Beauty and Self-Sabotage Theme Analysis

As the title “The Beautiful and Damned” suggests, Fitzgerald takes a skeptical view of beauty. His critique of beauty follows the conventions of nineteenth-century realist authors, such as George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert, who criticized beauty for distracting from more important societal issues, like poverty. Published in 1922, The Beautiful and Damned integrates the realists’ unease about beauty into a depiction of twentieth-century American high society. The socialites at the story’s center become so preoccupied with the material beauty that governs the lives of Jazz-Age elites that they lose track of what it means to live moral, productive lives.

By incorporating references to Plato’s Symposium into the novel, Fitzgerald folds the philosophical discourse of beauty into his rendering of Anthony and Gloria’s misadventures in high society. The Symposium, a classical work that has influenced many writers on the subjects of love and beauty, tells the tale of a dinner party among several great thinkers. Over the course of the evening, each thinker offers an opposing viewpoint on love and desire. Ultimately, Plato’s text is ambivalent about the morals of loving beautiful objects. Fitzgerald structures his novel around this ambivalence, gradually moving from an optimistic to a pessimistic outlook on beauty. In the early days of marriage, Gloria tells Anthony uncertainly, “mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and – and in love before they’re born.” The idea that love is the divine reunion of two souls comes directly from Aristophanes’ speech in The Symposium. Like the follow-up speeches in Plato’s text, both Gloria’s hesitation and the laugh with which Anthony responds undermine Gloria’s suggestion that their attraction is divinely ordained. What’s more, the central chapter of The Beautiful and Damned is entitled “Symposium.” This chapter title not only references Plato’s work, but also places it at the heart of Fitzgerald’s novel. The uncertainty about beauty that characterizes The Symposium is thus central to the novel’s philosophical arc. However, the ambivalence of the chapter “Symposium” contrasts with the more certainly pessimistic title of the novel as a whole. Gloria and Anthony’s beauty, and their moneyed insulation from more practical concerns, “damns” them to yield to their attraction to each other and to the image of wealth. Their marriage grows ever-more unstable, both emotionally and financially, as they attempt to supplement the ugliness of their relationship with a second residence and other beautiful objects of excess.

The insidiousness of beauty hinders the characters’ ability to behave admirably, as both Anthony and Gloria conflate self-worth with their own ever-fading attractiveness instead of with moral goodness or societal contribution. Having failed to achieve fame as a young writer, Anthony reflects that marrying Gloria will make him feel young and more handsome than ever. However, youth and handsomeness cannot endure the way a marriage or a career must. Anthony fails to achieve a productive career or a successful marriage because he fundamentally misunderstands the moral commitment each requires. Gloria’s concern for her personal beauty stunts her career, as well. Instead of pursuing her goal of acting, she spends her youth wishing she were even younger and flirting with the idea of what might have been had she married film producer Joseph Bloeckman. By the time she decides to audition for an acting role, she is already too old to play her dream role of leading lady. She begins obsessively using face creams in the hope that they will reverse the aging process, but her efforts are too little, too late. Though early on Anthony and Gloria imagine the possibility of children, Gloria comes to fear motherhood as a “menace to her beauty.” Gloria’s maternal ambivalence constitutes a bold statement in the context of early 20th-century America. The elite class, which allows ladies like Gloria to hold domestic roles rather than working, is diminishing in power. Gloria relishes her own beauty over motherhood, which many around her would consider not only the moral duty of all women, but also part of her social duty to conserve the American aristocracy. Her preoccupation with her beauty thus contributes to what Fitzgerald depicts as the downfall of her own social class.

Gloria and Anthony’s obsessive desire to be beautiful and to possess beautiful things is symptomatic of their elite position in society. Although they squander their wealth, they belong to a social class that promises them a life of beauty and leisure. The fact that they have not been conditioned to worry about more pressing issues, such as earning enough money to buy food or to pay for their education, leaves them vulnerable to the obsessiveness beauty can inspire in the onlooker. The America Fitzgerald depicts places such a premium on beauty that gifted young people spend their lives as narcissists and magpies, not only neglecting social realities, but also destroying much of what they touch.