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

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.