Women and Amory Blaine

Women in F. Scott Fitzgerald's first published piece This Side of Paradise , riddle the life of its main character, Amory Blaine. Despite his charm and his sense of confidence Amory fails, at least within the timeline of the text, to maintain a steady relationship. What Amory does achieve by the end is the conclusion that his generation is lost and that all he knows is himself. This is a serious change in philosophy from the beginning, where Amory believes he has the ability to master anything and anybody. Considering Amory has at least five loves within this philosophical development it seems likely that at least some of these lovers greatly influenced his final conclusions on himself and on the world. Thus, the question becomes not only how but which one of these women made the strongest impression on Amory and his verdict on the world? Three of those women will be examined here.

Before diving in looking at these women and their influence on Amory it's important to first understand where Amory ends up in order to backtrack and pick up the clues that led him there. At the end of the text Amory proclaims in a rather dramatic fashion, “I know myself...but that is all” (213). His sense of himself is all that he feels he can truly understand. The outside world is alien to him and full of uncertainty. When Amory contemplates at the end on the situation of his own generation he concludes that they are set adrift, wrenched from the foundations that once held culture down solidly. “A new generation...grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...” (213). Now compare these perceptions to his original conceptions of the world. As in the section, “Code of the Young Egotist”, where Amory invisions himself as...

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...Amory's life, he is not—so to speak—in love with her but he does become attached to her. Simply because they can role play comfortably together. She concludes the fragmentation of Amory's reality by causing him to recognize the fragmentation of thought when she accuses him of disregarding the subjective nature of the concept of 'goodness'. Amory has understood himself as 'good' with the pieces of reality that he possess's or more likely, is willing to recognize.

Thus, when Amory cries, “I know myself...but that is all” (213), he has finally realized the extent of the fragmentation of the world that surrounds him. Each woman led him down certain routes that further developed, and by that I mean tore down, his final conceptions of reality. He is no longer a forming force in the world but a being at subject to the whims of infinite realities that make up the world.