Connecting F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sylvia Plath

        In the Modernist era of the beginning of the 20th-century hemlines became shorter, woman's hair became shorter, and everyone's morals were a loose subject that was perspective to each individual. The Victorian era was meeting its successors and two of them came by way of the names Fitzgerald and Plath. These two writers were not interested in being politically correct all the time, nor did prim and proper hold significant roles in their decision making. What mattered to them was a truth to thyself and that what they wrote was what they saw and felt. How others interpreted it was up to the reader. Reader’s flocked to these two writers in droves for that reason; an entertaining and heartfelt way to say how oppressive Victorians kept women caged inside a man's world and how Fitzgerald's Roaring Twenties was going to be the start to liberating a woman's place among men and Plath's continuation of this. With this said it is my objective to compare and contrast the psychoanalytical aspects of Modernist works from Fitzgerald and Plath to define the differences in thought that came from repressed feminine Victorian to form liberated Modernist writing by way of its cultural shifts; what worked in terms of Modernist thoughts and what was hard to give up from the Victorian securities.

        Just before 1900 Sigmund Freud, leading European Neuropsychologist, abandoned his work with hypnosis to concentrate solely on Psychoanalysis of human cognition. This helped to start a new field that analyzed human psychology in literature; where psychoanalysis is used to decipher why an author chooses to write a certain way. So “rather than give expression to libido or instinctual drives, they will come to be seen as representations built up in the self as a way of securing for itself the benefit of relations with others that have become unstable or insecure.” (Rivkin and Ryan, 415) which is something an author will need in order to create in-depth characters that stem from suppressed emotions that become attached to certain individuals we meet throughout our lives. “According to… Sigmund Freud, the unconscious mind... consists of the processes in the mind that occurs automatically and is not available [for] introspection, and include thought processes, memory, affect, and motivation.” (Gholipour and Sanahmadi) which lend an explanation to how an author starts to form a story out of these suppressed emotions and in-depth characters. Throughout the Victorian age, many people were suppressing all of their emotions with little availability to release what they were building up, which created an expanse of negative energy that cultivated in the youth of the early 1900s with the desire to just let loose. So with the end of the 1st World War what wasn’t said before was now up for release.

        Time was now being spent expressing how people saw their world around them with their ever-expanding social circles, which many times would seem to those less fortunate as bragging and cause for jealousy. “To flaunt one’s possessions or overcome one’s rivals in love is an act of aggression no less than to provoke a duel... The practice of invidious social comparisons is awash with aggressive impulses.” (Gay, 4) It is these “aggressive impulses” of “social comparisons” that ensue territorial thinking among humans, mainly men, which can allow our jealousies, more accurately our fears, to consume us. In Fitzgerald’s stories titled Winter Dreams, and The Great Gatsby we see women portrayed in a very specific vanity that expresses their desire for rebellious sexual exploration but their comfort in the Victorian structure that men must maintain the upper hand in securing their futures for them. Judy Jones, the central most prize in Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams, objectifies men like they are usable toys in a search for lasting entertainment. Fitzgerald viewed women no differently than women viewed themselves in that day, as flighty, albeit they were creatures of mass appeal and astounding beauty, but they were flighty. “There was no divergence of method, no jockeying for position or premeditation of effects – there was very little mental quality in any of her affairs.” (Norton Anthology D, 667) Judy Jones never knew what she wanted; she only knew what men wanted. Much as Daisy Buchanan, from his critically acclaimed The Great Gatsby, didn’t know if she wanted to live lavishly with Gatsby or securely with Tom, but she did know that Gatsby would do anything to have her unlike her husband Tom who simply held secure “old money”. There was an intoxication about men that intrigued Judy Jones and Gatsby that intrigued Daisy immensely, though Judy Jones blew threw men like a cold wind through November leaves, Daisy only blew through one man and it was her warm breeze that captivated and killed Gatsby. Is it not human nature to want what we cannot have? Modernism explores that statement to its fullest potential through Fitzgerald’s fingers as they sculpt the true insanity that flows through our veins when our ability to love gets a hold of us and refuses to let us live without it. “Contemporary sensibilities, if actually transported into the physical world in 1900, would experience both a sense of oppression and a queer kind of emptiness and freedom.” (Bogan, 99) It was in that “oppression” that birthed the “queer” (happy) “emptiness” that came from “freedom” which all stemmed strongly from the Victorian way of thinking. A way of thinking that closed off one's feelings for the appearance of perfection within “social comparisons” that stirred “aggressive impulses” like those aggressions that ultimately killed Gatsby. “Social Comparisons” did not diminish with the shortened hemlines and hair, they actually grew stronger in emotional aggression between men and women. Fitzgerald knew this and as a result, he tended to want to mimic life through literature by allowing his characters to question the validity of repressing such innate feelings. For this reason, the Modernist view started to surface because the truth was “In literature “life” [had] not yet been thoroughly examined on the realistic level; “both sides” [had] not been clearly seen or dramatically juxtaposed…” (Bogan, 100) In doing this “they found notions such as “story” and “narrative” to be especially useful in conveying the coherence and the meaning of lives” (McAdams, 100) They were conveying the feelings that embodied emptiness when one was without love and freedom when one was with love. It did not matter what the love sprang from, whether it was lips, eyes, voice, subtle movement or grand gesture it was from another desired human being and the mind could not relinquish the intoxication of the feeling. They were also the “Fragmentary insights, broken examples of self-knowledge, [that were] about to surface and to merge; and the time [was] almost at hand when the true operations of the imagination and of the despised instinctual life of man [would] be laid bare.” (Bogan, 100)

        Judy Jones and Daisy Buchanan were created to embody the actual transitional gap. They were symbolic of all women, of all rich women, of all women wrapped up in the glitz and glam of a showy life of that time period but still unable to completely give up the Victorian regime roots that gave them the security to stay rich. They both still, at the end of their respective stories, go with the social class norm of being the homemaking wife that forgives the husbands indecencies and provides them continual security. 

“Joe Simms has gone to pieces in a way. I don’t mean he beats her, you understand, or anything like that. But he drinks and runs around…” “He treats her like the devil. Oh, they’re not going to get divorced or anything. When he’s particularly outrageous she forgives him.” (Norton Anthology D, 674)

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…” (Fitzgerald, 187-188)

        Women, though they seldom at times understand their own powers, can change men in ways that are incomprehensible but yet infinitely permanent. “No disillusion as to the world in which she had grown up could cure his illusion as to her desirability. Remember that- for only in the light of it can what he did for her be understood.” (Norton Anthology D, 669) Judy Jones was Dexter’s light for on page 664 Fitzgerald wrote twice at the top and bottom of the page “There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming.” Judy is the “star” light that made his heart start “jumping” and his whole body start “gleaming”. When Dexter heard that Judy had lost her luster his “star” light, “jumping” heart, and “gleaming” body became the “…long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone.”; for Dexter knew, “That thing will come back no more.” (Norton Anthology D, 675) Fitzgerald understood that when significant time has passed between two people usually what becomes of them is never what was; as we all are creatures of continual evolution. Fitzgerald knew the crippling effects that happen to a person (as they happened to Judy and Daisy as well) when trying to stay still in hopes that what once happened could still happen again and again at any given chance and could repeat itself forevermore. He also understood the deadly effects on a person when one blindly devotes his whole life to one pretty little thing like a daisy, when that daisy has devoted her pretty little life to survival in the securest sense. “Fitzgerald associates her affections for Gatsby with sunlight” (Sutton, 103) “but also identifies her as the sun…In the first chapter of the novel, Daisy is repeatedly associated with the sun.” (Luft and Dilworth, 84) Gatsby was “winking ferociously toward the fervent sun” (Fitzgerald, 14) as he looked upon Daisy’s face and “the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face” (Fitzgerald, 15) In this we see that “Writing is not simply a “true” representation of an objective “reality”, instead, language creates a particular view of reality. All language has grammatical, narrative, and rhetorical structures that create value, bestow meaning, and constitute… the subjects and objects that emerge in the process.” (Richardson, 116) Judy Jones and Daisy were through “grammatical, narrative and rhetorical structures” the “subjects and objects” that Fitzgerald created as a “value” for how much meaning men put on women.

          Fitzgerald was a Modernist writer who gave little caution to how the truth would be accepted (though it was accepted greatly) by his generational peers, he simply wrote what he knew and he knew of the difference between rich and poor and the insecurities women had from their Victorian upbringings as they danced their way into roaring freedoms and the differences between those cultural extremes. He wrote about what it felt like to desire what one could not have, what it felt like to touch the tangible serenity that came with absolute beauty, and how it felt to lose it when the world shifted and fate stepped in with flighty indecision.

        As alcoholism, the Great Depression, and World War II capped off what Fitzgerald coined the “Roaring Twenties” a new little beauty was born, Sylvia Plath. What women once were flighty about now became surrealistically clear and a new woman’s voice was born. “She knew that becoming successful would be difficult if she were to remain true to her artistic convictions and to her own poetic voice. That knowledge angered her…” (Martin, Kindle location 52) but she prevailed against the odds. “One of the extraordinary things about Sylvia Plath’s early texts is how precisely they inscribe a world not only beyond words but in some ways antithetical to them.” (Axelrod and Dorsey, 78) She was able to see the world clearly enough to be able to change it as she saw fit. She could weld the power of her words to create the unimaginable in a completely explanatory way. She was now the voice for all the women Fitzgerald found so extraordinary and much like those women that Fitzgerald wrote about “whenever she was dissatisfied with a situation, she tried to leave it, to find some more exciting new world.” While it was a flighty nature when Fitzgerald described it for his readers, it was explanations to the angst women were wrought with to her readers. An angst that came from preconditioned notions of how a wife and daughter were supposed to act and be at all times; angst that came from what a woman’s life was supposed to incorporate, perfect daughter, attentiveness, hard worker and continual mother; so essentially a human-machine that ran around the clock. “As American women of the post-war generation came of age, they began to understand the repression their mothers had suffered, and as they imagined lives beyond the family, ownership of their own subjectivity followed.” (Moore, xvii) and Plath was no exception to this subjectivity as she was a woman in the public’s eyes being scrutinized and criticized about how she was balancing all these titles. She rose to the societal challenge and became a beacon of light for women. With her incredible ability to weld sarcasm with educated, soft, respectful diction she wrote one of her most famous poems The Applicant in response to the fallen progress women lost. In all the exploration that came from the 1920s, in the 1950s women were right back to where they started from. As Plath alludes to in The Applicant women now felt again as if they were applying for the position of wife. “First, are you our sort of a person?” (1) “Stop crying./ Open your hand./ Empty? Empty. Here is a hand” (8-10) “Will you marry it?/ It is guaranteed” (14-15) “In fifty, gold./ A living doll, everywhere you look./ It can sew, it can cook,/ It can talk, talk, talk./ It works, there is nothing wrong with it.” (32-36) “My boy, it’s your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.” (39-40) Does she have a “glass eye” so she cannot see clearly, “a crutch” so she cannot stand on her own two feet, “a brace” to keep her from falling, “false teeth”, “Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch” (5) in which she can “hook” that potential mate on? At first, we all start out “Empty” and “stark naked” but in the end, it’s the woman’s responsibility regardless of what she has or doesn’t have to live longer and “thumb shut” her husband’s eyes in a suit that’s “Black and stiff”. (Norton Anthology E, 635) As it is the men who never really cared whether the woman was satisfied; this is how Plath expressed how she knew it was a man’s world. Therefore, all that fun Fitzgerald’s Judy and Daisy represented about how women could free themselves and wear what they wanted, dance with whom they wanted and sleep with whom they wanted in flighty disregard of the person’s feelings came crashing back to longer hemlines covered with aprons in mandatory home economics classes to prepare women to be what their husbands needed. Thus, the same cage that always allured with its safety and security that men at work could provide was back and Plath “…resented having to do the marketing and cooking as well as the housework.” (Martin, Kindle location 2307) So she wrote in her journal and published the true thoughts that women dared not speak aloud but felt when they realized the chauvinistic trap was back.

“The hurt going in, clean as a razor, and the dark blood welling… Sitting in nightgown and sweater in the dining room staring into the full moon, talking to the full moon, with wrongness growing and filling the house like a man-eating plant. The need to go out. It is very quiet. Perhaps he is asleep. Or dead. How to know how long there is before death…” (Martin, Kindle location 2307)

        The oppression of the Victorian era ran deep before the 1920s, so deep that it was easily resurrected in the 1950s and ’60s. Unfortunately, a psychosis of depression began to run deep within Plath. With all the titles she was to wear within her working mother and public title of beacon of light for emerging women she at times fell prey to the oppression after she got married which caused her inner conflict. Though, this psychosis was a double-sided coin and played to her advantage because through her own psychoanalysis of her self; as she was awe-inspiringly in-tuned with her own inner emotions; she was able to channel them into writings that captivated her audiences. She had the ability to capture her pain. No woman truly wants to feel the “razor, and the dark blood welling” but Plath was able to feel every tiny neurological impulse as it was occurring and attach it to the emotion it was producing. “Dying/ Is an art, like everything else/ I do it exceptionally well.” (Norton Anthology E, 626) She wrote this stanza in her poem Lady Lazarus (Norton Anthology E, 625-627) where she compares depression to that of a Nazi murdered Jew. While we are all not Jewish with our bones and tortures on display at the Holocaust Museum, many of us have imagined “The peanut-crunching crowd” staring at us in our own darkest days. When we are depressed our attempts to end our lives can become comparable to “the cat” and with each failed attempt we are the phoenix rising up and “Out of the ash” of our own despair. A despair we feel has been brought upon us by “Herr Doktor” and/or our immediate “Herr Enemy”. Plath shed her skin to her bones to assure people she knew what internal pain felt like. Plath was able to make an art form out of her pain. “The imaginative intensity of her poems is her own triumphant creation out of the difficult circumstances of her life.” (Norton Anthology E, 624)

“The world of the unconscious is not easily made accessible; its contradictory and intense feelings resist light. Feelings of primal powers are truly terrifying and absolutely real to [a] child, and they survive intact in the adult unconscious, retaining their original fairytale proportions and prehistoric power. We may remember such things only in dreams, or we may bring them up for painful weeks at a time to face them down, or we may use them as the impetus for creative acts. Freud argued in The Interpretation of Dreams that “dreaming is a piece of infantile mental life that has been superseded,” adding that dreams and poetic creation alike manifest, though in different ways, the “fulfillments of unconscious wishes”.” This is where “an object-loss” can become “an ego-loss”. (Axelrod and Dorsey, 78, 79)

        Plath was a Modernist literary writer who was caught up in the societal confines that many decades usher people into. A person in a comfortable chair coins a few phrases that send the media into a frenzy and people fall prey to the opinions of the influential because it’s easier to believe the fiction than to digest the truth. Plath was able to understand this about society subconsciously through her continual psychoanalysis of her self and she was able to serve up the truth in an imaginative way that allowed her truths to be relatable in the metaphorical way that brings people to clearer understandings of what is not understood about the worlds we all live in. She inspired authors such as Fran Winant who said women were “never helped by the institutions/ that imprison us” (40-41) “you’ll have to forgive me/ but there’s only so much time/ energy money concern/ to go around/ I have to think of myself/ because who else will/ I have to save things for myself/ because I’m not sure you could save me”. (55-62) So it is through these“Vocabularies of motives, protocols of intentions, and images of selfhood that are expressed in the philosophic anthropologies...” (Brown, 29) that all allow for “semiotics of selfhood” giving the author the ability to “examine the vocabularies of motives and the grammars of interest that are encoded in and realized through various forms of [self] discourse.” (Brown, 58) It's within the discourse of hardships, trials and tribulations such as the one’s Plath went through that were able to influence women like Winant because “an author, at once creating and ‘authorizing’ her own experience, while at the same time emerging from and merging into a pre-given structure of text, context, audience, and interpretation” (Brown, 58) has the power then to externalize what has been internalized for far too long. Unlike in the Victorian era, women were now gaining the right voice and it was stiffening to their male counterparts creating competition with every word. It was the old versus the new, the Victorian verses the Modernist, men versus women always and seemingly forever.

        Much like her predecessor Fitzgerald, Plath was connected to her emotions and a wonderful welder of words, so just as Fitzgerald brought voice to the Victorian suppressions of the 20th century, Plath brought a voice to its returned oppressions of the Donna Reed era that portrayed a very similar unrealistic norm where anti-depressants became the Nazi replacement and men were again trying to stipend a woman’s growth.

        In conclusion, the Modernist era of the beginning of the 20th century not only shortened hemlines bobbed women's hair and subjected everyone's morals to a whole new perspective on life, but it also gave way to the future where women gained vocal ground in illustrating their inner thoughts and feelings. The Victorian era was indeed meeting its successors with Fitzgerald opening the literary world to interpretation and Plath furthering its progression. They wrote solely based on how they felt the world around them was, they attuned their senses and they let the words just pour out of them. Each of them brought a new psychoanalytical aspect to Modernist's writing in their respective time periods that defined the differences in their thoughts from other writers that were writing alongside them. Fitzgerald took the repressed feminine Victorian views and liberated them to express their flighty indecision with whether they could handle complete emancipation or only partial emancipation. This started a cultural shift that influenced those who inspired Plath, who modernized the feminine voice further allowing women to let go of the apron strings of the Victorian securities of an imagined perfection that never existed and enter into a world full of insecurities and the non-guaranteed.



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