The Dissolution of Romance in Modernist Literature

Molly Cimikoski Dr. Darcy Shultz LIT-555 20 September 2015 The Dissolution of Romance in Modernist Literature “The sentimental person thinks things will last— The romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.” F. Scott Fitzgerald “If two people love each other, there can be no happy ending to it.” Ernest Hemingway In the decade leading up to and throughout the duration of World War I, the populations of Europe and the United States underwent great social change. The massive loss of life in battle, which was exacerbated by modern combat techniques, brought a new and painful reality to the term “horrors of war.” In addition to the advent of automatic weaponry contributing to the vast loss of life, World War I was unique to previous wars due to the extraordinarily high numbers of civilian lives lost. The devastation of war left a resounding impact on the well being of the global economy and resulted in the reassignment of power, which shifted largely in favor of the United States due the absence of warfare on American soil. The bleakness of war and the transition of global influence promoted an all-encompassing sense of uncertainty; the despair experienced during this era informed every aspect of society, resulting in the upheaval of “the political, social, cultural, and moral landscape in the literature” written during that time, and establishing a culture of grief that would become known as the modernist movement (Schultz). As a result of the societal difficulties in a post-World War era, the social construct of marriage was profoundly impacted, thus altering the norm of romantic partnerships in America. This epic societal change gave modernist writers permission to write explicitly about the realities of their lives, including frank depictions of their relationships. The deterioration of romance is depicted in the literary works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway; both writers frequently siphoned experiences from their own failing marriages to depict the shortcomings of modern romance in their writing, for which their relationships became infamous. F. Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, the woman who would become his wife, in 1918 at a dance in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama. The soldiers in training at the time, which included Scott, could not have known then that the war was nearing its end, and so the looming possibility of deployment and subsequent death “imbued the local courtship rituals with an even greater sense of urgency and romanticism than usual” (Bryer, Barks, and Lanahan 4). These external factors of war, coupled with the preexisting conditions of social expectations for “young women of the South, barely free of their Victorian chaperones,” assisted in expediting the intensity of Zelda and Scott’s courtship; the twosome quickly fell in love with one another and were married two years later (xxv-xxvi). Outside of the autobiographical components of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s publications to be examined in this paper, the other significant source of reference to their romantic history, particularly in their earliest years of courting, can be found in Zelda’s letters to Scott (many of his returned exchanges were not preserved by Zelda); in her letters, Zelda depicts a “desire for merged identities, for Scott to define her existence” so that she might eliminate the sensation of her “nothingness without him.” Scott and Zelda’s granddaughter, Eleanor, who compiled the collection of letters referenced here, makes sure to note that although Zelda’s perceptions may seem extreme, they are quite representative of typical romantic hopefulness at the beginning of the century, prior to experiencing the tragedies of war, particularly for young women as they were very much identified by their marital status (xxv-xxvi). This was undoubtedly intensified for the Fitzgeralds due to their popularity; the renown that they garnered “and their symbiosis made both their successes and tragedies… larger than life.” The heightened attention that they received was also unique at the time due to modern technology, which contributed to the creation of the “culture of celebrity” (Prigozy 1-2). The marriage between Scott and Zelda began with extraordinary optimism, with Scott even announcing after their wedding “that his greatest ambitions were to write the best novel that ever was and to stay in love with his wife forever.” Their love story however, was incredibly turbulent, as they experienced extreme highs of romanticism as well as many instances of tormented heartache in conjunction with the suffering of the era. The couple succumbed to the initial significant low point in their relationship when Zelda experienced her first mental breakdown in 1930, by which time Scott’s alcoholism was “full-blown” and as such “the fairy tale ended” (Bryer, Barks, and Lanahan xxvi). Similarly, the romantic success of Scott’s protagonists began to suffer equally following his own strife with Zelda. Inarguably Scott’s most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, for which he borrowed some of his own personal history, involves a man (Jay Gatsby) obsessed with a married woman (Daisy Buchanan). In the scene in which Gatsby confronts Daisy’s husband about their love, what is designed to indicate romance is portrayed as more closely as mania: “Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby. “She’s never loved you. She loves me.” “You must be crazy!” exclaimed Tom automatically. Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement. “She never loved you, do you hear?” he cried. “She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!” At this point Jordan and I tried to go, but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain — as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions. (The Great Gatsby 102) In addition to the intense emotions depicted in this particular scene, one of the most painful components is the use of symbols drawn from Scott’s own reality that encompass it; while Daisy is most certainly a representation of Zelda, Scott (who most closely relates to Jay Gatsby, having grown up poor and then accumulated wealth later) portrays his fictional self as still vying for the affections of his own wife, as she exists inside of this metaphor. Although Scott and Zelda were married at the time when “The Great Gatsby” was published, this scene shows that Scott still lacked security in their relationship, despite having won Zelda over from other suitors in the years prior. Ernest Hemingway, whose capacity for marital bliss will also be dissected in this paper, wrote about Scott and Zelda’s marriage in his book, A Moveable Feast. Ernest held little empathy for Zelda (admittedly, it was not known at that time that she was mentally ill), and his friendship with Scott wavered, however as a fellow writer of the modernist era, Hemingway gained unique access to their marriage and provides a compelling description of the couple’s dynamic: Scott was very much in love with Zelda and he was very jealous of her. He told me many times on our walks of how she had fallen in love with the French navy pilot. But she had never made him really jealous with another man since. This spring she was making him jealous with other women and on the Montmartre parties he was afraid to pass out and he was afraid to have her pass out. Becoming unconscious when they drank had always been their great defence. (A Moveable Feast 1785-1788) This description provides a clear picture of the disruption within the Fitzgerald marriage, and how far removed they became from their earliest days of devotion to one another. The powerful infatuation that served as a foundation of their relationship never dissipated entirely however, although their marriage ultimately dissolved; even after they had been separated and Scott was living with another woman, following Zelda and Scott’s last visit together prior to his death, he wrote to her saying, “You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known, but even that is an understatement” (Bryer, Barks, and Lanahan xxxi). Scott’s biographer Matthew Bruccoli described the tragic ending of the Fitzgerald love story as such: “Their marriage ended with a 3,000-mile separation when F. Scott Fitzgerald died in the apartment of his last love while Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was a discharged mental patient in the Southern city where their love story had begun in 1918. Their love was one of a century, he had said” (Bruccoli). Scott could not have had the insight to realize then how accurate this statement would be; not only were Scott and Zelda a renowned couple of the twentieth century for their literary successes and fame, but perhaps more symbolically their love and despair was largely representative of the mood regarding romance for their generation. As shown, the erratic nature of Scott and Zelda’s relationship, including the unraveling of their marriage, is depicted with frequency in Scott’s work. Towards the end of Scott’s life, when they were no longer living together and Zelda was being treated for mental illness, he wrote “Lamp in a Window,” a poem published by The New Yorker, addressed to Zelda, which depicts the loss of the happiness that the two had once shared: Do you remember, before keys turned in the locks When life was a closeup, and not an occasional letter, That I hated to swim naked from the rocks While you liked absolutely nothing better? Do you remember many hotel bureaus that had Only three drawers? But the only bother Was that each of us argued stubbornly, got mad Trying to give the third one to the other. East, west, the little car turned, often wrong Up an erroneous Alp, an unmapped Savoy river. We blamed each other, wild were our words and strong, And, in an hour, laughed and called it liver. And, though the end was desolate and unkind: To turn the calendar at June and find December On the next leaf; still, stupid-got with grief, I find These are the only quarrels that I can remember. This sense of mourning experienced by Scott in regards to his marriage was shared on a national level, both through the personal losses suffered by all Americans during the modernist era, as well as through the descriptions of pain in his writing that became so well known. The themes of broken romance, and the sense of being an “outsider” who seeks acceptance, which are pervasive throughout Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels, are indicative of a national mood wherein those who mourn the past are “consumed with nostalgia” (Schiff 13). This preoccupation with grief is evident in his ode to Zelda above, and also in their written correspondence once she was institutionalized, in which they each spent a significant number of pages blaming one another for their diminished careers and happiness (Bruccoli). Ultimately, Scott and Zelda were not immune to the cost of the pain associated with life during the generation of modernism, and even their relationship ended in irreparable havoc. Ernest Hemingway’s experiences with love and heartache, which also made significant appearances in his writing, were both similar and distinct to those of his friend and literary peer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. While Fitzgerald had one significant romantic relationship that continued to dissolve under the pressures of contemporary stressors, Hemingway had multiple influential relationships, and unfortunately all of them were equally as chaotic. Hemingway’s first love, a wartime nurse named Agnes that he met in Milan, appeared in fictional form on more than one occasion throughout his writing career. In A Farwell to Arms, Agnes is represented as the character Catherine Barkley, “his ideal heroine, submissive and fulfilled in love” (Kert 58). Upon an examination of the emotional well being of several of Hemingway’s female characters, Charles J. Norman Jr. depicted the prominent psychological implications of the modernist era as they impacted Catherine: Perhaps most significant is that her fiancé was killed at the Battle of the Somme, that four-and-a-month bloodbath in which the British lost 20,000 dead and suffered an additional 40,000 wounded on the first day alone. As a result of her loss, Catherine’s whole world view has been revolutionized. Before, she apparently held attitudes typical of her generation: she was engaged for eight years without sexual intimacy but didn’t marry because she “thought it would be bad for [her fiancé].” She has also been brought up to believe that there is a reason for everything, although she has clearly abandoned that tenet as a result of her lover’s death and of her own experience in the war. Had she known before the war what she has since discovered about life, she would have married her fiancé or gone to bed with him, and Catherine is guilty and regretful about her earlier views: “You see I didn’t care about the other thing and he could have had it all . . .. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn’t know.” As she reiterates, “I thought it would be worse for him. I thought perhaps he couldn’t stand it and then of course he was killed and that was the end of it.” This last comment indicates that she no longer believes in God or religion…Later, when she and Frederic discuss the possibility of their being married, she tells him: “You see, darling, it would mean everything to me if I had any religion. But I haven’t any religion. You’re all I’ve got” … In addition to this change, her earlier romantic attitude toward war and life has also been shattered. (Nolan 106) This in depth explication of Catherine is indicative not only of Hemingway’s fictionalized perception of his relationship to Agnes, but more broadly it represents the suffering experienced by young people in the modernist era as they begin to question their previous belief systems regarding religion, love, marriage, and sex. Although Hemingway had challenging relationships with the women in his life, in the case of Catherine it would seem as though he is also exhibiting the “emphasis on verisimilitude” that modernism is renowned for (Schultz). Catherine’s relationship to her sexuality, as well as her loss of faith in religion, are both conditions of an adulthood in an era of war, but are also very likely characteristics experienced by Hemingway himself due to the attention that they receive in his work. Through Catherine, as well as the other characters in his writing, Hemingway is able to self-express his own post-war trauma. As Nolan concludes, “we are reminded anew of just how hard the modern world is for them…drawing insights both from his [Hemingway’s] own interior struggles and from observations of those suffering around him” (Nolan 118). Through the lens of such suffering, it is possible to empathize with Hemingway’s inability to maintain romantic relationships due to the emotional trauma he had experienced. This remained a source of conflict for Hemingway in that his personal views on love and marriage were consistently in opposition with one another; although he continued to seek out romantic partnerships, they never provided him with the anticipated fulfillment: “married domesticity may have seemed to him the desirable culmination of romantic love, but sooner or later he became bored and restless, critical and bullying. The conflict between his yearning to be looked after and his craving for excitement and freedom was never resolved” (Kert 10). On the basis of these dueling beliefs on romantic love precipitated by modernist ideals, it is therefore unsurprising that Hemingway’s male protagonists, who are frequently autobiographical, often embody behaviors that are in conflict with one another. They are unable to engage in consistently loving behavior, and often act abrasively towards the women in their lives. In Hemingway’s short story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” The American Man attempts to convince his girlfriend, Jig, to have an abortion: “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.” The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. “I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”
The girl did not say anything. 
 “I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.”
 “Then what will we do afterwards?”
 “We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.”
 … “I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.” “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?”
 “I love you now. You know I love you.”
 “I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?”
 “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.” “If I do it you won’t ever worry?”
 “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.”
 “Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.”
 “What do you mean?”
 “I don’t care about me.” 
 “Well, I care about you.”
 “Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine.”
 “I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way.”
(Hemingway 30) While The American Man insists that he does not want her to go through with the abortion unless it is also her desire to have the procedure, thus implying that he genuinely cares for Jig, he is also persistent in discussing the topic, even after she asks him to stop echoing the debate (“Can’t we maybe stop talking?”). Ultimately, the only time that the male protagonist offers romantic dialogue throughout the short story is in order to persuade Jig to terminate her pregnancy, which would alleviate him from his emotional and fiscal responsibility to her. What is equally as disturbing in this story is The American Man’s lack of concern for Jig’s self worth; repeatedly she engages in self deprecating dialogue with little reaction from her significant other. This story is widely believed to be one of the fictional representations of Hemingway’s disappointment when his first wife, Hadley became pregnant: “She had conceived sometime in January and was thrilled with the news. But Ernest, who thought that they had been taking the necessary precautions, was upset, fearing that the baby would inhibit his freedom of movement and ability to work… It was the first serious challenge to the unity of the marriage” (Kert 132). Hemingway’s response to this life event, towards Hadley and also in his multiple depictions of this circumstance in his writing, highlights his disillusion within the confines of marriage, as he experienced it. Three years following the birth of their son John, Ernest and Hadley were divorced, thus resetting Ernest’s cycle of desiring romance and simultaneously discarding it. The main reason for their divorce was that Ernest was having an affair with a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer. During a short time immediately following their separation, Hadley did not permit Ernest to see Pauline as a condition of their divorce. During this brief time frame of being without the company of a woman, Ernest became lonely to the point of being suicidal. He wrote to Pauline: Last fall I said perfectly calmly and not bluffingly and during one of the good times that if this wasn’t cleared up by Christmas I would kill myself—because that would mean it wasn’t going to clear up . . . later I promised that I wouldn’t do it or think about it under any circumstances until you came back. But now it is getting all out of control again . . . I’m not a saint, nor built like one, and I’d rather die now while there is still something left of the world than to go on and have every part of it flattened out and destroyed and made hollow before I die. This letter establishes Hemingway’s on-going internal conflict in that he both fears the power of women yet is unable to live without them. (Henrichon 20-21) In this instance, perhaps more than in any other circumstance, Hemingway’s perpetual state of conflict regarding romantic relationships is highlighted. From these relationships, and Hemingway’s own portrayal of them in his writing, it is fair to conclude that Hemingway was unable to obtain a sense of contentment within the social constructs of marriage. The era that became marked as modernist was one of the most difficult times for Western Society in recent history. The suffering that people endured during both World War I and II brought with it a sense of hopelessness that marred an entire generation. When Hemingway sought to describe Fitzgerald in his book, “A Moveable Feast,” he wrote: His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. (A Moveable Feast) Although Hemingway, being the obsessive writer that he was, likely intended to highlight what he witnessed surround the talent of his peer, this passage is characteristic of more than writing; both Hemingway and Fitzgerald embraced marriage willfully and with excitement, however neither were able to maintain their partnerships when tested by the very normal challenges of married life. It is very plausible therefore, that the social conditions of this era diluted the possibility of achieving and maintaining romantic love, which is represented in the literature that was produced at that time. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are two of the most renowned, and thus characteristic writers of the twentieth century, neither of which escaped the hardship of lost love during a monumentally challenging historic period. Works Cited Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph, and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wm. S. Hein Publishing, 2002. Web. 30 August 2015. Bryer, Jackson R., Cathy W. Barks, and Eleanor Lanahan. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Macmillan, 2003. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Fitzgerald, F. Scott, Lamp In A Window The New Yorker, March 23, 1935 P. 18. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New Lion [Kindle Edition], 2015. Hemingway, Ernest. Men Without women. Simon and Schuster, 1997. Henrichon, Stephen E., "Ernest Hemingway’s Mistresses and Wives: Exploring Their Impact on His Female Characters" (2010). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3663 Kert, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. WW Norton & Company, 1999. Nolan Jr, Charles J. "" A Little Crazy": Psychiatric Diagnoses of Three Hemingway Women Characters." The Hemingway Review 28.2 (2009): 105-120. Prigozy, Ruth. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Schiff, Jonathan. Ashes to Ashes: Mourning and Social Difference in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction. Susquehanna University Press, 2001. Schultz, Darcy. “Module One; Antecedents and Foundations.” American Modernism. Southern New Hampshire University. Web. 30 August 2015. 1 Cimikoski