The Beautiful and Damned

by

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Gloria Gilbert Character Analysis

Gloria meets Anthony Patch while she and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert, are wintering at The Plaza in New York. The pair shortly begin dating, and within a few months they decide to marry one another. This marriage takes place much to the chagrin of Gloria’s other suitors, especially the movie producer Joseph Bloeckman. Anthony initially finds himself attracted to Gloria because of the way she spends her days and nights out on the town on the dime of all these suitors. He admires that, in a sense, she is a professional beauty. In fact, Fitzgerald introduces Gloria to the novel shortly after interrupting the narrative with a dramatic scene that sets up the reincarnation of Beauty personified as a Jazz Age society girl like Gloria. Even if Gloria is not this specific society girl, she is at least an iteration of her, making her a copy of Beauty herself. Because Gloria’s identity is so bound up with beauty, which is by nature ephemeral, she finds herself growing ever more anxious about her age. As opposed to Anthony, who worries about death, Gloria worries more about living without the bloom of youth. In addition to wanting her body to remain beautiful, she also insists on buying a country house and other objects to craft a beautiful image of her life with Anthony. No matter how much she buys, she is never satisfied. At 29, upon finally realizing that she is too old to be a starring actress and that she and Anthony have spent themselves into a corner, she imagines moving to Europe for a few years and then simply dying rather than finding a way to move through society on any quality other than beauty. In the final scene of the novel, Gloria is curiously absent from Anthony’s side. Her disappearance from the novel recalls the scene of Beauty’s Jazz Age reincarnation, in which Beauty was told that her time as a society girl would last fifteen years. At the time of the final scene, it has indeed been fifteen years since the reincarnation. Gloria is an embodiment of beauty that sweeps through Anthony’s life and leaves him a ruin of his former self.

Gloria Gilbert Quotes in The Beautiful and Damned

The The Beautiful and Damned quotes below are all either spoken by Gloria Gilbert or refer to Gloria Gilbert. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Wealth and Waste Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

“Portrait of a Siren”

Related Characters: Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

While it seemed to him that the average débutante spent every hour of her day thinking and talking about what the great world had mapped out for her to do during the next hour, any girl who made a living directly on her prettiness interested him enormously.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert, Richard Caramel
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:

“…[Dick] says the biography of every woman begins with the first kiss that counts, and ends when her last child is laid in her arms…He says unloved women have no biographies – they have histories.”

Related Characters: Gloria Gilbert (speaker), Anthony Patch, Richard Caramel
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the eloquence of her beauty—and of her body, close to him, slender and cool.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 88
Explanation and Analysis:

Her arms fell to her side. In an instant she was free.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other’s eyes—not knowing that they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment. And then, one fairy night, May became June. Sixteen days now—fifteen—fourteen—

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 118-19
Explanation and Analysis:

…After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed FINIS in large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 128
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

In a moment he would call Tana and they would pour into themselves a gay and delicate poison which would restore them momentarily to the pleasurable excitement of childhood, when every face in a crowd had carried its suggestion of splendid and significant transactions taking place somewhere to some magnificent and illimitable purpose…Life was no more than this summer afternoon; a faint wind stirring the lace collar of Gloria’s dress, the slow baking drowsiness of the veranda…Intolerably unmoved they all seemed, removed from any romantic imminency of action. Even Gloria’s beauty needed wild emotions, needed poignancy, needed death…

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert, Joseph Bloeckman, Tana
Page Number: 184-5
Explanation and Analysis:

She was at the top now and could see the lands about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon, coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees…The oppression was lifted now – the tree-tops below her were rocking the young starlight to a haunted doze. She stretched out her arms with a gesture of freedom. This was what she had wanted, to stand alone where it was high and cool.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert, Richard Caramel, Maury Noble
Page Number: 213
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Things had been slipping perceptibly. There was the money question, increasingly annoying, increasingly ominous; there was the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement – not an uncommon phenomenon in the British aristocracy of a hundred years ago, but a somewhat alarming one in a civilization steadily becoming more temperate and more circumspect. Moreover, both of them seemed vaguely weaker in fibre, not so much in what they did as in their subtle reactions to the civilization about them.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 239
Explanation and Analysis:

The phone clicked. Her eyes looking along the floor saw his feet cut the pattern of a patch of sunlight on the carpet. She arose and faced him with a gray, level glance just as his arms folded about her.

“My dearest,” he whispered huskily. “He did it, God damn him!”

Related Characters: Anthony Patch (speaker), Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 252
Explanation and Analysis:

“The Winter of Discontent”

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 254
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Then he found something that made him stop suddenly and sit down on one of the twin beds, the corners of his mouth drooping as though he were about to weep. There in a corner of her drawer, tied with a frail blue ribbon, were all the letters and telegrams he had written her during the year past. He was suffused with happy and sentimental shame.

“I'm not fit to touch her,” he cried aloud to the four walls. “I'm not fit to touch her little hand.”

Nevertheless, he went out to look for her.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch (speaker), Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 308
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Gloria told over to herself the people who had visited them in the gray house at Marietta. It had seemed at the time that they were always having company – she had indulged in an unspoken conviction that each guest was ever afterward slightly indebted to her. They owed her a sort of moral ten dollars apiece, and should she ever be in need she might, so to speak, borrow from them this visionary currency. But they were gone, scattered like chaff, mysteriously and subtly vanished in essence or in fact.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 314
Explanation and Analysis:

This was her twenty-ninth birthday, and the world was melting away before her eyes…

“Oh, my pretty face,” she whispered, passionately grieving. “Oh, my pretty face! Oh, I don’t want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what’s happened?”

Then she slid toward the mirror and, as in the test, sprawled face downward upon the floor – and lay there sobbing. It was the first awkward movement she had ever made.

Related Characters: Gloria Gilbert (speaker), Anthony Patch, Joseph Bloeckman
Page Number: 349
Explanation and Analysis:
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Gloria Gilbert Quotes in The Beautiful and Damned

The The Beautiful and Damned quotes below are all either spoken by Gloria Gilbert or refer to Gloria Gilbert. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Wealth and Waste Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

“Portrait of a Siren”

Related Characters: Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

While it seemed to him that the average débutante spent every hour of her day thinking and talking about what the great world had mapped out for her to do during the next hour, any girl who made a living directly on her prettiness interested him enormously.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert, Richard Caramel
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:

“…[Dick] says the biography of every woman begins with the first kiss that counts, and ends when her last child is laid in her arms…He says unloved women have no biographies – they have histories.”

Related Characters: Gloria Gilbert (speaker), Anthony Patch, Richard Caramel
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the eloquence of her beauty—and of her body, close to him, slender and cool.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 88
Explanation and Analysis:

Her arms fell to her side. In an instant she was free.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other’s eyes—not knowing that they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment. And then, one fairy night, May became June. Sixteen days now—fifteen—fourteen—

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 118-19
Explanation and Analysis:

…After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed FINIS in large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 128
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

In a moment he would call Tana and they would pour into themselves a gay and delicate poison which would restore them momentarily to the pleasurable excitement of childhood, when every face in a crowd had carried its suggestion of splendid and significant transactions taking place somewhere to some magnificent and illimitable purpose…Life was no more than this summer afternoon; a faint wind stirring the lace collar of Gloria’s dress, the slow baking drowsiness of the veranda…Intolerably unmoved they all seemed, removed from any romantic imminency of action. Even Gloria’s beauty needed wild emotions, needed poignancy, needed death…

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert, Joseph Bloeckman, Tana
Page Number: 184-5
Explanation and Analysis:

She was at the top now and could see the lands about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon, coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees…The oppression was lifted now – the tree-tops below her were rocking the young starlight to a haunted doze. She stretched out her arms with a gesture of freedom. This was what she had wanted, to stand alone where it was high and cool.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert, Richard Caramel, Maury Noble
Page Number: 213
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Things had been slipping perceptibly. There was the money question, increasingly annoying, increasingly ominous; there was the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement – not an uncommon phenomenon in the British aristocracy of a hundred years ago, but a somewhat alarming one in a civilization steadily becoming more temperate and more circumspect. Moreover, both of them seemed vaguely weaker in fibre, not so much in what they did as in their subtle reactions to the civilization about them.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 239
Explanation and Analysis:

The phone clicked. Her eyes looking along the floor saw his feet cut the pattern of a patch of sunlight on the carpet. She arose and faced him with a gray, level glance just as his arms folded about her.

“My dearest,” he whispered huskily. “He did it, God damn him!”

Related Characters: Anthony Patch (speaker), Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 252
Explanation and Analysis:

“The Winter of Discontent”

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 254
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Then he found something that made him stop suddenly and sit down on one of the twin beds, the corners of his mouth drooping as though he were about to weep. There in a corner of her drawer, tied with a frail blue ribbon, were all the letters and telegrams he had written her during the year past. He was suffused with happy and sentimental shame.

“I'm not fit to touch her,” he cried aloud to the four walls. “I'm not fit to touch her little hand.”

Nevertheless, he went out to look for her.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch (speaker), Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 308
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Gloria told over to herself the people who had visited them in the gray house at Marietta. It had seemed at the time that they were always having company – she had indulged in an unspoken conviction that each guest was ever afterward slightly indebted to her. They owed her a sort of moral ten dollars apiece, and should she ever be in need she might, so to speak, borrow from them this visionary currency. But they were gone, scattered like chaff, mysteriously and subtly vanished in essence or in fact.

Related Characters: Anthony Patch, Gloria Gilbert
Page Number: 314
Explanation and Analysis:

This was her twenty-ninth birthday, and the world was melting away before her eyes…

“Oh, my pretty face,” she whispered, passionately grieving. “Oh, my pretty face! Oh, I don’t want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what’s happened?”

Then she slid toward the mirror and, as in the test, sprawled face downward upon the floor – and lay there sobbing. It was the first awkward movement she had ever made.

Related Characters: Gloria Gilbert (speaker), Anthony Patch, Joseph Bloeckman
Page Number: 349
Explanation and Analysis: