In “The Ice Palace,” F. Scott Fitzgerald's interest in the lasting influence of birthplace on his characters¹ is manifested in the central conflict of the story: Can the protagonist, Sally Carrol Happer, from Tarleton, Georgia, go through with her marriage to the northerner Harry Ballamy? She yearns to escape the “lazy days and nights” of the South and to embrace the “energy” of the North, where “things happen on a big scale.”² But Fitzgerald's descriptions of the earth, air, fire, and water of the two locations, as Sally Carrol perceives them, preclude any possibility of the proposed nuptials.

Though earth and air in Georgia are “dusty” (113), the “tangled growths of bright-green coppice and grass and tall trees” bring cool comfort, as does the “savoury breeze” (117). Over the “soft grass” (120) where Sally Carrol and Harry sit on his visit to Tarleton, the evening air is “flower-filled” and dotted with fireflies (115). And the southern heat is “never hostile, only comforting, like a great warm nourishing bosom” (118). Quite different is the atmosphere of Harry's native St. Paul, Minnesota, during Sally Carrol's trip there the following January. Gentle breezes are gone, replaced by “howling wind” (129), and skies are obliterated by “a dark, ominous tent” of snow. The earth is just as disturbing, with soft southern grass only a memory on the “frosted … streets” (122) of the North, with every footstep treacherous on the hard, slick surface (137).

Even the sun is seen as a very different ball of fire in the two parts of the country. The opening words of the story depict southern sunlight dripping over Sally Carrol's house “like golden paint over an art jar,” providing a glorious “bath of light” (113). The only two words used to describe the sun in the North, however, are “pale” and “yellow” (129, 139). Indeed, Sally Carrol “scarcely recognized it” (131). Another kind of fire in the story is the “glowing open” one that Sally Carrol and Harry sit before in the Happer parlor during the romantic interlude that seals their engagement. In contrast, man-made fire in the North appears at the winter carnival as “a phantasmagoria of torches waving in great banks of fire … a solid flag of flame” (136). Sally Carrol is less than charmed by this spectacle—“she sat very quiet” (136) throughout the procession.

Also strikingly dissimilar are Fitzgerald's portrayals of water in the two regions. Water in the North is only snow or ice. But far from being part of the “fairy-land” (120) that Harry promised, the snow seems to Sally Carrol “just as if somethin' dead was movin'” (127). Even the magnificent winter palace, made from “blocks of the clearest ice … on a tremendous scale” (124), the kind of scale Sally Carrol once longed for (116), looms before her in “vivid glaring green,” and her first reaction is one of “oppression” (134-35). This frozen water of the North, like the walls of the ice palace, keeps people apart: Sally Carrol comments on her arrival, “I don't guess this is a very kissable climate” (125). The girls she meets sit in “haughty and expensive aloofness” (125), and the men treat her with “conscious precision” and a hands-off attitude (126). Quite opposite is the effect of the “muddy” (118) water of Sally Carrol's hometown swimming hole, so different from the crystal blocks of the ice palace, chosen for their “purity and clearness” (135). Rather than separating, southern water brings the local inhabitants together in “half-affectionate badinage and flattery” (126).

At the end of the story, Sally Carrol seems to realize that the four basic elements of life—earth, air, fire, and water—exist in forms so foreign in the North that they are unable to sustain her life. For when she collapses in the ice palace, a symbol for the North in general, she envisions her own death: “It was getting darker now and darker—all those tombstones …” (139). Thus is her conflict resolved. She cannot marry a northerner. Heaven and earth and all the elements have conspired against such a match. To survive she needs her native “golden sunlight … dust … heat …” and swimming water “warm as a kettla steam” (140).

Notes

1. Richard Lehan discusses this topic in “The Romantic Self and the Uses of Place in the Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson Bryer (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982) 6.

2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Ice Palace,” The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Malcolm Cowley, 6 vols. (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1963) 5:116-7. All text references are to this edition.