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

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1999 by David W. Ullrich

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.