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Memorials and monuments: historical method and the construction of memory in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Ice Palace" Studies in Short Fiction

 David W. Ullrich

1

In "The Ice Palace" Fitzgerald represents cultural memory as constructed through memorials and monuments: the South's cemetery and the North's ice palace, respectively; this process shapes the identity of Sally Carrol and Harry Bellamy. (3) More trenchantly, Fitzgerald's text examines how cultures combine interpretations of grand-scale historical events, such as the Civil and Great Wars, with collateral, material icons--such as public memorials and monuments--in order to idealize and sanitize the culture's representation to itself and to others.

Thus, I read "The Ice Palace" as Fitzgerald's first sustained inquiry into the construction and politics of memory. Fitzgerald situates his every-woman--Sally Carrol Happer--within the chronological and geographic double plot of post-Civil War South and post-World War I North to demonstrate that (1) local manifestations of cultural memory are merely iterations of universalist hegemonic efforts, (2) antecedent and present cultural forces so saturate individual efforts to establish "identity" that such quests are themselves fictitious gestures, and (3) "history" is subject to reformulations that sanitize the given culture's involvement in the inevitable violences of historical process. In addition, Fitzgerald foregrounds his distrust in the contemporary, conventional myth of geographic relocation as economically (re)invigorating and spiritually (re)deeming by employing a da capo frame narrative to effect closure. Sally Carrol's return to the South does not reaffirm a coddling nostalgia; rather, it emphasizes Fitzgerald's understanding of post-dialectic conceptualizations of history and a clear rejection of American empiricism. "The Ice Palace" is Fitzgerald's articulation of a question posed later by Werner Sollors: "Is it possible to take the postmodern assault seriously and yet adhere to some notion of history and of individual and collective life in the modern world?" (xi). The correlation is not as anachronistic as it seems: Sollors speculates that the term "postmodern" first appeared in 1916 (xiii).

Previous investigations into "The Ice Palace" assume that Fitzgerald represents the cultural identities of the North and the South as signifying stable generalities--a "geographical antithesis" (Kuehl 35) presenting a contrastive "code of values and mode of perception" (Roulston and Roulston 58) by which Fitzgerald examines "the cultural as well as social differences between the North and the South" (Bruccoli, Stories 48). Even the text's most perceptive critics interpret these geographies as alternate "symbolic settings" (Kuehl 34-39), and "emblems" (Petry 43). (4) Critics have not examined the material constructions embedded in each social fabric--the memorials and monuments--as shaping Sally Carrol and Harry Bellamy. (5) Fitzgerald selects the American North and South, cultures typically viewed as antipathetic, to demonstrate how each local culture similarly deploys its memorials and monuments to disseminate conservative ideational content, thus assuring conformity and thwarting the possibility of envisioning "individuality." "The Ice Palace" illustrates how the cultural forces of the North and the South equally constrain Sally Carrol's emerging subjectivity, despite her eagerness to incorporate the ideological premises of each society. Additionally, Fitzgerald demonstrates how memorials and monuments bear Sally Carrol and Harry Bellamy "back ceaselessly into the past" (Great Gatsby 189) by idealizing their ancestors. Fitzgerald posits that the cultural assumptions disseminated by these icons impede Sally Carrol Happer's ability to respond to the social issues confronting a young woman in 1919-20. To this end, Fitzgerald selects a thematics both comprehensive and controversial, including gender and economic empowerment, eugenics and environmental determinism, ethnicity and immigration, and a fractured post-war environment. He concludes that these cultural icons effectively curtail Sally Carrol's attempt to integrate her "subjectivity" within either a Northern or Southern society.

2

     "Oh, she was sweet, Harry! And she was the sort of girl born to stand on
  a wide, pillared porch and welcome folks in. I think perhaps a lot of men
  went away to war meanin' to come back to her; but maybe none of 'em ever
  did."

     He stooped down close to the stone, hunting for any record of marriage.

     "There's nothing here to show." (FP 52) (6)

The cemetery functions as a foundational cultural "site" for Southern women, linking "memories and memorials" (Fox-Genovese 11). Sally Carrol valorizes the cemetery as "one of her favorite haunts" (51), indicating her repeated attempts to integrate her emergent subjectivity within the established cultural mythologies of the South. In particular, two memorials attract Sally Carrol's attention: the gravesite of Margery Lee and the burial grounds for the "Unknown" "Confederate dead" (53). These two sites function as visual metaphors, synedoches, representing a collective cultural memory. They prove the most persuasive rhetorical devices to disseminate values, more visible and authoritative than parents or social peers, who have a negligible impact. To Sally Carrol, the memorials represent "that old time that I've tried to have live in me" (53). Sally Carrol identifies with these public memorials, and in turn, they have encouraged in her a loyalty to the idealized, collective, and provincial mythologies expressed within these constructs. Fitzgerald suggests that the relationship between individual identity and cultural memory is recursive and conservative.

Fitzgerald presents Sally Carrol's and Harry Bellamy's dissimilar responses to the cemetery/memorial as defined by alternative positions on gender, geography, nostalgia, and technology. Harry Bellamy, the hyper-masculine Northerner committed to technology, is blind to the layered textures that .create the cemetery's effectiveness as a potent signifier. His dim reply--"There's nothing here to show"--belies Fitzgerald's cultural investigations, even as his assessment unmasks the genteel, agrarian mythologies Sally Carrol perceives as deficient.

On the other hand, Sally Carrol's imaginative reconstructions of Margery Lee and the Confederate dead are so dominated by received cultural constructs that she can conjure only vague, rhetorical models of gendered identity, those fostered by revisionisms of the Civil War. (7) Sally Carrol cannot imagine a particular representation of Margery Lee ("the sort of girl," "I think perhaps," and "maybe" [52]) because Margery Lee's idealized position within the received cultural memory impedes a detailed representation. She can only construct Margery Lee through genetic mythologies of "gorgeous hoopskirts" (52). As a result, Sally Carrol places Margery Lee in a very odd, liminal position--"on a wide, pillared porch"--somewhere between, but excluded from, both a domestic setting and private life and society at large and public life. Fitzgerald alerts his readers to these issues by troping Margery Lee's headstone, specified as "1844-1873[,]" as an "eloquent date" (52). Its eloquence can be found in that the Civil War--the cultural event that privileges her ideational content--disenfranchises her. Margery Lee's prime years of eligibility for marriage--from 17 to 21 (Fox-Genovese 254-56, Scott 27-28, Spruill 138-39)--coincide exactly with the Civil War, and social historians note, "the prospect of a long war fostered a sense of urgency regarding marital prospects" (Anderson 77; Scott 80-102). (8) Thus, a rhetorical, idealized cultural construct dominates Sally Carrol's identity-formation despite the fact that Margery Lee inhabits a marginal, largely decorative place within society and dies at 29.

Fitzgerald links Margery Lee to the "Confederate dead" (53) to dramatize how local and idealized models of gender and a gendered economics are formulated amidst the pressures of wartime propaganda and post-war reaction. (9) As with Margery Lee, Sally Carrol cannot conceive of a model of male-gendered behavior with depth or accuracy. The "Confederate dead" are "Unknown," "indecipherable," and "just men, unimportant evidently" (53). Her contemporary, Clark Darrow, becomes "the living in the past" (50). Moreover, the "pained, strained" Clark Darrow (50) "considered himself a spare part, and rather likely to break" (47) and guesses "We'll all be failures?" (50). Sally Carrol's understanding of masculine identity is already framed as economically impotent ("money failures" [50]) and technologically deficient; Clark Darrow shares these beliefs, as indicated by the "death-rattle" of his "ancient Ford" (47). These local conceptions of masculinity have been carefully nurtured by memorials to the "Confederate dead," their idealized cultural status, and their many significations. Sally Carrol's fear of being wed to a "beautiful" but "useless" existence is reconfigured in the "ineffectual and sad" Tarleton males (50). The powerful, nostalgic representations enshrined in the cemetery reify disempowered models of gendered, economic, and technologic "identity" and overshadow traditional, mainstream constructions, such as family. Sally Carrol's search for identity takes place without a detailed understanding of history, gender, or economics. Her identity is shaped by a culture that reduces the complex myriad of historical events to mythologies such as "noblesse oblige" (53) and disseminates them through compelling, sentimental public memorials. Sally Carrol's own desire to "be useful somewhere [...] when I'm not beautiful anymore" (50) expresses the limits of her nascent understanding of gender, identity, and economics. Her desire both recapitulates Margery Lee's position and foregrounds her wish to integrate into either social fabric.

Fitzgerald uses the site of a Southern cemetery, replete with Civil War memorials and attendant mythologies, as an historical antecedent to contextualize his own contemporary society's efforts to combat expanding gender and economic roles for women. Fitzgerald's double plot clearly suggests that Southern women who wanted to be "useful" during the Civil War era faced obstacles similar to those confronting women in the post-World War I climate of the industrialized North. Social historians confirm Fitzgerald's insight, noting that the Civil War (Scott 80-102, 172) and World War I (Chafe 65-68) offered women an artificial and short-lived opportunity to contribute to the work force. As happened in the South after the Civil War, "wartime dislocation and postwar reaction" similarly impede women's economic roles after World War I (Cott 62). Fitzgerald's double plot implies that the modern woman's potential economic and political enfranchisement is foredestined to be compromised by the culture's own conservative reactions to what it ostensibly advances.

Events contemporary with Fitzgerald's act of writing "The Ice Palace" play an important role in its thematics. He wrote "The Ice Palace" as the national debate over women's suffrage came to a head. Fitzgerald writes (December 1919) and published (22 May 1920) "The Ice Palace" between the Senate's passing the Nineteenth Amendment and the Amendment's being ratified. Moreover, the massive, ultra-patriotic American Legion rallies of November 1919, held in Minneapolis, epitomize the kind of propaganda Fitzgerald found repugnant (Bruccoli, Authorship "Dos Passos"). Fitzgerald scripts the conflicts of his own time--as exampled by Harry's masculine braggadocio set against Sally Carrol's desire to be useful--as periodic iterations of conflicts occurring throughout history, conflicts exacerbated by cultural constructs and resulting in little or no progress. Thus, the cemetery in "The Ice Palace" should be read as a local example of recurring, universal efforts to obscure real-world exigencies--such as gender and national conflict--with overpowering nostalgia. Such memorials both reduce and sentimentalize history and sanitize one's own culture's participation and culpability in historical events.

By depicting memorials and monuments as shaping cultural memory and forming individual identity, Fitzgerald suggests Sally Carrol's "energ[etic]" side, her more modern, if vague, imperative to be "useful" (50), merely replaces an older, more transparent mythology with an appealing, but equally suspect, one. The Southern memorial of cemetery/nostalgia is replaced by the Northern monument of ice palace/technology. Sally Carrol envisions escaping to "somewhere" where personal growth corresponds with (the myth of) the historical growth of the society at large: "I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale" (50). (10) Far from pandering to his Saturday Evening Post audience as critics suggest (Roulston and Roulston 41-64), Fitzgerald's plot encourages a general readership's narrative expectations and geographic prejudices only to subvert them. Post readers expect Sally Carrol--who smokes, bobs her hair, curses, and insists on her rightful name--to find happiness in the North, where her transformation into a modern woman will be aided through geographic relocation and (from a Northern reader's perspective) a more enlightened culture. However, Fitzgerald frustrates such expectations and exposes as unfounded the early twentieth-century view of geographic relocation as economically reinvigorating. Fitzgerald encourages his Post readers to identify with Sally Carrol's credo of enfranchisement through utility and her recognition that beauty is transitory. Such sentiments espouse a potent mix of Puritanism and industriousness endorsed by mainstream America in 1920. As such, Sally Carol's anticipated marriage would be read as uniting the separate economic mythologies and geographic regions of the agrarian Old South and the industrial Gilded North. However, Fitzgerald's social criticism states explicitly that, although Sally Carrol desires to incorporate these mythologies, neither geographic region offers her participation in these cultural practices. Her willingness to assimilate both local economic structures actually exacerbates her historical position as a modern woman, alienating her from the South/past and fostering naive fantasies about the North/future. In fact, Sally Carrol discovers that the material forces of culture operating in the North are almost identical to those of the South, and equally repressive.

3

     "It's a hundred and seventy feet tall," Harry was saying [...]; "covers
  six thousand square yards."

     She caught snatches of the conversation: "One main hall"--"walls twenty
  to forty inches thick"--"and the ice cave has almost a mile of--" (65)

Set against the memorial/cemetery and its moribund associations, the ice palace appears as a "glittering" (66) and "gorgeous" (65) alternative. Indeed, Fitzgerald initially portrays the ice palace as an impressive example of Gilded Age can-do work ethic: the ice palace is built "on a tremendous scale" (57). Its "innumerable electric lights" and pre-eminence "on a tall hill" combine to make it the town's "great central hall" (65) and a sign of the community's enterprising commitment to technology and science. Fitzgerald waits until the narrative shifts North to mention "telegraph-poles," "Pullman," "trolley-car" (55), and electricity (65). However, Fitzgerald represents Harry Bellamy as so personally invested in the ice palace--" `It's beautiful!' he cried excitedly. `My Golly, it's beautiful, [i]sn't it!" (65)--that he cannot see it as a monument disseminating idealized mythologies that shape his identity and future.

Fitzgerald depicts the "glittering" ice palace and its pyrotechnics as a synechdoche for the culture's beliefs. (11) More trenchantly, Fitzgerald emphasizes the ice palace's "translucent effect" (66) to capture in a complex visual image the way in which the foundational assumptions of a culture become both invisible and transcendent to that culture. The ice palace so mesmerizes Harry's culture because it represents the culture's constructions as beautiful, crystalline truths to itself, and not as the provincial and dangerous mythologies they, in fact, are. Fitzgerald offers a frank and unflinching critique of the North as blindly seeking to propagate its mythologies under the modern and ostensibly self-justifying rubrics of science and health. These particular local assumptions are as systemically ingrained in Northern culture as in its Confederate counterpart. Fitzgerald substitutes the South/past "romance" of "noblesse oblige" (53) with the similar North/present "science" of eugenics and environmental determinism. Finally, Fitzgerald exposes the ice palace as a "gorgeous transparency," which I read as Fitzgerald's unambiguous critique of Northern culture as masochistically and unconsciously (i.e., blindly) embracing the pernicious effects that its cultural mythologies inflict upon its own inhabitants. Again, Fitzgerald presents cultural hegemony and the reconstruction of memory as recursive, conservative, and debilitating, even as he foregrounds for the reader that the culture's methods of dissemination employ attractive and compelling artifacts. As we will see, the wished-for union between genders, economies, geographies, and cultures is sacrificed to the ice palace and its many potent self-significations.

Erected out of local environmental and climactic conditions and subject to these for its survival, the ice palace functions to mythologize the climate and geography that make its presence possible as "healthy" (62) and prosperous ("Look at John J. Fishburn" [58]). With little ostensible history, this "three-generation town" (56) (12) erects a visually stunning, self-signifying symbol cut out of its own environment and worships it as intensely as Sally Carrol does her cemetery. However, the ice palace, although constructed in the present, does have a history, one that hearkens much farther back into the past than its last iteration in 1885, and one that Harry's community seeks to repress. To that end, Harry's culture replaces history with the modern mythologies of science/health and technology/money to legitimize their "offering sacrifice" (67) to the ice palace. Thus, the ice palace qua monument perpetuates a local agenda, romanticizing the culture to itself and exculpating it from historical complicity. Although freighted with weighty and seemingly contradictory values, the cultural icons of the North and the South have similar ends: cultural blindness and amnesia of massive proportion. Moreover, Fitzgerald exposes the North's mythologizing its environment as especially conducive to health as an elaborate compensatory fetish. Its inhabitants are described as "gloomy," "melancholy," and embracing a "brooding rigidity" (60) that borders on the suicidal, despite the "beautiful" (65, 65, 66) ice palace. The cemetery and the ice palace function as equivalent metaphors for death.

Fitzgerald demonstrates how Northern mythologies of eugenics and environmental determinism represent local, provincial constructions--Ibsen's influence is noteworthy here--although the culture presents them to itself as modern, scientific truths. Harry's own imaginative construction of what constitutes health and good looks is exposed as pre-determined by a very particular code of physiognomic traits that Harry articulates and Fitzgerald, through Sally Carrol, critiques as "sweepin' generalities" (63). Harry's view of Southern males as "degenerates [...]. They've lived so long down there with all the colored people that they've gotten lazy and shiftless" (63) foregrounds such assertions as geographic and cultural prejudices. His opinion demonstrates how important facile eugenics and environmental determinism are to his understanding of identity-formation. (13) At the same time, however, Harry is "anxious to extort enthusiasm" from Sally Carrol (56). He "demands" (58) that his friends are "healthy" (62) and "a good-looking crowd" (58), even though she finds the women "listless" (55) and the men "formal" (58). Advertisement

Theories on racial health and environmental determinism were widespread in the late teens, as evidenced by Madison Grant's "popular" and "influential" Passing of the Great Race (1916 [Delger 48,200]). These theories were debated at most major universities, including Princeton, where in 1923, Edwin Grant Conklin, professor of biology wrote a book on the subject (Delger 150). (Princeton University Archivists confirm that Professor Conklin taught at Princeton while Fitzgerald was enrolled there, although he took Chemistry, not Biology [Weeren and Lutz].) Grant's theories speculate on the conservation of physiognomic (significantly, not physiologic or anatomic) characteristics and on environmental determinism, especially the effects of habitat and climate on the health of an indigenous population. (14)

At the dinner-dance where Harry instructs Sally Carrol as to the social structure of the town, Harry expresses his understanding of both health and climate in terms closely paralleling Grant's formulations on eugenics and environmental determinism. Harry identifies specific physiognomic traits as indicating health--"the red-haired fellow" is a "Yale hockey captain"--and he brags that "the best athletes in the world come from these states round here" (58). More broadly, the particular physiognomic traits mentioned in the North--red complexion, red face; blond, flaxen, and red hair--all signify health. (15) Further, Harry articulates then-current speculations on the relationship between climate and health: "Everybody's healthy here. We're out in the cold as soon as we're old enough to walk. Wonderful climate!" (63) and "Can you feel the pep in the air?" (56). Harry embraces these constructions wholeheartedly, although Fitzgerald unambiguously recognizes them as "being in the wrong" (64). Fitzgerald amplifies Harry's "scientific" understanding of health and environment to foreground the extent to which Harry's allegiances to these values so transfix him that they blind his judgment. The ice palace, as a monument, keeps Harry appreciatively focused on its glitter and gorgeousness, and what it seems to portend: health and wealth.

Fitzgerald employs a series of metaphors to encourage his Post readership's identification with these then-current mythologies, myths he clearly subverts. (16) Metaphors such as "strawberry" face, "flaxen" hair, "corn-colored" hair and "Spud Hubbard" link "the good-looking crowd" to a beguiling and powerful economic mythology that mixes agrarian traditions with technological innovations. This newly-evolving paradigm is exemplified by John J. Fishburn, the "greatest wheat man in the Northwest," and endorsed by the high-brow Eastern culture of "Princeton and Yale" (58). Healthy, wealthy, and wise walk confidently together in a self-consciously masculine fashion. (17) This Northern and masculinized economic domain has no room for a "spare part" like Clark Darrow or a beautiful but impoverished upstart, like Sally Carrol. Advertisement

Thus, Sally Carrol's getting lost in the ice palace narrativizes Harry's unspoken doubts about her genetic make-up, environmental predisposition, adherence to traditional gender roles, and commitment to a commodified self. Although Sally Carrol has the requisite "corn-colored" hair (48), Harry fears she may be, like the Southern males, "degenerate" (63) or "money failures" (50) or, like Margery Lee, have "nothing here to show." For her part, Sally Carrol repeatedly associates Harry's mother with the image of an egg (56, 61, 62), a recurrent Fitzgerald image (East/West Egg) best glossed by his own term, "embryonic history," and denoting lineage or "breeding" (Turnbull 503). The disapproval of Harry's mother stems from her reservations about Sally Carrol's genetic composition and geographic origin rather than her ostensible objections to Sally Carrol's smoking, bobbed hair, and double first name.

I have been at pains to demonstrate Fitzgerald's sensitivity to cultural ideologies. Fitzgerald's letters reveal his awareness of cultural memory as it informs the interrelationship between "ancestral pretensions," societal competition, and ethnographic representation (Turnbull 503). (18) His ethnic trope--"I am half black Irish"--recounts his own family's competitions over origin and hierarchy and displaces them "back ceaselessly into the past" and onto a European landscape, where claims of cultural superiority are, again, contested by "pure" Celtic/Viking and "black" Spanish lineages. (19)

Fabricating an acceptable cultural identity informs the North's reconstructions of history as pervasively as it does in the South. Harry, Harry's mother, and the town's "social model" all seek to conserve social status by revising historical events through a truncated cultural memory. Harry explains that history is a potential source of embarrassment because of the "pretty queer jobs" (56) one's immigrant parents had to secure, and he points out that the father of the social model was "the first public ash man" (57). The "social model for the town" (57) teaches a self divorced from any historical past, including family. The entire society adopts a revisionist and dissociative understanding of historical processes and genealogy: "Everybody has a father, and about half of us have grandfathers. Back of that we don't go" (56).

The contrasting imagery of the "first public ash man" and the "beautiful" and "translucent" ice palace warrants deconstruction. A monument built from blocks "selected for their purity and clearness" (66) and the "cleanest ice they could find" (57), the ice palace can be read as a community-wide effort to obscure whatever "queer jobs" the "founding" "fathers" (56) had to do upon arriving in America. In place of history and genealogy, the community erects a "gorgeous transparency" (65), constructed on a well-documented and self-aggrandizing "tremendous scale" (57). The North erects and pays homage to this monument, foregrounding its desire for a pure, clean, but ultimately, vacant self-representation in history. The ice palace represents a communal effort to obscure through sheer electric glitz the real-world consequences resulting from economic strife and social upheaval. However, the social and economic advances celebrated by the ice palace become so sanitized that Sally Carrol finds it an "empty chamber," full of "glittering passage[s] with darkness at the end" (68). Lodged in its belly, Sally Carrol links the ice palace's implied economic mythologies with death, describing it as "a damp vault connecting empty tombs" (68). Represented as a "mansion" (66) of "green shimmer" (67), the ice palace (and ash man) foreshadow Gatsby's mansion and its uneasy juxtaposition with the valley of ashes.

Of course, Sally Carrol never deconstructs the ice palace. However, Roger Patton uses Bellamy's own "logic" against himself and exposes the "melancholy" (60) of the town. Roger Patton's literary critique of Ibsen rebuts Bellamy's position: "Well, you find in his characters a certain brooding rigidity. They're righteous, narrow, and cheerless" (60). Patton attributes Swedish "melancholy" to environmental determinism: "It's these long winters" (60). More meaningfully, he articulates for Sally Carrol exactly what a future in the North holds for her: by marriage, she will enter into the Swedish community ("Your future sister-in-law is half Swedish"); reside in a community that privileges its melancholy ("we've had four Swedish governors"); and inhabit a most unhealthy climate ("Scandinavians, you know, have the largest suicide rate in the world" [60]). Being "imported" himself (59), Roger Patton has the perspective to see that, although the townspeople have the ruddy look of health, they harbor deep-seated, unresolved conflicts. Roger Patton's catalog of psychological characteristics exposes Bellamy's hyper-masculine emphasis on physical appearance and athletic prowess as compensation for a collective melancholy of which he is not aware. Bellamy's own personal strategy is writ large in the community: both overcompensate for personal insecurities or embarrassments in history by foregrounding massive, powerful self-constructions. These cultural dynamics put into ironic perspective Sally Carrol's first direct speech to Harry Bellamy: "Are you mournful by nature?" His crisp, self-assured, "Not I" (51) should be read with considerable suspicion.

Thus, Fitzgerald represents both the North and South as harboring a deep-seated cultural malaise and as marshalling hegemonic signifiers to romanticize or expunge communal, historical traumas, be they humiliating military defeats or dubious economic origins. Fitzgerald's double-plotted narrative demonstrates that cultures in every historical period and geographic region deploy such artifacts and illustrates how local cultures rewrite history to exonerate or compensate for past embarrassments. Sally Carrol leaves her native South full of naive hopes but finds no meaningful place within the North to achieve personal, social, or economic integration. Situated between two bankrupt geographies, Sally Carrol assumes the social position of an immigrant--"these things were foreign, foreign" (69).

  4

  And then one afternoon in her second week she and Harry hovered on the edge
  of a dangerously steep quarrel. She considered that he precipitated it
  entirely, though the Serbia in the case was an unknown man who had not had
  his trousers pressed. (62)

"Serbia" functions as a metonym indicating a troublemaker or instigator and alludes to Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo, Bosnia, on 28 June 1914, ushering in World War I. Sally Carrol and Harry Bellamy's "dangerously steep quarrel" opens with an allusion to Princip and concludes with "Dixie." Framed within allusions to political and ethnic tensions and to the Civil War and the Great War, their quarrel is a gendered and geographically-driven struggle for historiographic representation. Harry Bellamy assumes the role of cultural authority in a confident but irrational manner. He takes the "extreme bagginess" of the "trousers" of the man "on the street corner" to symbolize all Southern males as "degenerate" and "ill dressed" (63). Harry's harsh words serve as an implicit warning to Sally Carrol: to live in the North, she must renounce any claims to her culture's understanding of gender, economics, and historiographic representation. She must accept a Northern interpretation of Southern history and culture.

Still, one wonders at Harry's vitriolic and over-determined reaction to an unknown man's unpressed trousers--"Those damn Southerners" (62) a "hangdog, ill-dressed slovenly lot" (63)--and at Fitzgerald's editorializing Harry's reply as "malignantly apologetic" (63). "Malignant" signifies that Harry's reactionary vehemence is, in fact, a self-destructive and self-loathing gesture. His preoccupations with ethnic origins and social acceptance result in a continual questioning from within that erodes his own culturally-invested subjectivity. Harry's incorporating the town's rigid hierarchy and social scrutiny generates profound self-doubt, an affiction that corrodes even his vision of his prospective spouse. Harry projects this melancholy onto an innocent bystander. It is a cautionary lesson for the Happer girl.

In addition, "the Serbia" is a public reminder of the previous social position of the town's masculine ancestry and a public affront to its resultant conception of masculinity. Unpressed trousers suggest the real-world working conditions of the "queer jobs" held by many of the town's "grandfathers" (56). "Queer" in 1920 has a variety of possible significations; the most prevalent links the word to "of doubtful origin" and "having a strange and odd appearance" ("queer" OED). It is tempting to read "queer" in the context of Harry's exaggerated notions of masculinity, and in fact, the OED notes that "queer" undergoes a morphological shift in America to include reference to homosexuals "in 1922" ("queer" OED 1982). Thus, the unnamed "Serbia" stands for all those not acculturated to the gender distinctions carefully delineated in this very newly-privileged society. Like the "unknown" Confederate Dead, this man represents what Harry and his community want to forget: the previous generation's economic and political vulnerability. The "Serbia" represents the return of the repressed; the ash man reanimated in the next-generation, predominately Southern European, immigrant wave. Finally, when Harry and Sally Carrol misread the man's "tense expression[,]" as implying he was "about to leap toward the chilly sky" (62-63), their mistake demonstrates brilliantly the community's predisposition to suicidal melancholia.

  5

  The leading column turned and halted, platoon deployed in front of platoon
  until the whole procession made a solid flag of flame [...]. She sat very
  quiet, listening while the staccato cries rent the stillness; and then she
  started, for there was a volley of explosion, and great clouds of smoke
  went up here and there. (67)

At a crucial moment Sally Carrol becomes lost and Harry "darted down one of the half-dozen glittering passages" (67) and is enthusiastically swallowed up into the belly of the ice palace. Under the influence of the processional "phantasmagoria" (67), Harry and his entire community escape from its "haughty and expensive aloofness" (57) and "conscious precision" (58), typified by Harry's house, where "all the chairs had little lace squares where one's head should rest" (56). In an extraordinary scene eerily capturing the massive rallies of 1919 and 1920 at home and abroad, Fitzgerald transforms Harry's community into a "viking tribe traversing an ancient wild" and "offering sacrifice" to "the gray pagan God of Snow" (66-67). The implied violences of the "trans[-]parent" ice palace surface amidst the "carnival" (57) and "phantasmagoria," and the ancient histories, rituals, and violences of the community are unleashed. (20)

Fitzgerald juxtaposes these images with several references to specific Native American artifacts--"Moccasined," "mackinaws," "toboggan," and "Wacouta" (i.e., Dakota) (67)--to link ancient Viking migratory patters with the recent' Scandinavian "settlement" of Minnesota. Such remnant artifacts speak to the historical realities of violence and genocide that the town seeks to conceal from itself by erecting the ice palace. The 1862 Sioux rebellion looms large here. Hamp Smith, of the Minnesota Historical Society, notes that of the several accounts of the Sioux uprising available to the young Fitzgerald, "foremost among these" is the provocatively entitled Minnesota in the Civil War and Indian War (1891) (Smith). Received history in Minnesota in 1891 lumps together the "betrayals" of the Confederacy and the Dakota. The complicity of Harry's culture in violence, although repressed, finds release as "great banks of fire" that become a "solid flag of flame" amidst "thousands of voices" singing and chanting (67). However, the town's elaborate pageantry does not ward off its melancholy; although the celebration begins with the jaunty "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here!," it ends with "a dim row of pale faces" (66) and a "flat, lifeless echo" (68).

At the moment Harry Bellamy asserts his allegiance to the ice palace and leaves Sally Carrol to fend for herself--as Margery Lee must have had to during the Civil War--Fitzgerald describes Sally Carrol as a soldier isolated and trapped amidst a "volley of explosion[,]" "great clouds of smoke[,]" and "platoon deployed in front of platoon" (67). Alone in the ice palace with its trench-like "labyrinths[,]" "passages[,]" and "alleys[,]" Sally Carrol awaits the "icy breath of death" (67-68). Fitzgerald's descriptions of Sally Carrol can be read in conjunction with his 1921 review of Dos Passos's Three Soldiers. Sally Carrol's "deep terror" from the spatial disorientation (68) and "muddled acoustics" (66) of the ice palace's "total darkness" recall the same "hysteria and panic" and "nightmare" that Fitzgerald notes soldiers experience during combat (qtd. in Bruccoli, Authorship 48). Critical assessments of Sally Carrol's responses to being entombed in the ice palace have not fully contextualized Fitzgerald's militaristic descriptions (Moses). I read Sally Carrol's "long low cry" of "Take me home" and her hallucinations of Margery Lee (69-70) as informed by and approximating the combat soldier's well-documented fear of being buried on foreign soil. (21) Advertisement

When juxtaposed to the confident, "full-throated resonant chant" of the marching clubs, Sally Carrol's speechlessness indicates an astonished silence at the "thousands of voices" that "swelled" (67) into a vast mobilization of public sentiment. Massive public demonstrations are on Fitzgerald's mind, as evidenced in "May Day," and Fitzgerald excoriates patriotic war rhetoric as "slaughter-crazy" with its "preposterous speeches" (qtd. in Bruccoli, Authorship 48; see also, Letters 414). Sally Carrol's leaving the North repudiates a society dedicated to obscuring its economic origins with glittering, but vacuous, representations of itself in history, even as it celebrates, clandestinely, a militaristic vision of life. Belonging to a culture of "strange courtliness and chivalry" (53), she already understands how the romanticization of war through ritual produces disillusionment in the men, social estrangement in the women, and exaggerated gender roles--the "whole gorgeous farce" of war propaganda (qtd. in Bruccoli, Authorship 48).

Thus, although Sally Carrol is positioned between alternative deaths--the "languid paradise of dreamy skies" (48) and the "tombing heaps of sleet" (65)--one should not over-emphasize her "small, frightened cry" at the expense of her "furious, despairing energy" (68). Fitzgerald portrays Sally Carrol as courageous and grants her a limited victory commensurate with his limited notion of individualism.

Fitzgerald's da capo conclusion reinforces how recapitulations of past events effect present circumstances. Although Sally Carrol occupies essentially the same place at the text's beginning as at its end, one should not conclude that she "has not grown" (Moses 13), or has "made no apparent progress" (Petry 29), or "confirms her identity" by returning South (Kuehl 39). Actually, Fitzgerald's conclusion conforms to his aesthetics of closure at this time. He states works that "reached some sort of decision" by "heroic dying" are "so obvious as to be painful," and he prefers "no sudden change of pace at the end" (qtd. in Bruccoli, Authorship 49-50, 108). Fitzgerald refuses, for example, the sensational option of having his character freeze to death, as happens in many of Robert Service's tidy conclusions; recall "The Cremation of Sam McGee." (22) Fitzgerald also rejects a dramatic, but improbable, reversal of the spirited and independent Sally Carrol. Rather, Sally Carrol's final position portrays a modernist woman isolated from every society she has inhabited. Within this no-win situation she flatly states, "Spect to die any minute" (70). Sally Carrol's deliberate and concluding self-appraisal--"Hate to move. But I reckon so" (71)--indicates an existential awareness that real growth is inevitable and painful. In contrast to her initial perception, she understands that geographic movement is a superficial substitute for self-knowledge fraught with its own problems. In this, she anticipates a central insight of The Great Gatsby--geographic relocation, perhaps the quintessential Americanist escape, is not a response to, but an avoidance of, constructing an "identity" within the thickly-woven fabric of cultural memory and social change.

How did the very young Fitzgerald acquire a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which cultural and historiographic representations operate as constructions, and local memorials and monuments serve to disseminate regional propaganda? Fitzgerald's travels, his sensitivities to class structure and social snobbery, and his wry, defensive humor, combined to grant him a keen awareness of geographic provincialism and social hierarchy. Fitzgerald's travels from 1917 to 1919 are astounding. His military service, trips home and to Zelda, and general restlessness place him, in rough chronological order, as follows: Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Louisville, Kentucky; Augusta, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; Long Island, New York (at Camp Mills); back to Montgomery, Alabama; to 200 Claremont Avenue in Manhattan; 599 Summit Avenue in St. Paul (summer 1919); back to New York; down to New Orleans and, from there, twice over to Montgomery; back to New York. These journeys, occurring before any visit to Europe, develop in Fitzgerald a sensitivity to American geography, regional cultures, and class structure. Fitzgerald's endless geographical displacements afford him the cosmopolitan perspective to understand how a local culture blinds itself with its own pretensions, its own histories, its own civic structures. It gives him the perspective to understand that St. Paul, New York City, and Montgomery all harbor provincialism and construct carefully assembled "histories" reinforced by civic monuments, which, when viewed from another geographic perspective, seem naive, self-congratulatory, or repugnant. A St. Paul boy living in New York City and in love with a high-spirited girl from Montgomery, Alabama, Fitzgerald's sensitivity to geographic prejudice is a formative influence on his fiction, one not sufficiently recognized by literary critics. His relatively obscure non-fiction prose piece "The Cruise of the Rolling Junk" (1922) chronicles Scott and Zelda's July 1920 drive from Westport, Connecticut to Montgomery, Alabama. In that piece Fitzgerald recounts a "snicker[ing] crowd" mocking their destination, "Alabama," as "the name of a hotel up to [sic] New York" (25). Clearly, the Fitzgerald of 1920 was already well aware of the class structure, ethnic origins, and geographic prejudice implied in the exchange.