Flappers and Philosophers

What “flapper” meant in 1920

A flapper, in the American slang of 1920, was a young unmarried woman of the generation that came of age around the First World War and did not intend to be supervised: she went to dances without a chaperone, wore her skirts shorter and her hair looser than her mother had, smoked, drank where drink could be got, and treated being talked about as a form of success. The word was new enough that it still carried an edge, and it was usually said by someone older and disapproving.

Fitzgerald put the word in his title and then, inside the book, gave it to people who use it as an insult. In “The Offshore Pirate,” Ardita Farnam's uncle imagines the newspaper version of her romance and calls her a virtuous flapper. The man who has just seized her uncle's yacht offers her a way off it: “if you will swear on your honor as a flapper — which probably isn’t worth much — that you’ll keep that spoiled little mouth of yours tight shut for forty-eight hours, you can row yourself ashore in our rowboat.” Later he tells her she has a lot of nerve for a flapper, and she answers: “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.” The one young woman in the book who gets called a flapper to her face asks the man to stop.

Why a haircut was a scandal

In 1920 an American woman past girlhood wore her hair long and pinned up. Putting it up was the visible marker of leaving childhood. One of the girls at the country-club dance in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is described as young enough that her hair still feels strange on top of her head. Short hair belonged to children, to dancers and actresses, and to women who had decided to be looked at. Cutting it off in public, at a hotel barber shop, in front of an audience, was not a style choice. It was a statement that could not be taken back for two years.

The story supplies its own evidence. Bernice's aunt is horrified less by the haircut than by the timing: the hostess of the next night's dance, Mrs. Deyo, had read a paper to her club called “The Foibles of the Younger Generation” and spent fifteen minutes of it on bobbed hair, which the narration calls her pet abomination. At the dinner table Bernice, coached, calls the practice unmoral. In the barber shop the first barber's cigarette falls out of his mouth, another barber spoils a boy's haircut, a man in the next chair gets cut by a razor, and small boys flatten their noses against the window from the street. One of them shouts about the long hair on a kid, because a girl with hair down her back reads to him as a child.

Bernice knows exactly what she is doing to herself. Riding downtown with the crowd following behind, she thinks of Marie Antoinette in the tumbrel, and the narration calls the barber's chair a guillotine and the barber the hangman. The result is bad, and she says so before anyone else can: it is ugly as sin, and she had known it would be.

The South and the North in “The Ice Palace”

“The Ice Palace” is a story about the difference between two American places, written by a man from St. Paul, Minnesota, who had just married a woman from Montgomery, Alabama. Sally Carrol Happer's Georgia is warm, slow, poor and backward-looking, and she loves it while seeing it clearly: she tells her friend Clark Darrow that the men she grew up with will all be failures, not only in money but in being “ineffectual and sad,” and in the same breath tells him she would not change him for the world.

Her reason for going north is stated once and never withdrawn. “Clark, I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’ll do, but — well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.” The North she finds is competent, healthy, prosperous and cold in every sense. The women bore her, her fiancé's mother shortens her double name to Sally, and a professor at the university explains over dinner that the local population is slowly turning Scandinavian and gloomy.

The quarrel that decides the story is not about the weather. Harry Bellamy makes a joke about a badly dressed man being a Southerner, then keeps going and calls Southerners degenerates who have grown lazy. Sally Carrol tells him to hush his mouth, that they are her best friends, and that a Southerner would not talk the way he is talking. She then asks him to marry her the following week rather than in March, because she is frightened of having quarrels like that one, and he refuses on the ground that they had already decided. It is the last thing that happens before the ice palace.

These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn’t have been ‘unknown’; but they died for the most beautiful thing in the world — the dead South.

The philosophers

The title divides the book, roughly. The flappers are Ardita Farnam, Sally Carrol Happer, Bernice, Marcia Meadow. The philosophers are four men who each work out a rule for living and then have it tested: Horace Tarbox, who has a master's degree at seventeen and no experience of anything; Bryan Dalyrimple, who decides that good and evil are a hindrance when you want something; Samuel Meredith, whose education comes entirely from being hit; and Kieth, the seminarian in “Benediction,” who has given up the world on the strength of a voice he heard on a train.

“Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” is the hardest of the four and the least like the rest of the book. A decorated soldier comes home, finds the parades over and the promised jobs gone, takes forty dollars a month in a grocery warehouse, and discovers on a salary ledger that the owner's nephew started at sixty. Walking home in the rain he reasons his way to a conclusion: “When I want something bad enough, common sense tells me to go and take it — and not get caught.” Then he cuts an eye-mask out of his coat lining and robs a man on the street. Nothing bad happens to him for it, and the story means that seriously.

“Benediction” is the one story in the book about faith, and readers who know F. Scott Fitzgerald only from The Great Gatsby do not expect it. A young woman on her way to meet a married man stops off at a Jesuit seminary to see her brother, sits through a service in the chapel, and is physically overwhelmed by it to the point of collapse. Fitzgerald never says why. What she decides to do about the man is delivered at the very end in thirteen words, in a torn-up telegram, read out by two clerks who have no idea who she is.

How it reads now

Fitzgerald was twenty-three and writing to a magazine formula, and the formula shows. Several stories end on a reversal timed for the last paragraph. “The Offshore Pirate” has a trick ending of the kind that was standard in the Post. Wealth is described admiringly and often. The narration and the white characters use the racial language of 1920 throughout, particularly in “The Offshore Pirate,” where six of the seven men who take the yacht are Black musicians and the story treats them as scenery.

What survives is the observation. The opening pages of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” describe a country-club dance as a theatre with a gallery of caddies outside the windows and a critical balcony of mothers in wicker chairs, and every social fact in the story follows from that one image. The line most often quoted from the book is a piece of narration in the same story: “At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.” Fitzgerald wrote that at twenty-three.