This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF

“woman-as-beautiful-object.” With no purchasing power of her own, she can afford only to be purchased and thus cannot risk playing her only hand, her beauty, on a low bid. Dawson Ryder might be boring, she claims, but is “floating in money” and would be a wiser choice. Unlike the romantic and unrealistic Amory, the young Rosalind has already learned the basic laws of supply and demand, and is a capitalist to the core.
    Rosalind Connage is a fictionalized Ginevra King, the golden girl belonging to the moneyed aristocracy of the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest who threw Fitzgerald over for his lack of money while he was still at Princeton. Bruccoli notes that during Fitzgerald’s last visit to Ginevra, in August 1916 “it was pointedly remarked in Fitzgerald’s hearing that poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls” (p. 64). Fitzgerald’s affair with the girl had a traumatic impact on him, one he remembered for the rest of his life. He observed in 1938 that “in This Side of Paradise I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound of a haemophile.” That wound is once again exposed in the portrait of Rosalind, the symbol of the glittering and magnificent life of the rich that conceals a dark underside of mendacity and deceit. As such, she is the literary predecessor of Fitzgerald’s later heroines, Gloria Gilbert in The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.
    Amory’s fear of poverty is gradually realized and is matched by his repulsion for the ugly conditions to which the poor are condemned. Later in the book, after Amory’s gradual descent into indigence, he stands on a street corner in Manhattan and ponders what he’s seen in the city:
    The rain gave Amory a feeling of detachment, and the numerous unpleasant aspects of city life without money occurred to him in threatening procession. There was the ghastly, stinking crush of the subway ... a squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the smells of the food men ate.... Dirty restaurants where careless, tired people helped themselves to sugar with their own used coffee-spoons” (pp. 237-238).
    At this point he has an argument with himself during which he asks and answers several of his own questions. One of them is “Do you want a lot of money?” His answer is “No. I am merely afraid of being poor” (p. 239). In his fear and anger, he decides that he “detests poor people” and that “it’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor” (p. 238). Thomas Stavola remarks that “the deepest motivation ... for Amory’s hatred of the poor is that he is one of them ... for in America there is no identity without money, the commodity that guarantees social recognition and love” (Scott Fitzgerald, p. 102). Just as Rosalind prefigures Gloria Gilbert and Daisy Buchanan, the fearful and embittered Amory who prefers corruption to poverty can be seen as the genesis of the wealthy Jay Gatsby, who turns to illegal bonds and bootlegging rather than miss his chance for love. And we get an inkling of Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned, who lives in a haze of alcohol and wild parties while waiting to inherit his grandfather’s millions, and perhaps a glimmer of the brilliant psychiatrist Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night, who sells his talent and finally his soul to marry for money. In the end, Fitzgerald’s penetrating observations of the rich reveal not how much, but how little, their money can buy for them.

Sex and the Devil
    Amory’s Princeton friends call him “Original Sin,” and he lives up to his name by seeing the devil in several guises, twice as a living person, and once as an aura. Since this devil appears only to Amory, the implication is that he is undergoing a moral struggle, and as Stephen Tanner notes, “the conflict between good and evil is explicit” (“The Devil and F. Scott Fitzgerald,” p. 67). This