Isolation
Isolation in Gatsby, Elizabeth Willard, and Frederic Henry
Daniel J. Travanti
English 556b
Elizabeth Willard sought “what could be for her the true word” (p. 224) from the men with whom she went. Frederic Henry discovers painfully that his attempt to find universal meaning in a limited personal relationship is futile. Jay Gatsby is sure that Daisy is his answer and dies because of that. All are lonely, all isolates. Personal isolation has been a major theme of American novelists since the early nineteenth century, and in these works of Anderson, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, it is still a valid preoccupation. Our three authors, in Winesburg, Ohio, A Farewell to Armsand The Great Gatsby, see their people as Hawthorne did; struggling in time to transcend it, constrained by society’s rules and fighting to escape its structures, and maddened by their hearts’ desires unto death or despair. What I find particularly interesting and significant is Elizabeth’s, Frederic’s, and Jay’s experiences is that—though the details vary markedly and they live in different sized worlds—each seeks answers in the same small place; the bosom of another human being. That connection is important. Perhaps, it is a reflection of the American temper between 1900 and 1925; a time of post-Victorian confusion for small town women and determined dreaming born of cynicism for the post-War young men; or it may simply be the human condition.
Hawthorne knew better than to offer excuses or solutions. Our writers believed as well that the meaning of loneliness seems to be in the experience itself; in the way it works, not why. Still, in these three examples, there are similarities that bespeak universality. So for me, the interest in their lives is not in whether or not any one of them will find satisfaction, but merely in how the process unfolds.
Elizabeth’s first dreams for glamour and adventure among theater people. They might take her away and give her a life full of excitement and meaning. They are honest with her, though, assuring her that their lives are not essentially different from hers, and that their world is the same. “’It’s as dull and uninteresting as this here. Nothing comes of it.’” (p. 46). But Elizabeth cannot accept that. It is the truth and it is honorably given, but to her it means only that they don’t understand her—because they don’t give her the answer she wants to hear; and so she finds other comfort. She makes love to the traveling men because “Always they seemed to understand and sympathize with her” (p. 46). The point, for me, is that Elizabeth’s restlessness is unappeasable. Always after one of these encounters, she weeps, is penitent, and weeps. Her imagination runs free, she allows herself sensual pleasure, she knows enough to give her son sound advice about bettering himself, yet she is helplessly bound by the myth that “the fact of marriage might be full of some hidden significance” (p. 224). Anderson seems to be suggesting that escape is impossible, which is at best pessimistic and at worst, perhaps tragic. I think it doesn’t matter. What does count is that Elizabeth is trapped—by herself. On the night before her marriage, her dying father offers her a sum of money and the entreaty to “Take it and go away” (p. 225). He tells her not to marry Tom, that she can do better. But Elizabeth Willard insists upon assurances. She calls herself an adventurer, but she has only part of that spirit. During the spring drive described in “Death,” she says for me what has been the key restraint in her psyche from the start. “I want to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too. Don’t you see, dear, how it was?” (p. 227). I hear apology in those last words, and regret. And I sympathize with her.
Probably, if he had understood the dichotomy in himself, Frederic Henry too would have identified with Elizabeth’s dilemma. He is alone mainly because he doesn’t have any real feeling for anything except his own comfort. He is neither for the war nor against it. He is an officer indeed, but he says his small command “seemed to run better while I was away” (p. 17). He is ashamed to carry a pistol, but later he shoots a deserter. He is an alien emotionally and an American in a foreign army: He is apparently an adventurer, but I wonder. Like Elizabeth, Frederic takes a path of lighter resistance. For her it is to stay, for him it is to chuck it all and bury himself in romantic bliss, away from the war, the world, and himself. While awaiting the birth of his child, he is out near the hospital. On the way back from a restaurant, he encounters a dog nosing at a refuse can. His reaction to the cur is a mirror of his innermost view of his struggle.
“What do you want?” I asked and looked in the can to see if there
was anything I could pull out for him; there was nothing on top but coffee-grounds,
dust and some dead flowers.
“There isn’t anything, dog,” he said. (p. 315).
Later, he sums up Catherine’s death and their adventure.
So now they got her in the end. You never got away with anything.
Get away hell: It would have been the same if we had been married fifty times. (p. 320).
From the start, he has felt there is nothing, and so he hides, runs, and denies. Elizabeth declares, “It wasn’t Tom I wanted, it was marriage” (p. 226). For both, there seemed to be some secret meaning in promised coupling. For Elizabeth, it was a vague and even mystical relief she imagined. For Frederic, it was definitely sensual pleasure, but just as assuredly an indefinable release. Both attempts were doomed from the start.
I could explore that surety in detail and label it among many things, Fate or Destiny. That’s another subject. But a view that applies to the correlations I have been able to make here is that all three of our characters opt for escape rather than encounter. To the extent that they do this, they pull themselves out of the stream of chance and muscle the Fates.
It could be said that both Elizabeth and Frederic suffered from self-generated notions of themselves that couldn’t possibly be realized in life. Jay Gatsby went them one better by actually living his vision and almost realizing it.
The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. (p. 99)
He makes his surroundings beautiful in every detail, sparing no expense, not even his soul. As a boy, he planned a regimen of self-improvement based on honest standards: exercise, diction, reading. That effort seemed to be an attempt to prepare James Gatz for deeper, more meaningful involvement with the world. But all the whole, he was charting a course of separatism. Elizabeth felt threatened by the outside world and took refuge in a social institution. Frederic felt alienated from everything and so plunged himself under the waters of his senses. Jay Gatsby hid himself most completely, “in his overwhelming self-absorption” (p. 99). Like Elizabeth, Gatsby had a dream, but his was not vague.
The vision was Daisy. But the dream was grander still. Jay Gatsby was not content with struggling to win Daisy Buchanan in the future; he had to try to change the past that had eluded him, as well. He begs her to swear that she had never loved her husband, but only himself. Both those efforts put Gatsby completely out of time, lost in illusion—as distantly isolated as it’s possible to get. He used his boyhood “SCHEDULE” not to honestly earn an influential place in society, but as a shortcut to make himself appear to be legitimate after he’s gained wealth by criminal means. That makes him a solid and separate hypocrite.
Elizabeth would like to erase the past, too. “I didn’t want to be a bad woman. The town was full of stories about me.” (p. 226). Marriage would legitimatize her. When Frederic emerged from his plunge into Tagliamento “Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation” (p. 232). They would all have the slate wiped clean. But they all share the nature if not the essence of Gatsby’s disappointment. Daisy falls short of his dreams “—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion” (p. 97). Isolation born of striving seems an ironic notion, but it is a real condition, and all of us, I am sure, live that contradiction to some extent.
The old man in “The Book of the Grotesque” says: “It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood” (p. 25). That is Elizabeth’s entrapment. Frederic’s truth says all is nothing, so seize the moment. Gatsby’s vision is compared to the wonderful anticipation of the Dutch settlers of America. Their dream was the last grand illusion that could even possibly be realized. He is as visionary and relentless, but the dream, of course, is long past and irretrievable. But nothing could have turned him from his course because “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (p. 97). He, Elizabeth, and Frederic cling to their truths with what Robert Penn Warren calls in his introduction to A Farewell to Arms, “lonely fortitude” (p. xxxvi). Grotesques, heroes, or truth seekers, they remind me of myself.