著者

千代田 夏夫

出版者

東京大学大学院総合文化研究科附属アメリカ太平洋地域研究センター

雑誌

アメリカ太平洋研究 (ISSN:13462989)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.7, pp.127-140, 2007-03

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary works and the word "romanticism" are regarded as very closely related to each other both among general readers and on the academic scene. His major literary materials are youth, beauty, and wealth. However, the strong ezistence of occult factors in his works are also noticeable besides these elements. In this essay, I aim to establish what makes up the crux of Fitzgerald's unique romanticism by inspecting the occult in his works. Reading his early works, including This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and major short stories, we come to notice the importance of the motif of the window. This is where occult factors such as spirits and auditory hallucinations enter into the indoor world.Significantly, those spirits or ghosts are mainly described with the word "something", which has the effect of blurring the object and producing a "closed" atmosphere. Nothing in the room is allowed to exit through the window.As a consequence, the indoors in Fitzgerald's works are always excessively full of "something" and this state reproduces an atmosphere of the occult. The window is a medium between the inside and the outside, and with its transparent glass surface, it functions both as a barrier and as a potential vent for the oppressed air of the indoors.//At the window, where spirits appear, the boundary between the dead and the living becomes obscured. Accordingly, the window becomes a dangerous place where one might be drawn to "that side" (the dead) from "this side" (the living). Whe people actually go out through the window or rebel against the glass, they are destined to die as we see in "The Cut-Glass Bowl", "May Day", ot The Great Gatsby. Glass also functions paradoxically in that it is beautiful and fragile, but simultaneously ominous. This double quality of the glass is equivalent to that of women. With the non-heterosexual gender axis, women in Fitzgerald's works possess a destructive potentiality against men. In the meantime, men's love toward women eventually turns out to be fictious in that it is actually narcissistic love for themselves.Fitzgerald had much concern with the conception of the sentimental and the ramantic. Under his definition of "romantic", that the romantic hopes against hope that things will not last. men are destined to live non-romantically in the enclosed indoors as long as they hope to keep living. Having the fictitious "romance" between men and women as its origin, the crux of Fitzgerald's romanticism is the paradox that one can never be romanticunless one stops living inside the closed room.