Essay On Sexuality In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Side Of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writings largely focus on the American aristocracy during the 1920s. The ‘20s became alternatively known as “the Jazz Age,” a term coined by Fitzgerald with connotations encompassing the prosperity, frivolity, and decadence of the upper class. The atmosphere and mindset of lavish excess are preserved in the plots and characters of Fitzgerald’s writings. Although Fitzgerald’s protagonists are wealthy, there is a noticeable distinction between those who come from “old money” and those who are considered “new money”. Amory Blaine, of This Side of Paradise, and Jay Gatsby, of The Great Gatsby, exemplify this difference.

Back in the day it was certain if you were gay that would you hide that fact. The 70s was defiantly not a time where homosexuals and bisexuals poorly claim there sexuality. in the shining there we’re a theory of a character being gay and trying to hide it.

F Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Although his last finished work was more than 60 years ago, today they are enjoyed with more enthusiasm and acclaim than they were when they were written. His works are cited as an influence for many other authors. Fitzgerald saw his writing as a reflection of his own life. His works are closely based on his experiences at Princeton, in World War 1 and his love life. Although he was not overly popular at the time of his death, today, he is regarded as one of the best authors of the modern era.

“This Side of Paradise” and “The Great Gatsby” two novels written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, during the post-World War I era. The novels have many similarities and differences in two main characters Amory Blaine and Jay Gatsby, “This Side of Paradise” has remained a novel while “The Great Gatsby” has been put into film in 1975. The comparisons of these two novels are based on the book and film. Blaine and Gatsby had very different lives growing up one of wealth and prestige and one of common wealth, which has affected the drive in life. Blaine and Gatsby had one big thing in common, a woman they felt they could not live without. Finally, in their final chapter of life, Blaine and Gatsby died never getting what they wanted.

To a certain degree, seeing how these matters have progressed since the 1960s gives a good vantage to predicting where they will go in the future. In conclusion, I will look at the future of change on these matters, by examining what seems to be the "avant garde" regarding matters of sex and gender, the phenomenon of transsexualism. I hope an examination of transsexualism will point out some of the contradictions that still continue to exist in American ideas about matters of sex.

With advances in technologies and the development of college and night life, more young people were spending more time together unsupervised. These changes created a sexual revolution in people dated several partners at a time and participated in “petting.” The invention of the automobile allowed for young people to travel outside the family sitting room, even young women learned to drive. Electric lights permitted for young adults to stay out later into the night and created activities to enjoy, such as the theater and night clubs. These developments in the dating culture strayed from the prior Victorian teachings of how ladies should behave with boys. The “new” woman expected to be treated on these dates and that meant that she needed to allow “petting.” Petting consisted of cuddling, kissing, and even foundling. This behavior led older women to believe that their daughters were partaking in premarital sex, Joshua Zeitz disputes this in his book, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern. He claims that the percentage of women who were virgins when they were married only varied between the years of 1910 to 1929 by 3%. This shows that even though young women in the 20s were engaged in “petting,” they were not sexually

At the forefront of the argument is the societal ideology of the American people during the era, most of whom were trapped in a traditionalist mind-set, one that required them to disregard generations of social norms, which had been subconsciously spoon-fed to them through media advertisements such as billboards and magazines most notably Cosmopolitan and Woman’s Journal, that had set a psychologically restrictive standard about what was acceptable. Following the baby boom of the 1960’s with the birth of a massive seventy-six million children, the American people were clearly in a mind-set of traditional family

Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous chronicle of the 1920s Only Yesterday, contended that women’s “growing independence” had accelerated a “revolution in manners and morals” in American society (95). The 1920s did bring significant changes to the lives of American women. World War I, industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, and birth control increased women’s economic, political, and sexual freedom. However, with these advances came pressure to conform to powerful but contradictory archetypes. Women were expected to be both flapper and wife, sex object and mother. Furthermore, Hollywood and the emerging “science” of advertising increasingly tied conceptions of femininity to

F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald is in many ways one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. In his first novel, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald epitomized the mindset of an era with the statement that his generation had, grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, and all faiths in man shaken(Fitzgerald 307). Aside from being a major literary voice of the twenties and thirties, Fitzgerald was also among The Lost Generations harshest and most insightful social critics. In his classic novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald blatantly criticized the immorality, materialism, and hedonism which characterized the lifestyles of Americas bourgeois during the nineteen-twenties. Collectively, Fitzgeralds novels and short stories provide some of the best insight into the lifestyles of the rich during Americas most prosperous era, while simultaneously examining major literary themes such as disillusionment, coming of age, and the corruption of the American Dream. The life of F. Scott Fitzgerald is marked by as much, if not more, romanticism and tragedy than his novels. Throughout Fitzgeralds life, he unsuccessfully battled alcoholism, depression, and himself, in a quest for both personal and literary identity. At the age of twenty-three, Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to critical raves and unimaginable economic success. Shortly after the publishing of this novel, Fitzgerald was able to coerce Zelda Sayre into marriage. This

Charles Scribner III in his introduction to the work remarks that “the title evokes the transient, bittersweet, and ultimately tragic nature of Fitzgerald’s ‘Romance’ (as he had originally subtitled the book)” (Fitzgerald ix). Tender Is the Night parallels Fitzgerald’s own struggles with his mentally ill Zelda, and the characters are carefully constructed from his interactions with the social elite of artists,

At first glance, Ernest Hemingway’s The  Sun Also Rises is an over-dramatized love story of bohemian characters, but with further analysis, the book provides a crucial insight into the effects of World War I on the generation who participated in it. Hemingway’s novel follows a group of expatriates as they travel Europe and experience the post war age of the early 1900’s. The protagonist is Jake Barnes, an American war veteran who lives in Paris and is working as a journalist. Jake was injured during the War and has remained impotent ever since. His love interest, Lady Brett Ashley, is an alcoholic englishwoman with severe promiscuity, which is representative of women and the sexual freedom that emerged during the Progressive Era. Jake and Brett

From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and predating further to Sophocles’ Peleus, the theme of a person being a man once and twice a child is often explored in literature. This idea of infancy being repeated during senility is consistently seen in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, Benjamin Button, as seen through the protagonist’s life. Unconventionally, the story begins with the birth of Benjamin Button as an old man of around seventy as he is “partly crammed into one of the cribs” (Fitzgerald 2). This beginning of his life is mirrored with his end, where he resided in a “white crib” once again (unable to come out), creating a circular return of senile infancy to infancy (14). Button, as an old man, speaks to his father in a series of cries to have his needs

This led to a sexual revolution. The was because of the greater freedom of the pill. The women;s movement and Supreme Court decision to make explicit books more availible. Movies also became more explicit. By the 1970’s the spreqda of benereal diseases and AIDs caused many young people to avoid casual relations. By the 80’s there an emphasis on virginity and celibacy. The dominant trends of independence, freedom, the consumer markey and wealth in youth culture remained. Pop music, fashion, smoking and drugs continued to be the expressions of youth cutlure. By now, the collaps of consensus was in full swing; the next development would be that of a counter-culture.

In his novel This Side of Paradise (1920), F. Scott Fitzgerald presents a powerful and compelling portrait of a young man coming of age during the First World War and its immediate aftermath. Taking its title from the poem “Taire Tahiti” by Rupert Brooke, which itself is a meditation upon the gap between ideal forms of ‘heavenly’ love and real forms of ‘earthly’ love, This Side of Paradise focuses on how the expectations of the novel’s protagonist for himself and for his society do not often match up with the possibilities available to him from his surrounding environment. Ultimately, the novel presents an image of the decline of nineteenth-century modernity during the crucial transition period between the two World Wars and the massive changes such decline wreaked at the time upon the relationship between romantic love and personal wealth.

Conceptual cross-traffic between religious, scientific, and sociocultural principles spurred a Modernist revolution characterized by its focus upon restoring individual autonomy, emancipation from structure, and self-expressionism. As a byproduct of Modernism, a sexual revolution was borne that, while still embodying the Modernist ideology, was more tightly centered upon a revalorization and acceptance of individualism and deviancy in sexuality. James Joyce, a modernist of this revolutionary era, uses the plot of his short story ‘Encounter’ as an analogous, satirical critique of the Christian perspective on the progression of the Modernist sexual revolution.