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Maddi Ward

Professor Fleming

English

5 February 2017

Flivvers, Flappers and Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald, more than of all the writers in the 1920s, epitomized the era in his

bestsellers by highlighting the ideal opulent romance that was so desired at this time. He sur-

rounded himself with the ritzy, glamorous lifestyle that his characters lived and used it as inspira-

tion for his books which drew his readers in continually. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life experiences

and love affairs parallel his Jazz Age novels through his use of the “golden girl”, his recurring

theme of the aspiration of idealism, and his projection of parts of his persona onto his fictional

male characters.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota to a middle-class family and moved to Buffalo,

New York at a very young age (Jacobs 379). He lived his first decade attending a private school,

but when his father lost his job, they were forced back to Minnesota to live with family. Fitzger-

ald was an avid reader throughout his entire life, but he began seriously honing in on his writing

skills while he was attending Princeton University (Jacobs 379). He started to neglect his school

work due to the time he was putting into his craft which resulted in being put on academic proba-

tion beginning in 1917. He then made the decision to drop out and join the Army. With World

War I erupting, Fitzgerald feared that his life would be taken before he could ever see the success

of his writing. While on a three-week leave, he decided write his first novel titled The Romantic

Egotist and submitted it for publishing at Charles Scribner’s Sons. Although it was rejected, the


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reviewer encouraged Fitzgerald to continue writing and bring them more of his work at a later

time (Jacobs 380). It was that small push that allowed him to continue his efforts in beginning

his career as a novelist.

Fitzgerald treasured love greatly. He had relations with a total of 16 women throughout

his life, but the final two were of utmost importance to him (Dyer 136). “Fitzgerald’s female

characters in his early stories… epitomized the Jazz Age. They were lively characters reminis-

cent of young and unattainable women in his life—Ginevra King, at first, then Zelda Sayre”

(Luong 1).

Genevra King was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s token “golden girl”. He took from his relation-

ships to build the characters of the women within his stories (Luong 2). Genevra acted as Zel-

da’s only rival in the sense of inspiration for Fitzgerald’s writing (Dyer 137). While Genevra

had an effortless beauty, Zelda was said to have fallen short of the beauty she always seemed like

she was supposed to have. Rebecca West once wrote about her saying that she was “inelegant”.

She was so rough around the edges that it made her endearing. Only pieces of her were beautiful;

“her ballet ambitions, her shiny hair, her life with Fitzgerald… It was broken up by the pores on

her face.” Zelda kept the ugly parts hidden, like the battles within her relationship and her men-

tal instability. She only showed what she thought was beautiful and Fitzgerald never found his

“golden girl” in his wife (Dyer 137).

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald took various pieces out of his life, himself, and the two

women who he found most important to construct the layered novel. He found a way to incorpo-

rate himself into each of the three main male characters, Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, and Tom

Buchanan. Nick acts as a representation of the man Fitzgerald used to be; he’s a puppet of sorts


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who has great ambitions, but he’s very timid and he doesn’t quite fit into the life that surrounds

him; he’s a guilty and tormented man with nothing to truly call his own, including a woman. Jay

Gatsby is the person Fitzgerald was at the time of writing the novel. He has worked very hard to

get to the point he is at and Jay enjoys the success, but he is still very new to the life he leads and

he is still fighting for the girl of his dreams and learning the downfalls of money, realizing it

cannot get you everything. Tom Buchanan serves his purpose in being what Fitzgerald had al-

ways longed to be. Being from old money, Tom never had to work to get what he had. His

money gave him the “golden girl” and a larger home and he was always regarded more highly

because of his reputation. A man like that always wins the girl in the end.

Furthermore, due to Fitzgerald’s injection of his reality into The Great Gatsby, Genevra

King and Zelda also make appearances in the novel. While the main story line between Jay Gats-

by and Daisy Buchanan was taken from Fitzgerald’s battle to get Zelda to marry him, he also

took his infatuation and desire for Genevra into account to form a mixture of his two favorite

love stories. Daisy’s looks are based on Genevra King’s beauty and so were lines such as “rich

girls don’t marry poor boys” (Fitzgerald 127) which was originally said by King’s father to the as

of yet unsuccessful Fitzgerald, but the premise of the struggle Jay Gatsby has to be with Daisy by

building his wealth over time stems from his fight to be Zelda Sayre’s husband. He worked

strenuously to write a novel that would sell big so that he wouldn’t lose Zelda like he did

Genevra. Fitzgerald revised The Romantic Egotist and changed the title to This Side of Paradise

to create his first bestselling novel and eventually marry Zelda Sayre (Dyer 136). Because

Genevra could never be attained, Fitzgerald’s only way of justification was to write of winning

her back. “He had invested a good deal of his feeling for the promises of life in her, and for


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Fitzgerald that kind of investment was always final” (Mizener, Dyer 138). In letters written be-

tween King and Fitzgerald, her words act as “Daisy’s original voice” (Dyer 137). Daisy was

Fitzgerald’s best way of obtaining his dream girl, Genevra, even if he could only do so with

words. He put every piece of his love and desire for her into this story where he says the words

he longed to say to her, but never could.

In contrast, in Tender is the Night, the love story is less of a blooming rekindling of ro-

mance and more of the deep and dying breath of one. The metamorphosis of Fitzgerald’s writing

could be blamed on the turning of the era, but it is also said to be due to the change of the girl he

uses as his inspiration and the difference in himself because of that. The novel’s main male

character, Dick Diver, is a successful, yet unhappy man who doesn’t want to live a life simply

basking in his own happiness. He sees his early success both financially and emotionally as

merely a detour leading him off the path of destiny (Dyer 137). When his wife in the novel,

Nicole, shows her true loathing for her husband, “there is nothing to endear him to anyone”

(Dyer 137). He longs for the beginning of a new love where his happiness can’t stand in his way

and he believes he needs to fail again before he can truly succeed in his mind. With the terrible

things Dick begins to do, “he [is] no longer terrible, only dehumanized” which relates directly

back to Fitzgerald at the time of writing this book (Fitzgerald 101). John O’Hara stated at one

point that “sooner or later his characters always come back to being Fitzgerald characters in a

Fitzgerald world… Dick diver ended up as a tall Fitzgerald.”

Moreover, due to Zelda’s mental illness, Fitzgerald had a very difficult time neglecting

his extravagant lifestyle while still maintaining his success and his thoughts on his wife altered

along with his life. When the couple in Tender is the Night meets, they’re in a refuge for the


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“broken, incomplete, and menacing.” (Dyer 137) This translates from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reali-

ty where he and Zelda connected on an imperfect level and they never saw each other as roman-

tically desirable, but more as an emotional refuge. With Zelda’s breakdown, the character writ-

ten after her also loses hope. In the novel, Nicole says “I am a woman and my business is to

hold things together. My business is to tear things apart.” (Fitzgerald 140) This contradictory

statement represents Fitzgerald’s thoughts on his wife. While he sees the woman as someone

who should sustain the family, he also notes that they can be the person to destroy it. Dick Diver

begins having an affair with Rosemary who is bright and new and what he says is “the only girl

[he’s] seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.” (Fitzgerald 143) The

difference between the two women within the novel is inspired by the different points in Zelda’s

health. Fitzgerald used Rosemary as a display of who Zelda was when their love flourished and

Nicole acts as the woman Zelda was at the time the novel was written.

After reading both novels and discovering the reality F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in, it be-

comes obvious that he never wrote about the perfections of his life, but rather the fantasies he

had of what would make them that way. He created the paradise that he couldn’t obtain on his

own. When Fitzgerald couldn’t find solace, his characters could and what Zelda couldn’t pro-

vide for him, his lovers in his novels did. He took his failing relationships in real life and turned

them into the glitzy and glamorous romances that were so sought after in the 1920s. Something

as trivial as meeting and falling in love with Genevra so young turned into the American dream,

mortality of romance, and the belief that he could be whatever he wanted to be with the story of

The Great Gatsby. An experience so terrible as Fitzgerald losing his wife to schizophrenia al-

lowed him to create a world where he could go back to his past and meet his wife all over again


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with youth still in her eyes. With F. Scott Fitzgerald’s use of his life and lovers within his novels

and the recurring theme of the aspiration of idealism, he epitomized the Jazz Age.


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Works Cited

Dyer, Geoff. “Rereading: Fitzgerald’s Afterglow.” American Scholar 70.2 (2001) : 136-142.

Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. New York City: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1933. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribners and Sons, 1925. Print.

Jacobs, Barry J. “Family Systems Medicine.” Families, Systems, & Health 17.3 (1999) :

379-382. Print.

Luong, Merry B. A Woman’s Touch in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night: Pulling the

Women Out of the Background. Diss. Georgia State University, 2010. Print.

Wexelblatt, Robert. “Tender is the Night and History.” Essays in Literature 17.90 : 232-241.

Print.