LITR 5535: American Romanticism

Student Presentation on Reading Selections 2005

Monday 2 May: F. Scott Fitzgerald,  “Winter Dreams” N 2126-2143

selection reader / discussion leader: Mary Brooks

Background:

“Winter Dreams” is from the Metropolitan magazine (1922).

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota in 1896 and became equally a famous writer and a celebrity author whose life style seemed to symbolize the decades of the 1920s and 1930s.

1920s:  all night partying, drinking, and the pursuit of pleasure.

1930s:  gloomy aftermath of excess.

“Winter Dreams”

This story was written while Fitzgerald was planning The Great Gatsby and is believed to be the strongest of the “Gatsby-cluster” stories that can be found in the collection called All the Sad Young Men (1926).  The general plot of “Winter Dreams” is about a boy whose ambitions become identified with a selfish rich girl much like the plot of The Great Gatsby.

Desire and Loss

“Long ago, long ago there was something in me, but now that thing is gone.  Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone.  I can not cry.  I cannot care.  That thing will come back no more.”  N 2143

Nostalgia

“…but he found himself glancing at the four caddies who trailed them, trying to catch a gleam or gesture that would remind himself, that would lessen the gap which lay between his past and his future.” N 2130

Idealism

“No disillusion as to the world in which she had grow up could cure his illusion as to her desirability.” N 2137

Transcendence

“Often he reached out for the best without knowing why he wanted it –and sometimes he ran up against the mysterious denials and prohibitions in which life indulges.”  N 2130

Regionalism:

Set in Minnesota, Fitzgerald’s boyhood home its descriptions of the landscape and life of that region is just nostalgic enough to make it a good representation of regionalism.

“There was a magic that his city would never loose for him.” N 2141

“…his dream of the city itself, now that he had gone from it, was pervaded with melancholy beauty.”  N 2141

Modernism:

Love has a monetary value.

“He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people – he wanted the glittering things themselves.” N 2130

“She was entertained only by the gratification of her desires and by the direct exercise of her own charm.”  N 2136

“That odd penny’s worth of happiness he had spent for his bushel of content.”

Questions:

1.      What is the effect of the use of Modernism on the Romanticism of the story?

2.      What part of the American Identity is being described in this story?

3.      How well do Romanticism and Modernism coexist in the story?