6 - The Fear of Feminization and The Logic of Modest Ambition

Summary

At times Fitzgerald and his contemporaries gained enough perspective on their sense of feeling dispossessed to recognize it as an old story – as we see, for example, in Glenway Wescott’s Goodbye, Wisconsin (1928), where displaced Midwesterners become “a sort of vagrant chosen race like the Jews.” But for the most part they left such ties unexplored. Rather than reach out to recent immigrants, women, or African Americans, they remained almost as jealous of their status and control as Tom Buchanan is of his. Cowley notes, for example, that “the admired writers of the generation were men in the great majority” and adds that they were also “white, middle-class, mostly Protestant by upbringing, and mostly English and Scottish by descent,” without stopping to wonder whether such a configuration was more created than given and, if created, by whom and in whose interests and, further, why, once created, it gained such easy acceptance in the United States during Coolidge’s presidency. In the process, he ignores issues that now leap out at us.

Cowley’s “admired writers” thought of themselves as rejecting the prejudices and provincialisms of their day. They bemoaned the Senate’s acts in the aftermath of the war; denounced the KKK, the Red Scare, and the persecution of Sacco and Vanzetti; and condemned the vulgar materialism and ruthless profiteering of businessmen. Such pronouncements fit their sense of themselves as an oppressed minority of cultural loyalists. Yet many writers, including some Cowley admired, harbored and even expressed versions of the ambitions and prejudices they thought of themselves as rebelling against, a fact that may help to explain why their society rewarded them in ways that it did not reward black writers of Harlem, Jewish writers of New York’s East Side, or women writers anywhere, from New Orleans to Chicago to New York to Paris, many of whom it pushed into the marginalized tasks of running bookstores, editing small journals, and writing diaries.