Significant Connections Essay

The Great Gatsby, Winter Dreams, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Ice Palace are all fictional stories written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. These four stories share significant connections which I will explore in this essay. One connection that binds all the stories together is a strong female character of questionable moral values who is the love interest of the main male character in the stories. All of these female characters also have a connection to Fitzgerald’s real-life wife, Zelda Sayre, with whom he had a troubled relationship.

The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as Fitzgerald’s most famous novels.  The story is essentially about the millionaire Jay Gatsby and his idealistic passion and fascination with a beautiful lady named Daisy Buchanan, who is the strong female character of interest in the story. Daisy is framed as a beautiful, rich and silly young lady who had a relationship with Gatsby when he was in the army in Louisville, her hometown, and envisioned that she loved him. When Gatsby was sent to Europe to fight in the Great War, she longed for his return. Daisy became bored and met a wealthy man named Tom Buchanan, with whom she fell in love with and married. Tom and Daisy moved to East Egg in New York, where they led an insignificant and petty existence. When Gatsby arrives back from the war and Daisy meets him at Nick’s house, she has an affair with him; but she knows she will never leave Tom for Gatsby because even though Tom has multiple affairs and treats Daisy badly, she knows that Tom offers her the security and lifestyle to which she is accustomed. “… I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool…” Daisy says this about her ambitions for her daughter in chapter one and this also shows a revealing glimpse into her character hoping that her daughter will be beautiful over intelligent. Like Fitzgerald’s real-life wife Zelda, Daisy is in love with being beautiful, rich and living in luxury. It’s also worth noting that Zelda pressured her husband to move out to the east so that she could mix and socialise with the New England socialites just as Daisy moved to East Egg with Tom to mix with the aristocratic set.

In the short story titled Winter Dreams, we find the lead female character, Judy Jones, shares Daisy Buchanan’s shallow and simple characteristics is also based on Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda. Judy’s first appearance in the story displays her self interest and narcissism when she dominates her nurse by hitting her with a golf club in order to try and get what she wants. Like Daisy, she is the love interest of the main character, Dexter Green, and shares Daisy’s belief that materialistic pursuits will give her happiness. An example of her love for money is when she and Dexter are talking after dinner. Judy asks about Dexter and about what he does for a living before quickly cutting to the line: “Are you poor?”. When Dexter indicates that he is not poor to Judy; she “smiled and the corners of her mouth drooped and an almost imperceptible sway brought her closer to him. “. The importance that Judy places on beauty is shown when she says: “I’m more beautiful than anybody else…why can’t I be happy?” Like Daisy, she also thinks that being beautiful is an important trait for women and will get her where she wants. The life Judy ends up living isn’t the life she dreamed for, ending up with a man who drinks heavily and cheats on her, just as Daisy ended up with a similar man. In both The Great Gatsby and Winter Dreams, the male lead characters Gatsby and Dexter fantasise about these beautiful “perfect” women but do not win the girl of their dreams and their illusions of these women are shattered.

As in The Great Gatsby and Winter Dreams, Fitzgerald’s own life is portrayed in the short story “The Ice Palace”, which chronicles the cultural dispute between a southern woman and her northern lover. Fitzgerald depicts his own relationship with his wife Zelda through the characters of Sally Carrol, who is a southerner, and Harry, who is a northerner. Sally is a ‘southern belle’ very similar to Daisy in The Great Gatbsy. Both Sally and Daisy look for a husband outside their hometown and both desire to ‘go places’. Sally says: “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.” Unlike Daisy and Judy, Sally is not a shallow and self-absorbed character that desires wealth, but she is the love interest of the main male character. The significant connection here is more to do with Fitzgerald’s own conflicts with his wife and the fact that the story ends with Sally becoming disillusioned with life in the north and wanting to go back home to the south. Similarly, the main female characters in both The Great Gatsby and Winter Dreams end up unhappy as they have not acquired their dreams.

In the short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, the main male character, Benjamin Button, experiences love at first sight when he meets a beautiful young woman named Hildegarde, who is the main female character of the story. Just as in the other stories of Fitzgerald’s, the female character is beautiful and that is why Benjamin marries her. Hildegarde tells Benjamin that she appreciates a man of fifty, because at fifty a man is no longer full of himself but not yet too old, and that is why she marries him. As he becomes younger, his wife sees his youthing as something that he ought to be able to control. She can’t accept him as he is, only how she originally saw him. Similarly, in The Great Gatsby, Daisy is unable to accept Gatbsy as the man he is; she can only accept him as he originally appears to her – a man of lower class. “There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button; his wife had ceased to attract him.” This quote shows that as Benjamin grew younger, Hildegarde became less attractive to him, which Benjamin became embarrassed to be with her in public. This possibly reflects Fitzgerald’s own changing feelings about his wife Zelda.

The Great Gatsby, Winter Dreams, The Ice Palace and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button all share significant connections with one another. All the stories have a strong female character that was the love interest of a male. Fitzgerald’s relationship with his wife Zelda is reflected in some way too. Zelda pushed him to write but when he achieved fame, she was not happy. It was the money, not his writing, that drove Zelda to encourage him. This concept is very similar to the characters of Daisy and Judy Jones, both characters always selfish and obsessive with money. All of the books were written and based in the 1920s, an era that Fitzgerald dubbed, “The Jazz Age”. They follow the idea that anyone can achieve the American Dream if they work hard enough, but while they try and achieve wealth, freedom and happiness, many displayed self-indulgent and decadent behaviour. As Fitzgerald was struggling with selling his books and a difficult relationship at the time of writing all these books, they reflect his personal struggle trying to obtain his own American Dream.