This Side of Paradise

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This Side of Paradise

Introduction
Author Biography
Plot Summary
Characters
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
Further Reading

F. Scott Fitzgerald
1920

Introduction

In the summer of 1919, after encouraging him to perform two revisions, Scribner's finally signed a contract with the unknown author F. Scott Fitzgerald to publish his first novel. Fitzgerald sold his first major short stories while waiting for the printing, but This Side of Paradise was his major debut, an immediate success that marked both the dawn of the Jazz Age and the dawn of Fitzgerald's turbulent career. An insider's satire of the American aristocracy and the social hierarchy of Ivy League universities, the novel turned Fitzgerald into a daring symbol for the Jazz Age, caused a sensation in the older generation, and inspired many in the younger generation to rush out and buy a copy.

The novel is much more than a sensation, however; it is a landmark in modernist fiction that challenged literary tradition and helped give a voice to a younger generation shocked by the horrors of World War I. An admittedly self-obsessed portrait of the "egotist" Amory Blaine and his intellectual development, Fitzgerald's novel is also a portrait of his own artistic development that led to his emergence as an author now considered perhaps the most important American modernist writer. Widely criticized as a haphazard collection of short stories that fail to cohere as a whole, This Side of Paradise does reveal some naivety in its young author, but its unique structure is also a vital part of what makes it a challenging and innovative text. In the early 2000s it was recognized as an enormously influential and compelling novel by an emerging legend of American literature.

Author Biography

Born in 1896 to an Irish Catholic family with connections to the American aristocracy, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald grew up in the elite schools of St. Paul, Minnesota. He was a favorite of his mother's and loyal to his father despite Edward Fitzgerald's series of business failures in upstate New York that brought the family back to St. Paul. In high school, Fitzgerald wrote his first short stories and developed an intense interest in drama, but his poor grades forced him to transfer to the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey. He continued to write fiction and participate in drama when he entered Princeton University in 1913, and his experience there was very important to his writing, although he never graduated because of poor grades and illness and because he joined the army when the United States entered World War I.

While he was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama in 1917, Fitzgerald met his future wife Zelda Sayre, with whom he had a long and volatile relationship (due in part to Zelda's mental illness). He also began working on the first edition of This Side of Paradise, which was published by Scribner's in 1920 and effectively launched his success as a fiction writer. Because of his and Zelda's lavish lifestyle in New York, supported chiefly by the numerous stories he sold to magazines, Fitzgerald became known as a symbol of the Jazz Age. The couple and their daughter Scottie then moved to Paris, where Fitzgerald wrote his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), and the family remained there for the rest of the decade.

After the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's relationship with his wife grew increasingly problematic, his friendship with the writer Ernest Hemingway turned sour, he developed a drinking problem, and he failed to make significant progress on a new novel, although he continued to publish short stories. The Fitzgeralds returned to the United States in 1931, where Zelda continued to be in and out of sanitariums. In 1934, Fitzgerald published Tender Is the Night, but the novel failed to produce the critical acclaim for which he was hoping, and his drinking problem grew more severe. Financial burdens and a desire for success caused Fitzgerald to pursue a career in Hollywood, and in 1937 he signed a contract with the production company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. While working as a screen-writer, Fitzgerald battled alcoholism and fell in love with film columnist Sheilah Graham. He died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, while working on his last, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon (1941).

Plot Summary

Book 1: The Romantic Egotist

The novel opens with a description of Amory Blaine's mother Beatrice and her exciting life of travel with her son Amory until his appendix bursts on a ship to Europe, and he is sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While in private school there, Armory kisses Myra St. Claire on the cheek and takes on various elitist values before Beatrice gives in to his request to go to a boarding school. After enrolling at the school, where he is unpopular because of his arrogance, Amory meets his friend and mentor Monsignor Darcy. Amory is more popular during his second year because he succeeds at football and as a writer for the school paper, and he decides to enroll at Princeton University.

At Princeton, Amory once again gradually becomes a social success by acting in plays and writing for the college newspaper, and he meets some of his most important friends, such as Kerry and Burne Holiday, and Tom D'Invilliers. He travels back to Minneapolis to meet his first love, Isabelle Borgé, at a "petting party" for upper class daughters, and they exchange long letters while Amory is at Princeton with his elitist group of friends.

Then, coming back from a night out in New York, Amory is shocked and dismayed to see his friend Dick Humbird die in a car accident.

When he next sees Isabelle at the prom, they quarrel and Amory leaves her, and this is followed by Amory's discovery that he has failed math and therefore will be expelled from the editorial board of the college paper. Amory's father then dies suddenly, but this does not affect Amory deeply, and it leaves him with an inheritance despite his father's somewhat ineffective investments. After returning to Princeton, Amory encounters a disturbing and devilish man with "queer feet" who terrifies him and from whom he flees through the streets of New York.

During Amory's final two years at Princeton, many of his peers, especially Burne Holiday, begin to challenge the social institutions and traditions of the college, but Amory does little himself. He falls in love with his third cousin, Clara Page, but this comes to nothing. Amory begins to be more interested in poetry at Princeton, but then the United States enters World War I and Amory enlists in the army. This is followed by the novel's "Interlude," which consists of a letter of advice to Amory from Monsignor Darcy and a letter to Tom from Amory with a plan to meet in New York after the war.

Book 2: The Education of a Personage

Book Two begins in the format of a play to introduce Rosalind Connage, the sister of Amory's Princeton friend Alec. Amory and Rosalind immediately fall in love and become consumed with each other, but their relationship is doomed because Amory is poor and without prospects, and Rosalind leaves him for the rich Dawson Ryder. Devastated, Amory falls into an alcoholic stupor, quits his job at a New York advertising agency, and dwindles his inheritance money. He does begin to write and read more, however, and he discusses philosophy and literature with his roommate Tom, but soon Tom must go home because his mother is ill, and they sell the apartment.

After narrowly missing Monsignor Darcy in Washington, Amory travels to Maryland to stay with an uncle, and while there he meets Eleanor Ramilly, an intelligent and passionate girl from an old Maryland family, with whom he begins a relationship. They discuss philosophy and literature, and they develop a bond that lasts long afterwards in the form of poems they send to each other, but Amory is still affected by his relationship with Rosalind, and he leaves Eleanor in a rather bitter mood. The next scene shifts to a party in Atlantic City, after which Amory wakes up in a hotel room he was supposed to be sharing with Alec Connage to discover that Alec has illicitly brought a girl back to the room and two house detectives are banging on the door to find them. Amory makes a "sacrifice" of himself in order to save Alec's reputation and then discovers in the paper that Rosalind has been married and Monsignor has suddenly died.

The last chapter of the novel describes the Amory's intellectual convictions during his attempt to walk from New York to Princeton. On the way, he is picked up by a "big man" who is revealed to be the father of his college friend Jesse Ferrenby, and with him and his companion Amory argues about socialism and the radicalism of his generation. Amory then leaves them and reflects on religion, philosophy, politics and literature, unsure about precisely what he believes or where exactly he should go with his life. As he exclaims in the last line of the book, "'I know myself,' he cried, 'but that is all—.'"

Characters

Mr. Barlow

Mr. Barlow is the president of the advertising company in whose office Amory rudely quits his job.

Mr. Barton

Mr. Barton, Amory's family lawyer, advises Amory about his inherited and mainly unprofitable property in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Media Adaptations

A book-on-tape of This Side of Paradise is available unabridged from Bookcassette Sales, 1997.

Amory Blaine

The main character of the novel in the process of becoming a "personage," Amory is chiefly characterized by his intense self-obsession and egotism. He changes markedly in the course of the plot, growing from a superficially clever and pretentious boy to a much more profound thinker, but his egotism remains his defining characteristic. His affairs with the four main young women of the novel, as well as his relationships with other adults and friends, are in many ways important to him only as they affect and influence his own development and desires.

Physically good-looking, but not conventionally so, and known for his "penetrating green eyes," Amory is very successful with young women and consistently manages to intrigue them. By the time of his relationship with Eleanor, however, Amory is not sure if he is able to love again after Rosalind affected him so deeply. Much of his taste for enigmatic and unobtainable women goes back to his unconventional relationship with his charming, indulgent, but often absent mother.

Like his other relationships, the young women in Amory's life represent the stages of his intellectual, artistic, and religious development, and they reflect that his own changing opinions and beliefs become more substantial as he reads more and explores himself more thoroughly. He retains something of an inability to persist in his endeavors, however, just as he remains an ambitious and romantic dreamer. Amory has become known as a Fitzgerald-type character, an elitist, ambitious, and daring youth of the Jazz Age based on the author himself.

Beatrice O'Hara Blaine

Amory's mother, with her "brilliant education," and the "exquisite delicacy of her features," is a beautiful woman from the American upper class. She is more of a companion to Amory than a mother, which is reinforced by the fact that he calls her by her first name. Nevertheless, she is extremely important to his development, babies him throughout his youth, and carefully arranges his education. With her brilliant charm, she is also a model for the elusive and intriguing women with whom Amory continually falls in love. A heavy drinker and socialite continually in danger of another nervous breakdown, Beatrice dies while Amory is in the army, leaving half of her possessions to the Catholic Church.

Stephen Blaine

Amory's father is an "ineffectual, inarticulate" man whom Amory does not know very well and who dies while Amory is at Princeton.

Isabelle Borgé

"Capable of very strong, if very transient, emotions," Isabelle is Amory's first love. He travels all the way to Minneapolis to see her at a "petting party," during which they flirt and begin a relationship of passionate letter writing until they fall out when she comes to the Princeton prom. Isabelle is something of an actress, and she fits in well with the vanity of Amory's pre-war Princeton period because she is quite vain herself. Nevertheless, she and Amory make an exciting pair during their relationship, and she enchants Amory as much as she infuriates him.

Phoebe Column

Phoebe is Fred Sloane's friend, and it is in her New York apartment that Amory has a severe fright due to the man with the queer feet.

Alec Connage

A "quiet, rather aloof slicker," Alec is Amory's friend from Princeton and Rosalind's brother. Amory's love for Rosalind puts a strain on his and Alec's relationship, as does the awkwardness after Amory takes the blame for Alec's having illicitly brought a young woman back to their hotel room.

Cecelia Connage

Cecelia is a sarcastic and "good-humored" girl who acts as a foil, or a character whose function is to reveal something about another character, for her sister Rosalind.

Mrs. Connage

Rosalind's mother Mrs. Connage keeps close tabs on her daughter and continually urges her to marry a rich gentleman.

Rosalind Connage

Amory's most important and intense love in the novel, Rosalind is an extremely striking character. Her long description shortly into the first chapter of "Book Two," beginning "Rosalind is—utterly Rosalind," emphasizes that all men fall in love with her except those that are afraid of her, claims that she is not spoiled despite her selfishness, and states that "all criticism of Rosalind ends in her beauty." She is spontaneous and intriguing, and her treatment of men in some ways represents a new type of liberated woman, since, she explains, she toys with men and leaves them as male lovers always used to do their female partners in the past.

Because of this pattern, Rosalind very frequently devastates men by leaving them, and there is much foreshadowing to her abandonment of Amory for the rich Dawson Ryder. Nevertheless, Rosalind seems entirely absorbed with Amory, as he is with her, during their brief and intense romance.

She seems to agonize over her decision to leave Amory because he is too poor, although there is the suggestion that she does not suffer from it later as he does.

Thomas Park D'Invilliers

Tom is a Princeton friend with whom Amory begins a friendship because of their mutual interest in poetry. They remain friends and confidants after the war, and they live together in New York, where Tom has a job as a reviewer. When Tom grows tired of Princeton, he becomes more cynical, and while they are living in New York, Tom is frustrated by what he sees as a dishonest and incompetent literary community. Amory sees him as "a blighted Shelley, changing, shifting, clever, unscrupulous," who represents "the critical consciousness of the race."

Monsignor Thayer Darcy

Monsignor Darcy, an influential and successful priest in the Catholic hierarchy, is Amory's confidant and father figure. He was Beatrice's passionate lover in his youthful romantic days, but when she abandoned him for the rich Stephen Blaine, Monsignor began his career in the priesthood. Because of his charm and ability to be adored by everyone, Father Darcy earns the title "Monsignor," which is a general term of influence in the Catholic Church, and tells Amory before his sudden death towards the end of the novel that he will soon become a cardinal. Monsignor exerts a great influence over Amory, and they are very close because of their many similarities, including their elitism and their taste in philosophy and literature.

Jesse Ferrenby

Part of Amory's Princeton group, Jesse eventually gets a place at the "Princetonian," the college's daily newspaper. He dies in World War I.

Mr. Ferrenby

Known as "the big man with goggles" until his identity as Jesse's father is revealed, Mr. Ferrenby is the impressive capitalist who gives Amory a ride in his car and argues with him about socialism.

Howard Gillespie

Howard is the unhappy young man of whom Rosalind has recently become tired when she meets Amory.

Thornton Hancock

The Honorable Thornton Hancock is a historian, advisor to famous politicians, and rich intellectual from an aristocratic Bostonian family. Amory meets him because of his friendship with Monsignor Darcy and afterwards considers that he is an example of an admirable atheist.

Burne Holiday

Burne is the chairman of the "Princetonian" and a social success at Princeton until he begins to radically challenge the social hierarchy. Although Burne is busy trying out for the "Princetonian" during their first year and Amory does not get to know him until later, Amory grows to admire his enthusiasm, stubbornness, and "earnestness." Flirting with ideas of socialism and pacifism, some of Burne's ideas are muddled, but he thinks seriously about intellectual issues in a way that inspires Amory's own development. Burne comes out as a pacifist during World War I and leaves Princeton, disappearing from the novel, although Amory speculates that he could have ended up in jail.

Kerry Holiday

Amory's first friend at Princeton and Burne's dark-haired older brother, Kerry is "the mentor of the house" and an elitist such as Amory. He becomes close with Amory by planning their social rise at Princeton, and they remain friends until Kerry leaves college to enroll in the war, in which he dies. Kerry's easygoing and charming personality makes him, with Alec Connage, the "life" of their Princeton social group, and Amory likes nearly everything about him, including his snobbishness.

Dick Humbird

Dick is Amory's "quiet" friend from Princeton, who admires him as the "perfect type of aristocrat." Amory is deeply shocked by Dick's death in a car accident, and his face comes back to haunt Amory while he is running from the man with the queer feet.

Mrs. Lawrence

"A type of Rome-haunting American" who is intelligent and dignified, Mrs. Lawrence is a friend and devotee of Monsignor Darcy.

The Little Man

"The little man" who offers Amory a ride is the assistant to Mr. Ferrenby. Amory insults him and uses him as an example of ignorance in his argument about socialism.

The Man with the Queer Feet

While at a club in New York, Amory has a strange and "inexpressibly terrible" experience with a middle-aged man in a brown suit who may represent the devil. Amory has a vision of the man in Phoebe's flat that frightens him and seems to chase him through the streets, and he remembers long afterwards the "wrongness" of the man's strange pointed shoes that curl up at the end.

Mr. Margotson

The senior master at St. Regis preparatory school, Mr. Margotson attempts to advise Amory about why the other boys dislike him, but Amory walks out of his office in a fury.

Axia Marlowe

Phoebe Column's friend, Axia chats and flirts with Amory until he runs away, frightened of the man with the queer feet, from Phoebe's apartment in New York.

Clara Page

Clara is Amory's third cousin, with whom he falls in love. She is a poor widow with two children and has led a "hurried life," but she is nevertheless charming and delightful, and everyone treats her with respect. Because of the vast "goodness" that he sees in her, and her ability to bring out a different side of his narcissistic personality, Amory proposes marriage to her. Clara brushes this off, however, and they lose touch with each other at the beginning of the war.

Frog Parker

"Froggy" is Amory's closest friend during his years of private school in Minneapolis.

Rahill

The "president of the sixth form" at St. Regis, Rahill becomes a friend and "co-philosopher" of Amory's during his second year.

Eleanor Ramilly

Eleanor is Amory's final love in the course of the novel, and she is associated with wildness and nature. From a very old Maryland family, Eleanor was brought up in France and is an extremely intelligent and well-read person who is intellectually challenging to Amory. She describes herself as a "romantic little materialist," and has an inclination towards paganism in thought and literature. Although her appearance is unclear at first, she is eighteen years old and beautiful, with pale skin and green eyes. She and Amory later write poems to each other, but their relationship ends when Amory leaves Maryland.

Dawson Ryder

The rich young man that eventually marries Rosalind, Dawson is a reliable choice, and Amory has to agree that he is "a good man and a strong one." Rosalind is never in love with him, however.

Fred Sloane

Sloane is part of Amory's group of Princeton friends. He has a "happy personality," likes to drink alcohol, and is the pitcher for the baseball team.

Myra St. Claire

Myra, a girl Amory meets while he is living with his aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, give Amory his chance for his first kiss. Myra is slightly spoiled and becomes upset when Amory refuses to kiss her more than once while they are alone at her "bobbing party."

Phyllis Styles

Phyllis Styles is the socialite that Burne Holiday embarrasses very awkwardly at a Harvard-Princeton football game.

Jill Wayne

Jill, in whom Amory sees the evil of "pride and sensuality," is the young woman who Alec illicitly brings back to a hotel in Atlantic City.

Sally Weatherby

Sally is Amory's acquaintance from private school in Minneapolis, and she sets him up with Isabelle.

Themes

Generational Conflict

Although Fitzgerald's novel may seem less shocking now, it created a sensation when it was published because of its representation of a younger generation that perceived itself as departing entirely from the tradition of the generations before it. Amory's vanity and egotism, his flirtatious affairs with young women, his startling ideas (such as about socialism), and his vague contempt for nineteenth-century tradition all struck a chord with a generation that blamed their parents, for example, for the horrors of World War I.

This generational conflict was a key motivation for the modernist literary movement in the United States. In This Side of Paradise, the intellectual and aesthetic aspects of the conflict are first revealed by Burne Holiday, who inspires many of Amory's own convictions against nineteenth-century tradition. And Amory's meditations and convictions in "The Egotist Becomes a Personage," although many critics have noted that they are not necessarily well informed or even coherent, are nevertheless something of an intellectual manifesto for his generation. As Amory says while he is arguing with Mr. Ferrenby about socialism, "I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation." While his specific intellectual theories are unclear, and, for example, Amory does nothing but dabble without conviction in socialism, this wavering is consistent with Amory's previous statement: "I'm in love with change and I've killed my conscience."

Such a demand for progress away from the previous generation without a clear view about the direction that this progress should take led to criticism of the novel such as that of Edmund Wilson in his essay, "F. Scott Fitzgerald": "In short, one of the chief weaknesses of This Side of Paradise is that it is really not about anything: its intellectual and moral content amounts to little more than a gesture—a gesture of indefinite revolt." Whether this revolt was "indefinite," however, it moved and excited many readers, and was key in defining Fitzgerald as a spokesperson for his generation.

Topics For Further Study

This Side of Paradise includes a number of poems by Amory and other characters, such as Eleanor. Reread these poems and discuss their style and themes. What role do they play in the novel, and what is their relationship to Amory's intellectual development? What do you think of the poems? Why do you think Fitzgerald includes them? How do they go about expressing themes such as traditionalism, radicalism, paganism, or other themes that you can see in them? Is their style similar to that of the novel itself? Are they modernist poems? Explain why or why not.
Fitzgerald's personal life has long fascinated critics. Read Arthur Mizener's biographical work The Far Side of Paradise (1951) or another biography of Fitzgerald paying particular attention to his life before 1920, and discuss how what you have read affects your understanding of This Side of Paradise. How are the personalities and experiences in Fitzgerald's life directly or indirectly included in his first novel? Discuss why you think Fitzgerald used certain events from his life in the novel, and how you think critics should treat knowledge of an author's life when they are discussing his or her writings.
Amory is characterized as a self-absorbed egotist in the novel. Do you think this is an undesirable trait? What are its positive aspects? By the end of the novel, does Amory think it is undesirable? Does Fitzgerald? Do you think Amory's personality will change? Why do you think Fitzgerald wrote a book about such a character? How is egotism important to the novel's place in literary history?
Two of the most important scenes in This Side of Paradise are written in the format of a play. Find a cast of characters and act out these scenes. Afterwards, discuss how this experience adds to your understanding of the novel, as well as how these scenes affect the rest of the book. Why you think Fitzgerald chose to use the dramatic form? Is it a success, and does it work well in the book? Why or why not?

Egotism

Amory's vanity and narcissism is more than a character trait; it is an emblem of the theme of "egotism" that pervades Fitzgerald's novel. When Amory says that he is an egotist, he does not simply mean that he is self-absorbed; he is revealing an essential philosophical trait of the novel, which is that the self is all-important. He best expresses this idea in the final chapter of the novel, "The Egotist Becomes a Personage," with statements such as, "This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part." Like many people in his generation feeling cut off from tradition and drastically changed after World War I, Amory comes to think that his self is, in a sense, all that he has.

This idea, which is common in other important modernist texts (such as Ezra Pound's famous magazine, the Egoist), is influenced by Freudian psychology, by the modernist generation's dis-avowal of past traditions, and by the individualism that was important to many writers of the time. Often, however, Fitzgerald is also critical and satirical of Amory's egotism, and he certainly mocks its more superficial form of vanity, a trait that characterizes Amory's youth as well as his first love, Isabelle. The egotism and snobbishness of many aristocrats in the novel is also something that Fitzgerald alternatively ridicules and admires. By the end of the novel, it is not necessarily clear whether Amory fully embraces egotism, although he does seem to recognize its valuable artistic and intellectual aspects.

Elitism and the American Aristocracy

Throughout This Side of Paradise, Amory encounters social hierarchies, aristocratic families, elitist standards of behavior, and vast amounts of wealth that allow a unique insight into the American upper class in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Since Amory is an elitist himself, he is continually coming into contact with the institutions and practices of upper class families such as the Connages, and upper class institutions such as Princeton University. Fitzgerald offers a thorough satire of the vanity and hypocrisy of the aristocracy (such as when Rosalind rejects Amory for a wealthy husband) at the same time as he suggests its enormous allure in the form of Beatrice, Monsignor Darcy, and Rosalind, despite their faults. His satire of the "petting party," in which young upper class girls kiss and make promises to a variety of men, was particularly shocking to the aristocracy, as was his ridicule of various Princeton clubs and elitist hierarchies.

Style

Dramatic, Poetic, and Epistolary Forms

This Side of Paradise is largely told by an omniscient or all-knowing, third person narrator, but many sections employ a variety of different and unique forms, from poems and songs, to lists, to letters and short notes, to the dramatic form or play that is used to portray the beginning and the end of Amory's relationship with Rosalind. These unconventional methods use a distinct style of text and layout, and they vary according to the situation that Fitzgerald is attempting to express. They are important for two reasons. First, they highlight the unsuitability of a more typical, straightforward narrative in a novel for the new generation of modernist authors; the dramatic form in particular is an innovative approach. And, second, they provide a reading experience that is slightly jarring and that inspires the reader to imagine the events and characters in a fuller, more evocative way.

Self-Conscious Narration

A predominant feature of Fitzgerald's style is the narrative voice's own insistent self-consciousness. One of the clearest examples of Fitzgerald's tendency to call attention to his own methods takes place in the "Young Irony" chapter of Book Two, after the narrator begins his story of Amory and Eleanor by describing how they remembered the affair afterwards. When he breaks off this description and states, "I see I am starting wrong. Let me begin again," the narrator surprises the readers greatly and makes them wonder why this false start has been included, if it really is "wrong."

Fitzgerald's showy style, including many of his romantic, elaborate descriptions and numerous epigrams, or brief witty sayings, is another method of drawing attention to himself as an author. Like Amory, the narrative voice often appears vain and superficially charming, and it is in this way that Fitzgerald presents himself as a daring, debut writer. In fact, this technique is part of the reason that such a large critical emphasis on This Side of Paradise has historically been placed on Fitzgerald's personal life. Most of the characters have some equivalent or near equivalent in real life: Amory is strikingly similar to Fitzgerald; most of Amory's Princeton friends are based on some of Fitzgerald's Princeton friends; Isabelle and Rosalind are both based, in part, on Fitzgerald's college obsession Ginevra King (although Rosalind also has much in common with Fitzgerald's wife Zelda); and Monsignor Darcy is based on Fitzgerald's friend, Father Sigourney Fay, to whom the novel is dedicated. All of these likenesses add to the intrigue of the novel, and the technique of self-consciousness is an important aspect of the period's aesthetic innovations.

Historical Context

World War I

With tensions running very high between the major European powers, the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife in Belgrade sparked the beginning of World War I. Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire formed the Central Alliance against Great Britain, France, Russia, and later many other countries, waging a devastating war on a number of fronts. The United States remained neutral for much of the war, but anti-German sentiment increased when passenger and commercial ships with American interests began to be attacked and sunk, and when Great Britain produced a decoded telegram from the German foreign minister promising Mexico control of areas of the United States if it entered the war on the side of the Central Powers.

President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany in April of 1917, and the American assistance on the Western front helped to overwhelm the Central Powers despite the Russian withdrawal from the war in the spring of 1918. By November of the same year, the Central Powers had been defeated, and in January Wilson delivered his idealistic "Fourteen Points" statement about international conflict resolution. Instead of adhering to Wilson's ideas, however, the embittered Allied Powers signed punitive treaties with Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire by 1919 that left these countries divided and in severe debt. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles also set up the League of Nations, a body intended to resolve international disputes, but opposition in the United States Senate blocked American entry into the organization.

Compare & Contrast

1920: Many young soldiers have come home to the United States from a devastating war abroad to a mood of increasing isolationism and a desire to enjoy a prosperous economy.
Today: American soldiers remain in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the United States military remains engaged in international initiatives, although they are nowhere near the scale of World War I.
1920: The younger generation in the United States shocks parents with kissing and flirting that was very liberal for the time, as displayed in Fitzgerald's novel.
Today: Although the United States has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the western industrialized world and teenagers in the early 2000s might not find the romance in This Side of Paradise very shocking, younger generations are probably not any more sexually liberal than their parents were at their age.
1920: Private Ivy League universities such as Princeton are elitist institutions dominated by and populated with the upper class.
Today: Financial aid and diversity initiatives have made Ivy League colleges somewhat more accessible to high-achieving lower and middle class students.
1920: Women make up one-fourth of the workforce (a dramatic increase from before World War I) and begin to vote for the first time.
Today: Women make up nearly half of the workforce and show an increasing presence in managerial and professional positions.

The Dawn of the Jazz Age

In the years following World War I, the United States was beginning to enjoy the optimism and economic boom characteristic of the 1920s. Mass-produced goods and household technology were becoming available, and people were investing in the prosperous stock market. In the final period before the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting alcohol took effect in early 1920, jazz music was popular and the social scene was notoriously flamboyant, particularly in large cities like New York. The beginning of the Jazz Age was also an important period for women's rights: women were increasingly involved in the social scene; they had a much larger presence in the workforce; and the Nineteenth Amendment, enacted in August of 1920, gave women the right to vote.

American Modernism

The literary movement of modernism is generally considered to have coincided with World War I, an event that caused many assumptions about the world to change drastically. Writers and artists across the western world, feeling that they could no longer express themselves in old forms, responded with experimental techniques that borrowed from a variety of other movements, most notably post-impressionism, which dealt with a simplification of form in the visual arts, and naturalism, which tended to present a deterministic universe that involved a brutal struggle for survival.

Modernism is most commonly associated with Europe, and the nucleus of modernist writers lived in Paris, where Fitzgerald later moved, and with the Bloomsbury group living in London. Perhaps the most influential modernist writer was James Joyce, an Irish author who became known for his efforts to deal with a multiplicity of viewpoints that lead to an "epiphany," or sudden moment of truth and understanding, as well as his later use of the stream-of-consciousness style. There was also, however, a group of American modernist writers, including Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, from the "lost generation" of an age to fight in World War I. Although many of them lived in Paris at some point, these writers often approached the literary movement by dealing with American social and political themes and did not necessarily identify with European modernism.

A specifically American modernist identity is noticeable in This Side of Paradise, for example, when Amory mentions that he did not take to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In fact, Amory tends to group all European authors into one and deny them all, from the patriotic English poet of World War I, Rupert Brooke, to the traditionalist English writer H. G. Wells, to the visionary Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, who was known for being profoundly at odds with his age. Although it is not at all clear that Fitzgerald is actually interested in disavowing all of European tradition, his first novel does reveal a desire to be uniquely new and to develop a distinctly American literary identity.

Critical Overview

Although it took two years of revision before Fitzgerald finally obtained a publishing contract for his first novel, This Side of Paradise was an immediate critical and popular success. As the anonymous article, "With College Men" in the New York Times Book Review of May 9, 1920, read, "The glorious spirit of abounding youth glows throughout this fascinating tale," and most reviews were similarly enthusiastic. Heywood Broun's April 11, 1920, review in the New York Tribune found the novel little more than a "self-conscious … stunt," but almost all other critics acknowledged Fitzgerald's great promise as a writer.

The novel briefly topped bestseller lists, and it was particularly popular among the young generation and in colleges. But Fitzgerald's success as a short story writer and the intrigue about his personal life were equally responsible for the subsequent success that earned him a reputation as an icon of the "lost generation." Critical opinion of Fitzgerald fluctuated when his next novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, was largely received as a disappointment and when The Great Gatsby was more successful in 1925. However, the author, and his first novel, generally remained in vogue with the public and the literary community until Fitzgerald's rapid decline in reputation and subsequent bout of alcoholism that began with the tepid reception of Tender Is the Night in 1934. From this point until Fitzgerald's death, This Side of Paradise sold few copies and was largely ignored by critics.

The revival of interest in Fitzgerald began to blossom after 1951, when Arthur Mizener's analytical biography of the writer attracted attention to him and his wife Zelda. From this point onward, Fitzgerald's works were incorporated into the canon of American literature to the point that he was as of the early 2000s viewed as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century. This Side of Paradise was perhaps less highly esteemed than The Great Gatsby or Tender Is the Night, and critics tended to find it slightly naive and less a novel than a collection of short stories. It was nevertheless viewed as a landmark achievement of the Jazz Age by the ambitious young modernist writer, however, and critics continued to write about the novel from nearly all analytical perspectives.

CRITICISM

Scott Trudell

Trudell is a freelance writer with a bachelor's degree in English literature. In the following essay, Trudell discusses the significance of Monsignor Darcy and the theme of religion and tradition in This Side of Paradise.

Sigourney Fay, the person to whom Fitzgerald's novel is dedicated, was a brilliant priest whom Fitzgerald met while he was in preparatory school in New Jersey, and with whom he remained close friends until Father Fay's sudden death in 1919. Fay is, of course, the basis for the character Monsignor Darcy, and although the purpose of this essay is not to speculate about the particulars of Fitzgerald's real life and their impact on This Side of Paradise, it is worth noting that Fay made an extraordinary impression on Fitzgerald. Their discussions greatly affected the author's intellectual and artistic development, and Fay's premature death assumed a unique significance in Fitzgerald's symbolic world.

Monsignor Darcy's death, on the other hand, is not in any way premature or untimely. It is exactly in line with Amory's development and, coming as it does in the lines immediately preceding the novel's last chapter, "The Egotist Becomes a Personage," it allows Amory to complete what the novel terms his "education." Monsignor is Amory's father figure throughout the novel; while Mr. Blaine does not so much as make an appearance, Monsignor is introduced in the first chapter as Beatrice's true passionate lover, and Amory's mother predicts: "Amory will go to him one day, I know." With Monsignor's death, which represents, in symbolic terms, the death of the father, Amory's religious faith dies as well, and he is finally able to contemplate artistic and intellectual ideas outside the European tradition.

Amory and Monsignor get along immediately when they meet during Amory's first year at St. Regis and discover an intense affinity with each other. Their relationship remains close enough for Monsignor to constantly compare their similarities and even write that he considers Amory the "reincarnation" of himself. Monsignor's description of a recurring dream of his in a letter to Amory during the novel's "Interlude" is particularly enlightening on this subject:

I've enjoyed imagining that you were my son, that perhaps when I was young I went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I came to, had no recollection of it … it's the paternal instinct, Amory—celibacy goes deeper than the flesh…. Sometimes I think that the explanation of our deep resemblance is some common ancestor.

Not only does this dream reinforce Monsignor's significance as Amory's father figure; it helps to establish the idea that Amory's deep connection to Monsignor has been passed down from an ancient tradition of spiritual, intellectual, and artistic ideas. Like many of Amory's relationships, Monsignor is chiefly important because of what he represents about Amory and Amory's relationship with the ancient European literary, cultural, and religious tradition. Although Amory is still fairly ignorant of literature when he arrives at Princeton (he does not know who Oscar Wilde is, for example), his interest in "English and history" sparks at about the same time he meets Monsignor, and from then on the priest serves as the cultural and intellectual mentor that Amory never finds among the faculty at Princeton. Monsignor advises him on what to read, whom to idealize ("some such man as Leonardo da Vinci," for example), and which philosophies to follow.

There is, however, a growing sense that Monsignor and Amory's ideological connection is breaking apart. Monsignor's letter in the "Interlude," while Amory is in the army, is the first and perhaps most important signal of this break. Beginning by pointing out that, "you will never again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew," Monsignor then highlights the widening gulf between their generations: "your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine ever grew," and the letter ends with the mysterious thought: "curiously alike we are… curiously unlike." In his last letter to Amory, Monsignor stresses that Amory's last letter was "not a bit like yourself," and it includes the statement, "Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman," which refers to Rosalind but is ironic because it could be applied to Monsignor as well. Then, after Monsignor's death, Amory appears to renounce the priest's religion and moral system, counting instead on a newly discovered philosophy of reliance on the self and one's inner convictions.

In this egotistical break from tradition, Amory goes so far as to declare that the books of previous generation were all lies, and it is in ideas like these that the widening difference between him and Monsignor becomes clear. A "reincarnation" of a figure like Monsignor in Amory's generation will not, it seems, have a very similar life to the priest at all, and this is in fitting with the new artistic movement's radical goals and convictions. During the penultimate scene of the novel, when Amory finds himself in a cemetery at "the golden beauty of four," Fitzgerald reminds the reader of Monsignor's description of giving out "the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M." when he first introduces Amory to the idea of "personage." Unlike a personage of Monsignor Darcy's generation, when the egotist of Amory's age becomes a personage, it is by disavowing the generations that came before.

In addition to its generational significance, Monsignor and Amory's relationship is a metaphor for the relationship between Europe and the United States before and after World War I. American modernist writers such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway were part of the generation involved in a bloody and devastating war in Europe that, many felt, was the culmination of all that was wrong with the European tradition. The war destroyed thousands of American soldiers; it contributed to many in Amory's generation believing the "Gods dead"; and it was a significant factor in the death of the transatlantic cultural elite. Introduced as "rather like an exiled Stuart king" and a "Turner sunset," which refers to the popular nineteenth-century English painter J. M. W. Turner, Monsignor's identity as an American with firm European roots is what leads to the necessity of his death in a novel that envisions the collapse of this tradition.

The great shock of World War I led many young readers to sympathize fully with Fitzgerald's metaphor for this political break. But Fitzgerald envisioned something even more extensive than a break with Europe's politics and literary tradition; he very purposefully uses the image of a Catholic priest to represent the separation and, therefore, firmly connects it to a rejection of this faith. Indeed, the author's agenda is much more radical than the satire and frankness about upper class America that offended many readers, because he is rejecting the very basis of Christian faith and replacing it with a boundless egotism like Amory has. The last chapter of the novel makes this atheism explicit with certain phrases, such as "There was no God in his heart," and the stark newness and deep conviction of Amory's break from the past should make the reader doubt that this atheism is simply a temporary phase.

The chapter "The Supercilious Sacrifice," at the end of which Amory learns of Monsignor's death, is the key evidence of the central importance of atheism to the intellectual content of the novel. Amory's sacrifice by implicating himself with Jill, which he believes to be divinely inspired and later recognizes, in the form of something "featureless and indistinguishable" among the curtains, to be connected to Monsignor, is a religious sacrifice. However, it is not a selfless sacrifice as in the traditional Christian understanding; in fact, it is "supercilious," or disdainful and self-important, because Alec will "secretly hate [Amory] for having done so much for him," and because it is essentially a selfish endeavor. This is reinforced by the fact that the quotation that inspires Amory's action is an incorrect version of Luke 23:28, in which Jesus says, "weep not for me, but for yourselves, and for your children," and the fact that Amory leaves out the "for yourselves" in his version suggests that he misunderstands the place of the self in the sacrifice.

The point of Amory's selfish sacrifice, which is inspired by a religious impulse but turns out to be useless and misdirected, is that it results in the subheading, "The Collapse of Several Pillars." The last of these pillars is Monsignor Darcy and, with him, the pillar of religion in Amory's intellectual and moral life. As Fitzgerald goes on to discuss more overtly in the form of Amory's thoughts and conclusions in "The Egotist Becomes a Personage," as far as the modernist egoist is concerned, religion has no place in the philosophy of the younger American generation.

In his 1952 essay, "F. Scott Fitzgerald," Edmund Wilson famously describes This Side of Paradise as "a gesture of indefinite revolt," and this is true in the sense that the philosophical system offered as an alternative to the tradition represented by Monsignor is inconsistent and even incoherent. As Wilson points out, Fitzgerald's literary references are often uninformed, and many of Amory's intellectual conclusions have little substance. But the novel nevertheless has tremendous intellectual importance because its "gesture" is distinctly away from the European literary, political, and moral tradition. And one of the most important aspects of this revolt that is definite and substantial is its call for the modernist generation to turn away from religion.

Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on This Side of Paradise, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Barry Gross

In the following essay, Gross argues that, despite critical contention to the contrary, there is intent, unity, and force in This Side of Paradise if the novel is read as a bildungsroman.

Considered opinion of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel has not changed much since 1924 when Edmund Wilson labelled it "a phantasmagoria of incident which had no dominating intention to endow it with unity and force, … really not about anything: intellectually it amounts to little more than a gesture—a gesture of indefinite revolt." Those critics who discuss the book at all verify Wilson's judgment; if the novel is at all significant, that significance lies in its stylistic place in the Fitzgerald canon or in its historic place in the Fitzgerald canon or in its historic place in the literary twenties. But This Side of Paradise does have unity and force, and it is about something. It is about what Fitzgerald's novels are always about: the realization that "life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and … the redeeming things are not 'happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle." If the dominating intention is not as clear in This Side of Paradise as it is in The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, that is because this first novel, for all of its attempted unconventionalities, is a traditional bildungsroman. Amory Blaine does not begin to appreciate the redeeming things or understand what he should struggle for until the end of the novel. And it takes him that long because, unlike Gatsby, he is not immediately one of the free dispossessed; he inherits a system that seems to him attractive and viable. Amory and the novel move from spiritual marriage to that system to spiritual divorce, from instinctive questioning of it to total rejection, from a casual to a deliberate and necessary search for an alternative.

What Do I Read Next?

Fitzgerald's most famous novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), is the story of the rise and fall of Jay Gatsby together with the boredom, seduction, and moral irresponsibility of the American aristocracy.
Algernon Charles Swinburne's Selected Poems (1987), edited by L. M. Findlay, is an excellent introduction to the nineteenth-century visionary poet who refused to be categorized into his time.
Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (1964) is a compelling autobiographical account of the expatriate modernist writing community living in Paris in the 1920s, and it includes stories of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda during their time in Europe.
The Time Machine (1895), by H. G. Wells, is a science fiction novel about an inventor who claims to have traveled to the distant future to learn in what direction nineteenth-century ideas are taking humankind, and its political and social commentary influenced Fitzgerald.
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) is a brilliant modernist novel that, like This Side of Paradise, is divided into two parts in order to dramatize the political, social, and artistic break from the past that followed World War I.

At Princeton he acquires a distaste for the social system based on "the bogey 'Big Man'" and on "artificial distinctions made by the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and to keep out the almost strong." By the end of the novel, the "bogey 'Big Man'" has evolved into "the big man with the goggles" who gives Amory a lift to Princeton. The huge hedge and tall iron fence behind which Ferrenby lives are the barriers the socially strong erect for self-preservation. He represents "those who by inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the moneyed class," the class to which Amory originally belonged. For Amory, he is also a symbolic father: Ferrenby's son, a classmate of Amory's killed in the war, "had borne off the crown that [Amory] had aspired to" at Princeton. Ferrenby's invitation for lunch behind the huge hedge and iron fence is an offer to Amory of another crack at that crown, now the crown of class succession. But Amory knows this world has nothing to offer him; he tells Ferrenby he has got to get on.

He has to get on to Princeton. Although the university first attracted him because of its bright atmosphere and reputation for easy living, it is now a shrine to which Amory makes solemn pilgrimage. He wants to see if, in a world in which "all gods [are] dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken," anything remains. He finds that something does:

as an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride.

The chosen youth cannot know that the world is muddled, unchastened, a turmoil because it has taken Amory the whole of This Side of Paradise to learn that this is, as Lionel Trilling terms it, "the condition, the field of tragedy" against which he must order his life.

Amory suspects that the world is a turmoil long before he knows that it is. He makes lists of all sorts of things in order "to get something definite." Fitzgerald was only half kidding when he referred to This Side of Paradise as "A Romance and a Reading List": there is a reading list for each stage of Amory's development, and there are lists of what interests him at twelve, of the contents of a trunk, of Eastern prep schools, of Princeton buildings and clubs. The same impulse to get something definite prompts his repeated attempts to classify himself. At thirteen he formulates "a code to live by," about as profound as any thirteen-year-old's "philosophy" is likely to be. His premature summations of himself—Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis plus St. Regis plus Princeton etcetera—are tedious, ludicrous. But the impulse is more important than the act, the need to create such formulation is more significant than the formulations. He is searching for order. It can be said of Amory's lists and classifications what Tom Burnam says of Jimmy Gatz's schedule and resolves: they represent "the boyish effort to reduce the world to terms in the Chaucerian sense of 'boundaries,'" to impose "on the haphazard circumstances of life a purpose and a discipline."

The most significant classification is the "personality-personage" formulated by Darcy:

Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I've seen it vanish in a long sickness. 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. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, … but he uses them with a cold mentality back of them.

In itself, this is not very meaningful. But later, "personality" will evolve into the "spiritually married man" and "personage" into the "spiritually unmarried." Amory does not realize the implications of the personality-personage distinction because, at this point, he does not have to. The spiritually married-spiritually unmarried distinction, however, will be the product of a painful passage through disillusionment and of a deliberate and necessary search for meaning.

Also foreshadowed early in the novel is Amory's later conclusion that the problem of evil has to do with the problem of sex, that evil is inseparably linked with beauty because both beauty and sex have "too many associations with license and indulgence." License and indulgence become synonymous with evil, and their contraries—order, restraint, purposefulness—with good. Darcy correctly perceives that Amory is prudish about sex not because of convention but because he fears he "would run amuck." Concerning this problem of evil, Kenneth Eble maintains that Amory's "awareness is not directed toward recognizing an abstract evil but toward understanding the distinctions which mark one man, one portion of society, off from another. His knowing of self is not an appreciation of his or mankind's metaphysical nature but of his social nature." But on the contrary, Amory discovers a significant relationship between man's metaphysical and social natures. He begins to gain this understanding in "the Devil scene," which Eble must dismiss as "padding," as "neither very relevant to the novel nor of great importance in itself." True, Amory never succeeds in giving this experience an appropriate value, but Fitzgerald does give it one.

The Devil scene takes place in New York, where, as Nick Carraway is to say, anything can happen. Amory has come to the city from Princeton for a night on the town with a friend and two girls, Axia and Phoebe. They spend the evening drinking in a crowded, noisy club. Amid this chaos, Amory sees a man whose strange appearance disturbs him. The quartet then goes to Axia's apartment, and it is here that beauty and sex are linked inseparably with license and indulgence. At the precise moment "temptation crept over him like a warm wind, and his imagination turned to fire," Amory sees, right before him, the man he saw in the club. This "devil," then, prevents Amory from starting what he might not be able to stop. He flees the apartment, but "the footsteps were not behind, had never been behind, they were ahead and he was not eluding but following." In short, Amory is in danger of "going to the Devil," literally and figuratively. By an act of will, he resists the meeting, but not before he sees that "the Devil's" face is Dick Humbird's.

Ever since freshman year, [Dick Humbird] seemed to Amory a perfect type of aristocrat…. Everythinghe said sounded intangibly right. He possessed infinite courage, an averagely good mind, a sense of humor with a clear charm and noblesse oblige that varied it from righteousness…. People dressed likehim, tried to talk as he did…. He seemed the eternal example of what the upper class tries to be.

He is also the example of what Amory tries to be throughout the first hundred pages, an ideal he has pursued as he now pursues the Devil down a dark New York street. But Dick is a false ideal; his infinite courage is fatal recklessness. Far from being eternal, he kills himself in a car crash on his way back to Princeton from a New York party at which he had drunk too much, a party not unlike the one Amory has just fled.

No wonder Amory fails to assign the experience an appropriate value. He is too close to this complex of beauty and sex, license and indulgence, aristocracy and death, to see the pattern in it. But there is a pattern: beauty and sex make up the particular context in which Amory, for the first time, consciously confronts his inheritance, that perfect type of aristocracy Dick Humbird represents, and the dangers inherent in what the upper class tries to be. By an act of will, he rejects the path Dick Humbird followed, not because he prefers another path but because Dick's leads to death.

However, the matter is even more complicated than this. If beauty, sex, and aristocracy are inseparably linked with license and indulgence, they are also linked with their contraries—order, responsibility, purposefulness. Fitzgerald's golden girls—his chief representatives of beauty, sex, and aristocracy—embody these contradictions in their very natures. Isabelle, as her name suggests, is a beauty, and a flower, too, "a bloom." She is also careless, "capable of very strong, if very transient emotions"; to her, "all impressions and, in fact, all ideas were extremely kaleidoscopic." But her effect on Amory is not kaleidoscopic: "he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was returned." Love, then, provides unity. But when love fades—and it must if the loved one's emotions are transient—the unity dissolves into chaos. This brief interlude with Isabelle establishes the pattern for Amory's deeper affair with Rosalind, and, indeed, for the loves of all the Fitzgerald men: love for a flower, total commitment to that love, fulfillment and unity as a result of that commitment, defection of the loved one, collapse of the unity, a lesion of enthusiasm.

He falls in love with Rosalind Connage at first sight and, of course, "all life was transmitted into terms of their love, … all experience, all desire, all ambitions were nullified." He finds the unity once again, closes "the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life." Amory's commitment is complete because it has to be, because, like all the Fitzgerald men to follow, he loves a girl who

wants what she wants when she wants it and she is prone to make every one around her pretty miserable when she doesn't get it—but in the true sense she is not spoiled. Her fresh enthusiasm, her will to grow and learn, her endless faith in the inexhaustibility of romance, her courage and fundamental honesty—these things are not spoiled…. She is quite unprincipled; her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez-faire for others…. Women she detested. Theyrepresented qualities that she felt and despised in herself—incipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and petty dishonesty.

Rosalind is, of course, a bundle of contradictions. Fundamental honesty vs. petty dishonesty, courage vs. cowardice—these are conflicts between her identity as Rosalind and her identity as woman. "But all criticism of Rosalind ends in her beauty"—when she must choose between identities, she will do so on the basis of practicality, not of romance. She will choose what is best for her beauty, her raison d'etre.

She really has no choice at all; it is the choice between life and death. She knows the world's threat to a flower's beauty, knows that "beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses." Although the death of roses is inevitable, the rose must try to cheat that death, or at least forestall it as long as possible. And that is only possible in the hothouse only wealth can build and maintain—"safe and proud above the hot struggle of the poor," as Gatsby will see Daisy. Marrying Amory means the immediate death of roses and, although Amory cannot see it because he, more than Rosalind, believes in the inexhaustibility of romance, it would be death for him, too: "I can't be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You'd hate me in a narrow atmosphere. I'd make you hate me…. I wouldn't be the Rosalind you love." At theend of the novel, Amory can say, "I know myself, but that is all"—but Rosalind knows herself now: "I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness—and I dread responsibility. I don't want to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the summer." She chooses rich Dawson Ryder because "he'd be a—a background," the background that she needs if her beauty, which is to say, her significance, her identity, is to survive.

The unity again collapses into chaos. Amory now realizes that he has no place in the system he inherited. Worse, he sees that the unity he built around Rosalind blinded him to the disunities of his world. The war, he now understands, "ruined the old backgrounds, … life is too huge and complex." This is "the condition, the field of tragedy," Trilling speaks of, the donnée of modern American life. But while chaos may be the given condition of a society's life, it cannot be the condition of an individual's. "Borne along a stream" or "left in an eddy," "picked up on a wave's top and swept along," "without desire to work or write, love or dissipate" is "moral suicide." If he is ever to emerge from the lethargy in which there is "no sense of waste, no sense of the present hope that waste implies," but only "the great listlessness of his disillusion,"

Amory's search for meaning and order must become deliberate and intense.

He takes the first step during a sentimental pilgrimage to Atlantic City. He does not encounter the happy times of a few short years ago, only Alec Connage, Rosalind's brother, who has brought a girl down from New York. In the middle of the night, there is a knock on the door of the adjoining room—Alec's room—and Amory instantly decides to tell the house detective that he, not Alec, has violated the Mann Act. Charles Shain maintains that "no one would admire [Amory's self-sacrifice] more than a Victorian mother," but Amory's motive would shock the Victorian sensibility. He literally sacrifices these remains of his former self—burden, not ballast—which still wed him, however tenuously, to his inheritance. He destroys his name and his reputation to be free, destroys his present so that he can begin to create his future.

The first fact that flashed radiantly on his comprehension was the great impersonality of sacrifice—he perceived that what we call hate and love, reward and punishment, had no more to do with it than the date of the month … that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power—to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin—the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair.

Amory accepts the responsibility, takes the risk: the brief notice of the incident appears in the newspaper the same day Rosalind's engagement to Dawson Ryder is announced.

Amory is now one of "the fortunate or unfortunate few" for whom "the dominant idea, the foredoomed attempt to control one's destiny," is reserved. He has always been engaged in such an attempt, starting with those lists to get something definite and that thirteen-year-old's code to live by. But only now does it become the dominant idea, although he knows "he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment." He rejects "the old epigram that had been playing list-lessly in his mind: 'Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.'" He realizes the implications of the earlier personality-personage distinction: the spiritually married man

takes human nature as [he] finds it, uses its timidity, its weakness, and its strength for [his] own ends. Opposed is the man who, being spiritually unmarried, continually seeks for new systems that will control or counteract human nature. His problem is harder. It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life. That is his struggle. He is a part of progress—the spiritually married man is not.

The spiritually married man—Amory at the beginning—is wed to the system he inherits. Like personality, the system "lowers the people it acts on" because the spiritually married man is necessarily committed to the status quo and is, therefore, not a part of progress. But the spiritually unmarried man—Amory at the end—divorced from his inheritance, is, like the personage, "never thought of apart from what he's done." Having no system to preserve, he must seek one, not merely for the sake of having a system but in order "to guide and control life." In Fitzgerald's terms, that is always the hero's struggle and Amory commits himself to it.

The place of This Side of Paradise in the Fitzgerald canon should now be clear: it has the same "dominating intention" as The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon. But it is not necessary to go outside the novel to find it worthy. This Side of Paradise is like the personage, "a bar on which a thousand things have been hung." Too many things—albeit "glittering things sometimes"—have been hung on the bar of Fitzgerald's first novel. But the bar is strong enough to hold them and emerges intact because Fitzgerald does use those things with a "mentality back of them." Amory's metamorphosis into the spiritually unmarried man should come as no surprise: from his first instinctive attempts to get something definite to his explicit commitment to the struggle to guide and control his life, that is where he is heading. Rather than "a gesture of indefinite revolt," This Side of Paradise is a mature affirmation that, although all gods are dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken, man can—must—struggle to guide and control life, foredoomed though it may be.

Source: Barry Gross, "This Side of Paradise: The Dominating Intention," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1969, pp. 51–59.

Margaret Emerson Bailey

In the following review, Bailey notes Fitzgerald's youthful vigor and individual style, and calls This Side of Paradise "a convincing chronicle of youth by youth."

"Just as the boiling pot gives off heat, so through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue." Since this, as Mr. Fitzgerald sees it, is the process of molten youth as it takes shape and hardens, his novel is less a history of its assumption of form than of its loss of radiance. Were this all, This Side of Paradise would contain little new. More tolerantly, certainly more humorously, the same process has been set forth by a score of English novelists. But though referred to still as "the younger group," they show by their very tolerance and humor that they have passed on, that their experiences have already become recollections. They are reviewing youth with a memory—not a sensation—of its joy and bitterness, and are looking back to its problems with a wistful patronage. Mr. Fitzgerald, in contrast, gives the impression of being still in the thick of the fight, and of having the fierceness of combat. The dust of conflict is still in his eyes and he does not even see very clearly. At times he cannot distinguish youth's friend from its foe or perceive where it has met with defeat and where conquered. The battle is on and the besetting forces loom very large. They take shape allegorically; it is their exaggeration and the very solemnity with which they are viewed that give the book value, for they make it a record at the very moment of the encounter.

Amory Blaine, the hero of this tale, starts life with a handicap. "From his mother he inherits every trait except the inexpressible few which make him worth while." An exotic she may no longer be called, for in novels her species has become indigenous to the Middle West and is constantly culled there whenever costly and poisonous beauty is needed to color the page. Unfortunately for her son, whose coming she had looked upon as a burden, she finds him a source of diversion and takes delight in the precocity developed by her companionship. Had it not been for his heritage from his father, the calories of his virtue must have been multitudinous to have held out. As it is, the worst that she does for him is to cut him off from his kind and from a normal boy's "roughing it," to make him acutely conscious of his good looks, and to give him a snobbish belief in himself as a personage reserved for special adventure. But once she has worked what havoc she may, she drops him with a swiftness amazing even in a person of her fleeting interest, and he is left to the leveling process of school and college. From both as well as from the war, he emerges with mind awakened and consequently with a lessened conceit, save where it is concerned in the amourettes which lead up to the tragedy, so splendidly black, of the lost Rosalind. It is in relation to these that the author sets himself the task of the social historian, presenting society in its mad reaction to war. For the hero does not need to go to the underworld in his quest for excitement. The débutante of old days, the Victorian "virginal doll," has been transformed to the "baby vamp," who if she is too hard-headed to follow in morals the Queens of the Movies, has at least adopted their manners. Against her, Amory hasn't a chance. And when to disillusionment is added the loss of money and of his friends who are pushed out of the story in a way to which no vigorous characters would submit, he goes down like Brian de Bois Guilbert, "the victim of contending passions." One would think in such a moment that it would be small comfort to "know one's self," though it is with that triumphant if unconvincing protestation that the book closes.

Such a summary is undoubtedly too hard on the book, for it overstresses its failure to arouse sympathy. It also fails to take into account passages, sometimes whole chapters, of brilliant cleverness—those for example where the author takes a fling at modern literary movements or satirizes the already jaded débutante as she makes her curtsy to the world. Little, moreover, does Mr. Fitzgerald care for the conventions of form; and there is something very taking in the nonchalance with which he passes from straight narrative to letters, poems, or dramatic episodes. Quite as wilful is his style. But in all its affectations, its cleverness, its occasional beauty, even its sometimes intentioned vulgarity and ensuing timidity, it so unites with the matter as to make the book a convincing chronicle of youth by youth.

Source: Margaret Emerson Bailey, "A Chronicle of Youth by Youth," in the Bookman, Vol. 51, June 1920, pp. 471–72.

Sources

Broun, Heywood, "Paradise and Princeton," in F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R.

Bryer, Burt Franklin & Co., 1978, p. 9, originally published in the New York Tribune, April 11, 1920, Sec. 7, pp. 9–11.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, This Side of Paradise, edited by James L. W. West III, Cambridge University Press, 1995, originally published by Scribner's, 1920.

Wilson, Edmund, "F. Scott Fitzgerald," in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Arthur Mizener, Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp. 80–85.

"With College Men," in F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Burt Franklin & Co., 1978, p. 21, originally published in the New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1920, p. 240.