Emerging from the Lonely Night: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Shadow of Fin-de-Siècle Aestheticism

Abstract The English and French aestheticists of the 1880s and 1890s appealed immensely to F. Scott Fitzgerald in his youth. They offered a reaction against the earnest optimism, faith in progress, and clear moral divisions that he regarded as Victorian and obsolete. With its dreamlike mystery and exotic indulgence and dandyish sophistication, aestheticism offered Fitzgerald a haven from a disoriented and materialistic society. Fitzgerald later discarded aestheticism as he matured, and this article discusses how his first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, demonstrate why he eventually considered aestheticism self-absorbed and defeatist. Withdrawing scornfully from a fractious society into isolated, languid hypersophistication was for Fitzgerald a trap that only heightened individual malaise. This Side of Paradise charts an escape from the false promises of aestheticism, while The Beautiful and Damned depicts the damage caused by aestheticist indulgence, but both depict aestheticism as a hollow response to a convoluted, overstimulated modern world. Relying on aestheticist platitudes distracts from the responsibility of developing a personal response to an unmoored, directionless age, and it also constitutes a solipsistic and fatalistic rejection of the world, instead of attempting to confront that world more honestly and incisively.