Essay: A Story Within
Topic: In some novels and plays certain parallel or recurring events prove to be significant. In an essay, describe the major similarities and differences in a sequence of parallel or recurring events in a novel or play and discuss the significance of such events.
The Beautiful and Damned is Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel and captures a relationship, damned to go nowhere but down in the epoch of the Jazz Era. However, the relationship’s downward spiral of Anthony and Gloria Patch, certain events of flirtatious behavior, obsessive drinking, and risqué tendencies repeat throughout the novel and parallel to something greater than the Jazz Era. These events in the Beautiful and Damned are a representation of Fitzgerald’s own life and the relationship he had with his wife, Zelda, and how their love for one another faded like a rose.
One of the most prominent reoccurring elements incorporated within this novel is the relationship between Anthony and Gloria Patch, who of course, resemble Scott and Zelda. Fitzgerald first met Zelda when he was twenty-one at a country club dance in Montgomery, Alabama. Since Fitzgerald was raised as a gentleman and displayed a gregarious personality, his relationship with Zelda started of as quick and ambitious as the Jazz Era. However, Zelda herself was a beautiful woman and her popularity attracted many suitors, including Fitzgerald. She also had a flirtatious ora about her, causing Fitzgerald to want her even more, but as this ora continued to dominate her character, jealousy set in with Fitzgerald, ultimately destroying their relationship, and even their marriage. These events are modeled within this novel and are emphasised as they continued to play a major role between Gloria and Anthony. Even more importantly, Gloria Patch’s character was modeled solely from Zelda Fitzgerald, who had all the beauty in the world, but the deceptive charm of a cobra that damns all who get to close.
Another important reoccurring theme in the novel is Anthony Patch’s obsession and abuse of alcohol. Alcohol was as much a factor of the Jazz Era as it was apart of Fitzgerald’s life. He first began drinking while in college at Princeton and seemed that he was doomed to continue the habit. unfortunately like all bad habits, Fitzgerald’s seemed to plague him the rest of his life and worsened as problems with Zelda increased proportionally. Anthony’s character certainly portrays Fitzgerald himself and is repeated throughout the novel as more problems arise between Gloria and Anthony.
The Beautiful and Damned clearly is an interpretation of Fitzgerald’s life, incorporating elements from his own life into his literature. These reoccurring themes throughout this novel help the audience understand his life’s story and the beautiful relationship with Zelda, that died in the “roar” of the 1920s.
Word Count: 400
Corbyn Cravero
Rebeske-3B
General Post VI: Musical
Since the Beautiful and the Damned originated back in the 1920s, it has taken many forms of interpretation through the film making industry. However, a more unique approach has been created in recent years, and create Fitzgerald’s novel into a musical. This musical was created back in 2004 and has had moderate success among audiences who admire Fitzgerald’s life story with his wife Zelda. Fitzgerald himself started out writing the lyrics and scripts to musicals at the college he attended, making it ironic that one of his more serious works has been transformed by thespians into theatrical entertainment.
Here is a scene from the musical as the drunk Fitzgerald stumbles about over the life he has created for himself.
General Post V: Fitzgerald’s Jealousy
In the Beautiful and Damned, Anthony Patches friends Richard Caramel and Maury Noble are much like he is, young and eager men of the decade within the higher aristocracy. However, they all share the common interest of writing stories and becoming famous authors. Despite this interests, Maury and Richard especially, have a lot more success as writers than Anthony could have ever hoped to achieve, seeing as how he found himself doing anything he could to support his damned marriage. Anthony even becomes slightly jealous of his friends, as shown when he says Maury Noble was the man “whom Anthony considered his best friend. This is the only man of all his acquaintances whom he admires and, to a bigger extent than he likes to admit to himself, envies”. This is how Fitzgerald himself felt about his own writing when comparing himself to other fellow writers, one of them being his friend and acquaintance Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway seemed to be having way more success than Fitzgerald was having and he portrayed his shame within his literature. Unfortunately, this shame would last him a lifetime as this representative novel suggests.
General Post IV: Alcoholism
“Oh no, he doesn’t show it anymore unless he can hardly stand up, and he talks alright till he gets excited. He talks much better than he does when he’s sober. But he’s been sitting here all day drinking-except for the time it took him to walk the corner for a newspaper” says Gloria talking about her husband’s drinking problem. This is one of the final entries the audience reads about Anthony, and shows just how despicable and damned he has become. Since he did not inherit the money he had planned on receiving from his grandfather’s death, Anthony was forced to find work and scale down his expensive living habits in order to get by. However, in his desperation, he did what most people in his situation do, and that was become addicted to alcohol in hopes of forgetting the hardships being endured. Fitzgerald himself developed a drinking problem early in his life, and it stuck with him till his death. His wife’s family was even concerned for her having a relationship with Fitzgerald, considering his drinking seemed to be getting worse and worse. Anthony’s drinking is a good indication of what Fitzgerald went through and is another consequence the Jazz Era had on many people who began to drink irresponsibly. As defined by Anthony’s character development, alcohol can have devastating effects on one’s life.
The following video is part of a documentary about Fitzgerald’s early life and how early his drinking problem began to develop.
General Post III: Antisemitic Views
Fitzgerald himself was known for being a racist against blacks and an antisemitist during his life. Stereotyping of these ethnicities was popular during the 1920s, and Fitzgerald found it appropriate to include this ideology within his own works of literature, including The Beautiful and Damned. As Anthony Patch walks the streets at night, two men pass him, “talking in loud voices…in their fatuous suspicious glances”. These men are unmistakably recognized as Jews, as Fitzgerald’s opinion of them through Anthony gives them an even further negative connotation. Another, and even stronger, reference to Jews would be with Joseph Bloeckman, a filmmaker and associate of Gloria, who is described with the stereotypic features of the “brown-haired, big nosed” Jew. Anthony even calls him “a God Damn Jew” over the phone in a drunken rage. These references represent not only those of Fitzgerald, but of the majority of society as well during this time. More and more people were becoming antisemitic with the growing Jewish Immigration to America and the fear of Jewish Bolshevism setting within American soil. In turn, these views made Fitzgerald’s novel even more popular, seeing as how many people could relate to Anthony Patch’s scorn and hatred for the Jewish People.
General Post II: Beauty in its Form
“Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved-to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of rose” Anthony Patch.
Of course, Anthony fell in love with Gloria Gilbert because of her sexual attractiveness and flirtatious affection she showed. One could say that love literally was “flung” at Anthony, judging from the affection the Gloria and Anthony developed for one another in such a short amount of time. However, as Gloria subliminally knows and dreads, her beauty and figure will one day fade, and she will cease to be the attractive young woman she is now with so many suitors. In a conversation with Anthony, he remarks that she has her own idea of the world and says, “It’s your own world, isn’t it?” And she responds hesitantly “As long as I’m…..young”. This idea of change as beauty fades foreshadows that their relationship and affection will also fade, thus leading from being young and beautiful with all the possibility of the era, to being damned in a failing relationship of misery and hate.
The Song below by Nat King Cole is a good jazzy interpretation of Love, and its lyrics coincide with Anthony and Gloria’s relationship.
General Post I: Jazz Era Values
Maury Noble, a writer and friend of Anthony Patch, attacks christian values in his monologue quote:
“Let’s join together and write a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man…so the men died, but the book lived always. They neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead, it became know as the Bible”.
His quote demonstrates the changing values brought upon by the 1920s and the Jazz Era. People began singing and dancing to new music, people rejected certain religious traditions, women were dressing more promiscuous as flappers, drinking alcohol and partying were encouraged. Overall the era became a iconoclastic rebellion of old values before the “Roaring Twenties”. Being a writer of this time, Fitzgerald portrays his characters well with their expressions of these new values, which helps the reader understand more of what the time period was like. Anthony Patch certainly has a few of these values in that he drinks heavily and has a strained relationship with his grandfather, Adam Patch, who is a Christian Prohibitionist and represents the values of the “Previous Society”. The contrast between Adam and Anthony itself further adds to the distinction between old and new values that are expressed within the text of The Beautiful and the Damned.
Book to Media Post
Surprisingly, this novel is being turned into a Hollywood film and is to be released in 2011. However, since the novel is more of an interpretation of Fitzgerald’s life, it seems that the film will use the characters of Fitzgerald and Zelda, rather than the actual characters of the novel, Anthony and Gloria. Kera Knightly will stare as Zelda Sayre, but it is unclear who is playing Fitzgerald at this point in time. The movie looks to be promising and popular among audiences, since so many people liked “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, another story by Fitzgerald. Below is a teaser poster of the movie with its link to some more basic info about the movie.
http://teaser-trailer.com/movie/the-beautiful-and-the-damned
Publication of The Beautiful and Damned
The Character illustrations were designed to look like Fitzgerald and Zelda.
The Beautiful and the Damned was Fitzgerald’s second novel that was first published by Scribner’s in 1922 after his first novel This Side of Paradise. The story is of Anthony Patch and his relationship with his wife, Gloria, and how certain events drive their marriage into alcoholism, money issues, illicit sexual attractions, and other events of the Jazz Era. This book is believed to be based on the relationship between Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, and after examining the parallels between reality and fiction, it is evident that Fitzgerald used his own life events in his novels. Although it is not as popular as The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned has remained popular among audiences and gives a good indication of what life was like back in the 1920s and Jazz Era when times were changing, amongst all people, the beautiful and the damned!
Here is a link to current review of The Beautiful and Damned:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4708.The_Beautiful_and_Damned
Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He would later become one of the many great American Authors and also be considered as a member of the lost generation of writers during the 1920s. The four books he completed were This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night, and The Great Gatsby. While writing his first novel, Fitzgerald met his future wife, Zelda Sayre, at a country club in Montgomery, Alabama. Zelda and her strenuous relationship with Fitzgerald would later be portrayed in many of Fitzgerald’s works, especially The Beautiful and Damned. As the years past and their relationship failed, Zelda was diagnosed with Schizophrenia, and had to be omitted into a hospital, creating even more separation from Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was also notorious for his bad drinking habits, which strained their relationship even more. In the last years of his life, Fitzgerald had barely seen his wife until he died on December 21, 1940. Zelda died 8 years later in a fire accident. Both are buried next to each other in Rockville, Maryland with a quote from one of Fitzgerald’s novels that reads “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”.
The Beautiful and Damned 