHICAL DATA:
- born in St. Paul Minnesota , in a family -socially prominent and genteelly poor;
(Midwest= pastoral values. See Nick in GG)
- with help from relatives went to Princeton ( social successes , academic failure)
- in 1917 in his senior year - left college to serve in World War I ; sent for military
training in Alabama and fell in love with Zelda Sayre; (in the 30s a series of mental
breakdowns. See Tender is the Night)
- 1919 - discharged from the army , advertising jobs;
- in the early 1920s , F. = the embodiment and the chronicler of the Jazz Age :
handsome , wild , uninhibited , successful ; he went to the best parties , knew the
best people , drank the best wines , lived as though money would never stop.
- His life - the fulfillment of the American dream of success and in a nightmare of
squandered talent and despair.
- 1920-his first novel "This Side of Paradise" , after a week - F. and Zelda were
married
- the new generation of the Jazz Age
- a portrayal of the casual dissipation of scandalous young people
( he and Zelda lived up to it : extravagant life -style : swam in public fountains in New
York , drove to parties on the hoods of taxis , dance on dining tables ; therefore life
became a cocktail party
- 1922 - the 2nd novel " The Beautiful and the Damned " - a lesser novel
- short stories : The Tales of the Jazz Age
- 1925 - The Great Gatsby - completed , critical success and commercial
disappointment
- the finest novel - life related to the American dream;
- 1925 - 1927 - he wrote little ; a time of 1000 parties and no work;
- 1927 - he went to Hollywood for screen writing( it sustained him for the rest of his
life;
- 1929 - the stock market crash - Depression
- 1930s - Zelda suffers a series of mental breakdowns ( sanatoriums)
- F . engaged in periodical drinking bouts ( alcoholism) ; failure in
writing , ; his own illness;
 2

- 1934 - Tender Is the Night - a precise indictment of the irresponsible social values
of the 30s ; psychological and spiritual malaise of man's life
-yet - accused of ignoring the Depression to write a frivolous novel about
neurotic expatriates ;
- 1940 - F. died of heart attack
- unfinished novel The Last Tycoon - after 1940 - considered a major work

-like Franklin, Whitman and Hemingway he = self-mythologizer, his personal life

= a legend (his life is primary material for his art, Zelda), he=a culture hero
-dualities in him: his dual role: as representative and critic of the Jazz Age; his
fascination with wealth but also his horror at the dehumanization that affects its
possessors; his romantic idealization of sexual love and his suspicion of its self-
destructiveness
Lionel Trilling: his success lies less in his narrative power than in the delicate and
elegant “voice of his prose” which rarely loses its irony in his involvement and never
sacrifices its sympathy in his detachment.
-focus on style, the aesthetic—his novels = the opposite pole to the scientific,
material, economic novel of Dreiser

- Main concern: relation bet. romanticism (imagination/wonder) and American values

Fisher:--Yeats: “We were the last romantics” (applies to F.’s novels in the 20s and 30s)
- old fashioned celebration of romantic wonder, elegance and beauty and style—the
new idea of a commercial society in which is staged the old drama of beauty
transformed into glamour (including also media-fame, being talked about, envied)
- Key words: glamour and WONDER. Romantic Wonder - - the illusion of perennial
youth , grace and happiness ; in The Great Gatsby - the extraordinary gift for hope , a
romantic readiness. (“an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness”)
- the novel of breakdown =one of the major forms of the modern Am. novel (Herzog,
Catcher)
From Critical Scrutiny:
- Source of his excellence: ability to juxtapose romantic wonder (p.185/89) with
significant phenomena of Am.civ. and derive from that juxtaposition a moral critique
of human nature and the corruption of the dream in industrial America
- Rel. between romanticism and American values - the story of his emphatically
romantic and representative life should be read as American history conversely :
American history should be read as the tale of the romantic imagination in the USA
- Basic plot: the history of the New World that is the history of the human imagination
in the New World (what happened to the dream) –In Morrison—unwritten history of
slavery recovered through memory. In F.=a.) idea that his romantic and representative
life should be read as Am.history; b) conversely, Am.history should be read as the
tale of the romantic imagination in the US
- Two predominant patterns: 1.The Quest and 2.the seduction
1. the quest=the search for romantic wonder in terms proposed by
contemp. America (the Am. Dream, the pursuit of happiness)
=a flight from reality, normality, time, fate, death, all limits
 3

two goals of the quest: a.) the search for eternal youth and beauty (the essence of
romantic wonder resides in the illusion of perennial youth, grace and happiness
surrounding the leisure class of which F. wrote—see the obsessive youth-worship of Am.
Pop. Culture (p153/57: youth, glamour, money)
b) the search for wealth (money), personal material success
Relation between a and b=the quest for romantic wonder and its inevitable failure
2) The seduction= represents capitulation to the corrupting terms proposed by
contemp.America.

-The hero= inner forces compel him towards the personal realization of romantic
wonder, but destroyed by the materials which the Am.experience offers as objects and
criteria of passion

Great Gatsby (1925)

- mature realization of his vision
Eliot: “the first step the Am. novel has taken since Henry James”
Main concern: the corruption of the dream in industrial AM ( Dramatization Midwest-
East coast values = pastoral/industrial (Nick Carraway comes from the Midwest , sells
books in New York , has his own set of values = naïve ,honest, carrier of moral values in
the rural Midwest)
- Gatsby as a poor lieutenant fell in love with Daisy
- Daisy ( Nick's cousin) + Tom Buchanan = brutal man of wealth
- Myrtle Wilson ( garage man's wife) = Tom's mistress ; hit by Daisy who was driving
Jay's car
- Tom tells George Wilson that Gatsby killed his wife. Wilson shot Gatsby and then
himself.
- Near the end Jay's father shows Nick a book on a flyleaf on which Jay had written a
schedule of self-improvement - alludes to Franklin's "Autobiography" - campaign for
moral perfection ( ex. The study of elocution , poise and how to attain it).
Gatsby= the man of imagination in industrial America ( like Dick Diver in "Tender Is the
Night" );
-his capacity of wonder, illusion, sentimental idealization =a gift (98/101)
- his wonder on Daisy ; she becomes for Gatsby the iconic manifestation of
his dubious vision of beauty
=the product and manifestation of the Am. dream
=the instrument by which F. points to its self-contained possibilities of destruction
(his mansion and fabulous entertainment are financed by bootlegging and other criminal
activities) –see allusion to Franklin’s protestant ethic (Jimmy Gatz’s fabrication of Jay
Gatsby) –the irony: self-perfection schemes led to “success as a bootlegger and a fraud;
Franklin’s moral earnestness—led to a remorseless opportunism, a worship of prosperity
and pleasure- his tragedy: he thinks he can buy his dream which is to recapture the past
Am. Myths and traditions corrupted (the tradition of success story and rags-to-riches
story): Am. Dream, self-made man
-in the final symbol of the novel the personal equation is pushed to national even
universal scope (165/69)—the New World shipped off its pleasing and falsifying
illusions
 4

- the ironic contrast between the wonder of the New World and what the Americans
have done of it.

Why is Fitzgerald a modernist? Or the relation of Aestheticism to modernism

1.-aesthetic discontinuity—relation art/life;
2.--impotance of DESIGN:
Structure is compositional rather than sequential (plot replaced by anecdotes,
flash-backs, integrity of fragments)
Spacial form--the frame is replaced by symbolic structure.
Narrative strategy= F. juxtaposes a moral and social story (action, plot) and a
surface or manner or way of telling the story that aestheticizes the events.
- makes of aestheticism a means of transforming the novel [symbolism and aestheticism
blended with realism and naturalism in a new compound form]

Why is Fitzgerald considered a modernist?

Fitzgerald as a representative of aestheticism in the Am. Novel. How do we connect

aestheticism with modernism?
-aesthetic discontinuity—relation art/life; impotance of DESIGN: Structure is
compositional rather than sequential (plot replaced by anecdotes, flash-backs, integrity of
fragments) Spacial form--the frame is replaced by symbolic structure.
Narrative strategy= F. juxtaposes a moral and social story (action, plot) and a
surface or manner or way of telling the story that aestheticizes the events.
- makes of aestheticism a means of transforming the novel [symbolism and
aestheticism blended with realism and naturalism in a new compound form]

-Aestheticism (WITH Fitzgerald and Nabokov): deals with 1.) the Am. Dream
(F=corruption, N=always an illusion; and 2) with the contrast imagination-reality:
Fitz.=Gatsby lost the capacity of wonder; Nabokov=only the Europeans imagined the
dream. There is no dream.
-aestheticism is manifested in different forms: F. transformed the novel into a visualized
film script: locations, stars, costumes, scene to scene progress—integrity of fragments
(the glamour of Hollywood – in 1927 he became a script-writer in H.); N. aestheticism
linked to language:

Relation between FITZGERALD and NABOKOV through Lolita:

-born in 1896 and 1899, started publishing at about the same time,
-both juxtapose a moral and social story (action, plot) and a surface or manner or way of
telling the story that aestheticizes the events.
-both make of aestheticism a means of transforming the novel, but N. represents an exilic
identity and the transition to postmodernism, a later moment (died in 1977)
-Aestheticism : with both writers deals with 1.) the Am. Dream (F=corruption, N=always
an illusion, the contrast bet. the New and the Old worlds. Lolita is a comic myth, relation
bet. place and the heroine suggests that the dream existed only in the imagination of the
Europeans. Lolita was no longer a virgin); and 2) with the contrast imagination-reality:
 5

Fitz.=Gatsby lost the capacity of wonder; Nabokov=only the Europeans imagined the
dream. There is no dream.
-aestheticism is manifested in different forms: F. transformed the novel into a
visualized film script: locations, stars, costumes, scene to scene progress (the glamour of
Hollywood – in 1927 he became a script-writer in H.); N. aestheticism linked to
language: his novel is an alternative for the novel within a culture where film is the
dominant form of story-telling and entertainment (the novel is tied to extreme subjectivity
of memory)—a subjectivity never achieved in film—a camera looks objectively, records
perceptions
6