This Side of Paradise

From Sharon Carson's Introduction toThis Side of Paradise With the soul of a poet, the ear of a musician, and a psyche inextricably intertwined with that of his culture, F. Scott Fitzgerald was perhaps the last true voice of the romantic American spirit. And in all instances, he sought beyond the constraints of cultural mores and literary conventions to create a body of work that bespeaks its ethos.This Side of Paradise(1920) was Fitzgerald's first novel, the work that made him the voice of postWorld War I America, "the Jazz Age." The Jazz Age was not just a drastic change in the culture; it was a new dimension in consciousness. During the 1910s and 1920s America underwent a massive paradigm shift, a transition from an era of smug Victorian conformity and certainty to one of confusion and ambiguity called "modernism." World War I had accelerated the velocity of this change, and Fitzgerald expresses this transition in attitudes early in his 1917 playThe Debutantewhen flapper Helen Halcyon with her cigarettes and silver flask is asked by her father if she is ready to fit into the wide, wide world, and she replies, "No daddy, just taking a more licensed view of it."The typical 1920's flapper, Helen doesn't want to "fit in" to the rigid roles prescribed for her by the Victorian world, but to live a more independent lifestyle based on her own desires, and to experience greater social and sexual freedom. Her disdain for convention is a symptom of the shifting cultural mores of the Jazz Age. It is ironic that Fitzgerald's first novel is the one for which he achieved the most acclaim, praise from which he never recovered. Perhaps its reception was the result of the novel's sense of anticipation for the age to come. Written between 1917 and 1919 and published on March 26, 1920,This Side of Paradiseactually preceded the Jazz Age, an era that Fitzgerald claimed lasted from May Day 1919 to October 1929, when the stock market crashed. Yet the novel is a sensitive barometer of the shifting social climate. Brian Way remarks that "all Fitzgerald's best writing as a historian of manners is retrospective," and even thoughThe Great Gatsby(1925) andTender Is the Night(1934) both look back on previous summers and previous years, "for a short time at the beginning of his career, Fitzgerald anticipated social change . . . he achieved the kind of popularity which depends upon a writer's being fractionally ahead of his time" (Way,F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction, p. 62; see "For Further Reading"). This Side of Paradisemight have been ahead of its time partly because it examines and rejects the romantic idealism of the Victorian past and reluctantly embraces the troubling uncertainties of the future. It reveals an American culture that is economically on the ascendant but that is psychically ambivalent. World War I had finally ended in November 1918, and the "war to end all wars" had given the nation a euphoric sense of its own power. The stock market was booming, and thousands were getting rich overnight. Many felt the United States had emerged from the war relatively unscathed, having suffered fewer deaths than France, Germany, or Great Britain, and that it was now the greatest nation on earth. But at the same time Americans were troubled by a sense of unease: The trenches in France had demonstrated the brutality of war, and death was on a scale so massive it was incomprehensible. How had the culture, indeed the whole world order, failed so cataclysmically? The war had created a tectonic shift iFitzgerald, F. Scott is the author of 'This Side of Paradise ', published 2005 under ISBN 9781593082437 and ISBN 1593082436.