Isabelle

Fitzgerald starts the subsection titled “Isabelle” writing about Isabelle which was a change from his usual style of focusing primarily on Amory’s action or his direct thoughts and then continues to write about her for several more pages, losing Amory as the focal point, although he is featured in her thoughts. Since Fitzgerald exercises so much energy to describe Isabella’s physical appearance, temperament, thoughts, emotion, and motivation, I was led to believe that she was to play a large part in Amory’s life. Overall, Isabelle struck me as a typical sixteen year old, immature yet trying to emit that air of sophistication that she must have paired with older girls of her acquaintance. Fitzgerald gives the impression that although Isabelle was a “Speed,” a girl that could be easily kissed, she also wants to leave that behind her but “…in a strange town, it was advantageous (Fitzgerald, 70).” This brings me back to her desire to be seen as more mature and sophisticated, she wants a striking reputation that impresses the other girls that she meets but Isabelle isn’t mature enough to carry it with pride. In that sense, she resembles Amory. Both are shallow, want to be mature but fail at it, and don’t see any real concerns or problems. Upon meeting Amory, Isabelle acts like the tease towards him and isn’t willing to lose the upper hand in their exchange, the game is to be played her way. She loves the attention that is besotted on her throughout the dinner; Froggy Parker was so engrossed that he even goes as far as to forget his good manners towards his date and Amory is in open admiration of Isabelle. However, Amory is also smooth and within a few verbal exchanges, Isabelle is quite taken with him. The adjective line pick-up line wouldn’t have worked on me, per se, but it had Isabelle eating out of his hand. The end of this subsection reveals the lack of sophistication on Amory’s part. The fact that there was a chance that his foot had touched her under the table made him excited, seemed childish to me, especially given the fact that he is 19 at the time. This section didn’t give me much hope of the two of them having a lasting meaningful relationship. There was nothing meaningful or clever or out of the ordinary about their exchange and other than her good looks, there as nothing that seemed attractive about her. This paired with the fact that it was very clear that Amory excreted much more effort towards the relationship in the form of extensive letter writing made me dislike Isabelle as a character and more specifically as a romantic interest of Amory’s.

On another note, I don’t know why Fitzgerald included that line about men wearing a certain type of shirt “…a silk ruffled shirt of the kind that women still delight to see men wear, but men are just beginning to get tired of (Fitzgerald, 73).” It was a random line that made me “rise my eyebrows” and wasn’t really amusing.