Amory is prone to falling deeply in love and feeling passionately attracted to women. Indeed, he is enamored with four women over the course of the novel: Isabelle Borgé, Clara Page, Rosalind Connage, and Eleanor Savage. Youth sexuality and romance are increasingly permitted in Amory’s surrounding cultural landscape, though they are still considered inappropriate by elders. The novel suggests that despite the relative sexual freedom that Amory, his friends, and his lovers enjoy, love and sexuality in and of themselves aren’t capable of providing meaning, purpose, or comfort.
Amory comes to realize throughout the novel that love and sexuality are not exempt from any of the world’s social problems. When Rosalind leaves him because he has no money, he learns that love is governed by the same rules of class hierarchy that often made him feel inferior at Princeton. What’s more, Eleanor articulates the burdens that love, sexuality, and marriage place on women in this era: even though she is highly intelligent, she is destined to marriage, which will inevitably be to an upper-class man who is her intellectual inferior. For women, therefore, love is like a cage confining them in a fixed and rather unrewarding social position. And for both men and women, love essentially becomes little more than a way to achieve class mobility. Sexuality is also a tool with which the government can punish citizens, such as when the detectives in Atlantic City try to catch Alec Connage having sex with a woman who is not his wife. By the end of the novel, Amory realizes that he has been chasing love and sex for the wrong reasons: instead of seeking women for the personal fulfillment that their love and companionship could bring him, he was chasing them for their superficial beauty. Amory eventually realizes that his quest for beauty has corrupted rather than improved him, turning him away from his ideals and further ensnaring him in the restrictive social norms he has repeatedly tried to overcome throughout his life. The novel is, therefore, quite pessimistic about love and sexuality, emphasizing the virtues of self-sufficiency and individual personhood.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Love and Sexuality ThemeTracker
Love and Sexuality Quotes in This Side of Paradise
“He knows you’re—you’re considered beautiful and all that”—she paused—“and I guess he knows you’ve been kissed.”
At this Isabelle’s little fist had clinched suddenly under the fur robe. She was accustomed to be thus followed by her desperate past, and it never failed to rouse in her the same feeling of resentment; yet—in a strange town it was an advantageous reputation. She was a “Speed,” was she? Well—let them find out.
He became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then he knew he could leave in the morning and not care. On the contrary, if he didn’t kiss her, it would worry him… It would interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror.
She was immemorial…. Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.
All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified—their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia. For the second time in his life Amory had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation.
ROSALIND: Amory, I’m yours—you know it. There have been times in the last month I’d have been completely yours if you’d said so. But I can’t marry you and ruin both our lives. (…) I can’t Amory, I can’t be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You’d hate me in a narrow atmosphere. I’d make you hate me.
“ ‘S a mental was’e,’ he insisted with his owl-like wisdom. “Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be Prussian ‘bout ev’thing, women ‘specially. Use’ be straight ‘bout women college. Now don’givadam. (…) Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ‘At’s philosophy for me now on.”
Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a mood in him.
Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty.
“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, why am I a girl? (…) Here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.”
Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”
On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.
