|
The
Brownstone Journal >>
Issues >> Vol.
XII Spring 2005
Intellectual and Social Progress in
Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams"
Michael Zisser (CAS 07) will graduate
with dual degrees in English and Philosophy. He wrote this paper
for EN220: Tragedy and the Tragic.
According to Ronald Berman, there exists in
America a "natural progression" from the "spiritual
to the material" (Berman 6). An account of the development
of American culture and ideology clearly shows twentieth-century
America as a byproduct of the imperialistic and pseudo-intellectual
aspirations that have dominated our country's politics, beginning
with the violent removal of the Indians and continuing through
the "full tide of empire in the twentieth century"
(Callahan 5). When the first settlers landed at Plymouth Rock
in the 17th century, they saw ahead of them an infinite realm
of possibilities regarding social, religious, and political
development. Although the nation was founded upon "the
myth of a new Eden, the history of the United States has displaced
that vision into an industrial, excremental reality" (Callahan
12). America has developed into a nation of "uncritical
drifters" (Berman 15) who have, in a way, lost all sense
of direction in life, who fear complete independence, and whose
lack of free will leads to an ultimate loss of self and tragic
isolation in the face of a new world order. An historical and
Marxist interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter
Dreams" exemplifies how the love of the protagonist hero,
Dexter Green, for the "great beauty" (Fitzgerald 504)
Judy Jones becomes a metaphor for the necessity of man, particularly
in the overly-materialized milieu of the "Jazz Age,"
to manifest his desires for infinite prosperity and opportunity
onto something "limited and final" (Callahan 47).
Green's ultimate dream of obtaining the love of the shallow
and artificial Judy Jones comes to represent the tainted "values
of modern consumer capitalism" (Abrams 185) and how the
ideologies of the "dominant economic and social class"
(Abrams 148) of the Roaring Twenties leave the hero caught in
a conflict between "imaginative reality and the sort of
reality which is established by social consensus" (Frye
39). In this way, the tragic hero becomes isolated from the
consumer-ridden society as his aspirations fall short and the
illusive American Dream is transformed into nothing more than
an "American nightmare" (Callahan 34).
An examination of American intellectual and
social history shows that Dexter is nothing more than a victim
of the false American consciousness that wealth and material
success are guaranteed in a country that, since the dawn of
its creation, has advocated democracy, freedom, and the pursuit
of happiness. The reader is told immediately that Dexter "wanted
not association with glittering things and glittering people—he
wanted the glittering things themselves" (Fitzgerald 493).
The rise of American military technology, industry, imperialism,
and empire has threatened domestic society since the signing
of the Declaration of Independence, and it has been hard to
reconcile the dream of infinite conquest and infinite possibility
with "those sensual worlds promised in myth but denied
by culture" (Callahan 5). This vision of infinite hope
has become an innate psychological trait within the American
psyche and for Dexter it is "deep in him. He was too strong
and alive for it to die lightly" (Fitzgerald 500). What
he does not realize is that he is trapped within an endless
cycle of history he cannot change. Dexter certainly "made
money" (Fitzgerald 493) after his causa sui rise to the
upper-class, but this "hope of man creating himself collides
with the determinist view of personality and history, the Calvinist
principle of predestination, of man as damned or elected previous
to his own consciousness" (Callahan 33). History is already
written and finalized but "we are doomed to repeat its
pattern in our lives even if individual minds"—like Dexter's—"resist
its course . . . History has taken away our freedom" (Callahan
34). This inherited belief in the American dream has warped
the American consciousness into believing that the foundation
of an "old democratic dream" can and will be transformed
into a "new dream of monied style" where "clothes
make the essential man" and where the "gentleman is
at the top of the American scale" (Berman 5). Fitzgerald
informs us that "Dexter was unconsciously dictated to by
his winter dreams" (492), showing that the illusion has
even unwillingly taken over the American spirit due to the historical
and cultural development which has caused us to drift away from
the religious and spiritual freedom our founders first set out
to establish. This has even brought about a "loss of certainty"
as to the general direction of one's life, and the drift can
be noticed empirically as "church buildings now appear
trivial and unimportant in contrast with the enormous skyscrapers
of commerce and finance" (Berman 2).
Many times, "the country gave [Dexter]
a feeling of profound melancholy" because, as a golf caddy,
he is in direct contact with people who are "poor as sin"
(Fitzgerald 490). The Marxist view of class consciousness, as
manifested cultural ideologies in literature, is clearly evident
in Dexter's scorn towards the lower class. It is this old notion
of the "American superiority complex, this annihilation
of otherness" (Callahan 7) rooted deep within American
social history—from the Indian removal and continuing through
slavery, Manifest Destiny, and Vietnam—that drives Dexter to
quit his job as a lowly caddy and reach out his hands towards
the green light that shines upon the "blatantly artificial"
(Fitzgerald 491) Judy Jones.
Dexter, like any man, is conscious of the fact
that something infinite cannot be grasped, and it is primarily
for this reason that Judy Jones becomes the object of his desires
and the "sexual embodiment of the America promised to every
boy by the democratic dream" (Callahan 212). Judy, with
her "preposterous smile" and "general ungodliness"
(Fitzgerald 491) represents the American cultural construct
that "women become to the male imagination mere projections
of class and wealth," serving as "commodities obtained
by those who have mastered the system" (Callahan 213).
Judy is the physical, tangible, finite manifestation of Dexter's
infinite aspirations. And although Green "owned the largest
string of laundries in his section of the country" (Fitzgerald
493) by the time he is twenty-five, he certainly suffers from
"spiritual poverty" (Higgins 57). Essentially, Judy
Jones is seen by Dexter not as a woman, but through the cultural
metaphor which reflects the "divided allegiance of Fitzgerald's
heroes to a romantic transcendence and to a vision of the world
as a resource to be possessed and held in dominion" (Callahan
211). Judy is symbolic of possession; a possession that, despite
its emptiness and aimlessness, reflects Dexter's efforts "to
conceal the possessive desires of his own dark heart" (Callahan
47). One wonders how Dexter can set as his object of possession
somebody so mindless and shallow; Judy serves as the perfect
representation of the historical concept of cultural drift,
which "extends itself into metaphor, prepares the ground
for the meaningless voyaging and failed navigation . . . and
the meanderings by automobile" that "often go nowhere"
(Berman 16). As Dexter lies peacefully in a nearby lake, he
is disrupted by a motorboat that causes an "immense and
purposeless cycle of spray round and round with equal eccentricity"
(Fitzgerald 495). Of course, it is Judy Jones, circling round
and round in aimless and "meaningless voyaging" with
no direction. She, too, is unaware of her entrapment in the
endless cycle of predestined American history, and has lured
Dexter into the same cycle, while leaving him to drown in his
own abyss.
Judy confesses to Dexter, "Last night
I was in love with a man, and tonight I think I'm in love with
you" after he reveals his unprecedented wealth, but this
is a clear example of how there exists a "very little mental
side to any of her affairs" (Fitzgerald 497). This is precisely
the problem with which Dexter becomes entangled. Judy's lack
of mentality cannot possibly allow her to "think"
properly or rationally and Dexter becomes "caught in the
power of the arch-femme fatale" (Higgins 60) in the midst
of his infatuation. In this sense, Dexter becomes a sort of
tragic alazon, caught up in a "pathetic obsession"
(Frye 41) as he "tries to be something more than he is"
(Frye 39). The reality is, unfortunately, that Dexter is just
another conformist, pseudo-spiritual prototype of the power-hungry
American male whose misled ideologies and identity, or lack
thereof, culminate in the materialistic milieu of the Roaring
Twenties. It is the customary American idea that "under
mass democracy, it was altogether safer to go along with the
herd, to claim the rights of individuality without ever validating
them" (Berman 13). The fact that Judy first refers to Dexter
as "boy" (Fitzgerald 491) reaffirms the notion that
Dexter has been stripped of his individuality under the confines
of American cultural ideology. He is just another one of the
"many youthful lovers" (498) that Jones uses, enjoys,
and then leaves in an "intolerable agony of the spirit"
(499). Her values and lack of direction are pathetic, but Dexter's
devotion to her and his "youthful illusion" (Higgins
60) are even more so.
Judy Jones, the "slender enameled doll
in cloth of gold" (Fitzgerald 500), represents the old
aristocratic wealth of permanence that contrasts clearly with
the transience of the self-made Dexter, which is symbolized
by the changing nature of the seasons. The "solidarity"
of her house and its "strong walls" (Fitzgerald 502)
symbolize "old wealth, timelessness, exchangeability, reality"
in contrast to the "youth and dreams" (Higgins 62)
of Dexter Green. As seen historically through the cases of Horatio
Alger, Ben Franklin, and Booker T. Washington, "success
for those who start as outsiders in America ultimately depends
upon whether their rise involves incorporation into the American
establishment. This need to belong, to be approved and admired,
has its origins in the failure of roots in America, a failure
of lineage" (Callahan 191). Dexter's "winter dreams"
(Fitzgerald 492) of being a self-made nouveau-riche who hopes
to capture the love of his summer dream girl are significant
because "he anticipates with pleasure the season of dreams
rather than that of reality, which cannot match these dreams"
(Higgins 60). This psychological idealism of self-made, Alger-like
success and personality leads to the "incapacity to respect
other things and other people . . . for aggression and idealization
both destroy personality" (Callahan 14). Indeed, Dexter
may have a longing for love but he can only manifest it through
wealth and his need to "wear good clothes" (Fitzgerald
496), which has become the "American idea of success"
(Berman 6). Dexter has become a product of the Jazz Age ethos
and the evolution of the myth of success and rising in the world
inherent in the American materialistic consciousness. However,
a few winters later, when Dexter finds out that Judy has lost
the "transient and ephemeral beauty" (Isaacs 206)
she possessed in her youth, Dexter's past romantic illusions
become "realistic disillusions" (Bryer 101) and his
winter dreams of summer are "gone" (Fitzgerald 505)
forever. In a tragic sense, Dexter has experienced a recognition,
a "change from ignorance to knowledge" (Aristotle
26), in which he realizes the ultimate falsity of his dreams.
His youth and emotional life have both come to an end and he
has been trapped by the inevitable cycle of recurring history.
Following the American Industrial Revolution
and the rise to power of a middle class, the "centre of
gravity in human affairs shifted from the public to the private"
(Steiner 195). Dexter Green is a modern tragic hero in a sense
that he represents this precise portrayal of the downfall of
an individual in post-industrial history. In modern tragedy,
"gods and nature have been replaced by history. History
is the only frame of reference, the final authority to accept
or reject the validity of human actions" (Kott 367). In
Dexter's case, like that of Gatsby's and most other Fitzgerald
heroes, history is a cyclical force that cannot be overcome,
due to the processes that have shaped the ideologies of American
culture. History is permanent, like the wealth of Judy Jones;
Dexter's dreams and aspirations are transient, in that they
"had existed and they existed no longer" (Fitzgerald
505). In this sense, Dexter is a "Hegelian tragic hero"
who has been "crushed by history" (Kott 368) because
of his insistence on trying to change its course. This "strongly
individualized" (Frye 38) nature of low mimetic tragedy
deals also with the concept of a "ruthless figure strongly
contrasted with some kind of delicate virtue" (Frye 39).
Dexter can love, but he is ruthless and self-absorbed in his
dreams of wealth and status. It is this hope of being able to
define and possess women and the course of American history
that leads Dexter to his emotional and psychological downfall.
Essentially, it is Fitzgerald's objective to portray the "disintegration
of men who discover reality to be other than those categorical
images imagination had considered absolute in time and space"
(Callahan 211). It is the same theme that occurs repeatedly
in modern, post-industrial American literature; that "even
infinite wealth not only fails to bring satisfaction but inevitably
leads to isolation and corruption" (Higgins 56).
It is clear that Dexter Green inevitably becomes
a byproduct of the cultural milieu that dominates the Roaring
Twenties. His "obsession about rising in the world"
(Frye 39) causes him to become a tragic figure who becomes mentally
and emotionally "isolated from the social group in which
he is trying to belong" (Frye 39). Dexter's isolation,
more significantly, arises from his failure to gain the love
of Judy Jones, who represents the objective of hope that must
necessarily be made tangible in order to be obtained. However,
Green's hope and emotional life are terminated at the story's
ending and his "winter dreams have become winters reality"
as he realizes the disillusionment and mythological nature of
the American Dream. History has triumphed over Dexter Green,
and no matter what man does to try and overcome the forces that
shape modernity, and "no matter how well a man may swim,
history's current pulls him backwards" (Callahan 29). Green,
as a self-made man of the American Jazz Age, has failed and
his dreams are lost forever; they will "come back no more"
(Fitzgerald 505). The sun has gone down on Dexter Green and
he is left only with the nostalgic memories of a lost love and
a faded glimmer of hope. TBJ
BIBLIOGRAPHY |
|
