Garden at Vaucresson and The Beautiful and Damned
5:00 PM |
| Edouard Vuillard, Garden at Vaucresson, 1920 |
Take, for example,
F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 novel The
Beautiful and Damned. Cast in the light of the sparkling Jazz Age, Anthony
Patch and his wife Gloria float through New York atop champagne bubbles,
committed to no vocations other than waiting around for inheritance and
improved societal standing. Gloria eschews traditional roles in favor of
cherishing her days as a flirtatious flapper, even after her nuptials.
Fitzgerald best sums up Gloria's perspective in the following passage:
"The reality,
the earthiness, the intolerable sentiment of child-bearing, the menace to her
beauty--had appalled her. She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower,
prolonging and preserving itself. Her sentimentality could cling fiercely to her
own illusions, but her ironic soul whispered that motherhood was also the
privilege of the female baboon."
This preservation
of beauty that occupied the minds of Jazz Age women not only appeared in
Fitzgerald's characters, but also in pieces by artists such as Vuillard. As females
sought independence within society, they championed new ideals of youth and physical appearance. The subject of The Garden at Vaucresson chooses the path that leads
to elegant aging and a charmed life, rather than the route of the laborer.
Perhaps this era of luxury and sophistication appear most evident in such refined
works as The Garden at Vaucresson and The Beautiful and Damned, embodiments of
Fitzgerald’s 1920s.
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