‘Beautiful little fool’ : the representation of women as flappers in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Beautiful and the Damned’ (1922), ‘The Great Gatsby’ (1925) and ‘Tender is the Night’ (1934)

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald is famously renowned for classifying, demarcating, and popularising the female representative of the interwar period, the flapper. With her bobbed hair, short skirts, silk stockings and bold lips, the flapper immersed successfully in the American culture. While Fitzgerald eternalised her image and clasped to the role of her spokesperson, he also perceived women as ‘leeches […] [who] simply dominate the American men’. Therefore, this dissertation aims to examine how this well-renowned chronicler of the 1920s represents his female characters in accordance with the popular image of the flapper in three of his novels: The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934). Its purpose is to answer the question of, what are Fitzgerald’s motives behind his portrayal of the New Woman? It also intends to show that Fitzgerald’s flappers go beyond the frivolous, energetic figure of the Roaring Twenties. This dissertation will unveil the flapper’s life as the other sex in the patriarchal society that she inhabits, and her war against mental illness, motherhood and her loss of youth and beauty. The image of the New Woman of the post-war decade is examined through the feminist perspective of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Hélène Cixious’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975).