It has long been a given that the idea of emotional bankruptcy is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's central themes. However, critics have tended to focus upon the “emotional” aspect of the equation, the protagonist's eventual inability to feel and experience fully, rather than to consider the economic implications of the expression.¹ A “bankrupt” is one who no longer has the means for exchange, one who has overextended him- or herself. The language of the marketplace—trade, value, profit, and loss—is also the language of Fitzgerald's sequence known as the Josephine stories. Considered from the perspective of the sexual economy—what Emma Goldman called “the traffic in women”—emotional bankruptcy is the inevitable result of a social system that situates women as sexual objects to be possessed and as consumers without independent means or power. It occurs when a woman attempts to exert her sexuality and/or beauty, the forms of currency she does possess, to satisfy her own desire instead of reserving them for the pursuit of a suitable marriage partner. Recent work in material culture theory and constructions of gender in the early twentieth century provide a unique framework in which to consider the theme of emotional bankruptcy, which is central to the Josephine stories.

Published between 1928 and 1931, the Josephine stories represent Fitzgerald's first complete development of the concept of emotional bankruptcy and his earliest actual use of the term (Fitzgerald, Basil and Josephine xix).² The five stories in the sequence compose a single narrative unit with a distinct trajectory and denouement: the scapegoating of Josephine, the “baby vamp” and prototypical New Woman. In them Fitzgerald delineates the process and economics of emotional bankruptcy in elaborate detail. Considering Josephine in terms of material culture, both as an object to be possessed and as a consumer in her own right, reveals the complex work of social criticism in which Fitzgerald was also engaged. Josephine is a paradigm for the sexual-economic relationship embedded as text or subtext in much twentieth-century fiction. Her emotional bankruptcy is merely one result of her condition, which is typical of the luxury-class women about whom Fitzgerald wrote; she is a consumer rather than a producer, economically dependent, and, ultimately, a commodity.

Both the Josephine sequence and its companion series, the Basil stories (published during the same years), trace the coming-of-age of their protagonists, although with far different results. In the Basil series, which was published first, Fitzgerald traces the development of someone who will eventually grow up to become a Nick Carraway—or an F. Scott Fitzgerald—while the Josephine stories explore the roots and emergence of what Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl have called “the most important figure Fitzgerald ever drew,” the “femme fatale” or “vampiric destroyer” (Fitzgerald, Basil and Josephine xx). Set between 1914 and 1916, the sequence also records Fitzgerald's response to the changes in American society in the early part of the century and can be read as his attempt to understand and explain the effects of those changes. One of the main transformations occurred in the role and position of women. The growth of industrialism had resulted in an increased number of women who worked outside the home (between one-third and one-quarter of all married women), although at first they worked “primarily in factories or as domestic servants” (Green 57). By 1930, however, the number of women in clerical jobs had also escalated (Green 58). In a time of increasing instability—social, financial, and cultural—women were held “responsible for cushioning the uncertainties of war and economic dislocation” (Green 120). In The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945, Harvey Green observes that advertisements of the period “placed women in a position full of responsibility but with little real authority” (24). They were at the mercy of those who advocated scientific and managerial approaches to home care and childrearing, as well as of advertisers who realized that they were the primary consumers in the family.³ At the same time, they were stereotyped as spendthrifts who could be taken in by any new fad, saved only by the sound judgment of men. As Jackson Lears explains in Fables of Abundance, “Mrs. Consumer” had a “ravenous appetite for goods” and was “a stock gag in comic strips and vaudeville humor” (120). The changing roles for women were most apparent in advertisements of the period, in which, for example, “formidable mother figures” were replaced by “giggling teenagers” (Lears 118). “By the 1910s, most commonly, women in advertisements were merely beneficiaries of the largesse generated by the male genius of mass production—new emblematic expressions of old male anxieties. … [The] iconic representation of the modern woman was girlish rather than authoritative, and reassuringly dependent on corporate expertise” (120). He also observes that in advertisements, “The positioning of men's bodies vs. women's … reaffirmed masculine authority” (184). Men in these ads loom above women and are physically more imposing.

Finally, this period saw the emergence of the so-called New Woman, a term used to describe “successive generations of educated and self-supporting middle-class women who … demanded careers and public roles” (Smith-Rosenberg 430). The New Woman was the result of several trends: the changes in sexual relations that occurred between 1880 and 1920 and the “early women's movement [that] had made it possible for women to hold jobs and act autonomously. The developing consumer society promoted sexual pleasure and leisure to sell products and created a culture that separated sex from reproduction and valued the pursuit of sexual interests. … In this context women's emotional/sexual lives were transformed” (Kennedy 328-29). In the Josephine stories, Fitzgerald brings together many of these elements—gender, money, power, and class—and explores them within the context of the rapidly changing social and sexual climate in America.

The events of the Josephine sequence exemplify, in a striking way, the theories of sexual economics developed by such writers as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, and Gayle Rubin (Reiter). From this perspective, the stories are an examination of a particular female role within capitalist society as well as a critique of what was perceived as a collapsing social and moral order. Josephine's experience is cast in economic terms first and foremost, so that she emerges as a remarkable example of the “sexuo-economic relation” described by Gilman (121), one in which a woman's success and “personal profit” are intrinsically tied to her ability “to win and hold the other sex” (63), and the effects of that relation. According to Gilman, women are forced into the role of consumers, “always to take and never to think of giving anything in return except their womanhood” (118-19). For women, the sex relation counts for everything, even something as simple as having a good time (308), and the outcome is the same as it would be in any creature: “Where one function is carried to unnatural excess, others are weakened, and the organism perishes” (72).

Josephine also typifies the young women of the 1920s described by Paula S. Fass in her landmark study The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's. She is the embodiment of “youthful sexuality,” the force that represented “demoralization” and “a continuing threat to the social order” for the older generation (Fass 21). Yet, according to Fass, despite the seeming freedom and rejection of social mores, the youth of the 1920s “had not separated themselves from the roles and responsibilities they would soon assume. They had no reason to doubt that the future held anything but opportunities” (366). That sense of abundant opportunity was also an element of contemporary advertising, which depicted an ideal world of status, wealth, and security. However, ads also reflected the anxiety of the period. On the one hand, they suggested that “failure to achieve the middle-class goals of material success was the individual's alone,” while at the same time they alluded to uncontrollable forces that could destroy the ideal at any moment (Green 25). In effect, Josephine's condition at the end of the sequence anticipates that of her female contemporaries who hope to move beyond the confines of gender and discover that woman's role remains circumscribed. Exploiting her newfound sexual power throughout the series, she is eventually brought to the realization that her choices are limited, that she is essentially powerless, and that she no longer wants the ideal mate who is supposed to be her raison d'être.

Josephine Perry is first presented to the reader by way of an episode from her childhood that incorporates the most important elements determining her fate as a woman of her particular time, place, and social class: the connection between gender and the marketplace and the powerlessness of women who are primarily objects of exchange. The title of the initial story, “First Blood,” also introduces the vampiric theme that pervades the sequence and symbolizes Josephine's rebellion against the economic imperatives that impinge on her even as a young child. The story opens in the Perry living room, where Mrs. Perry is entertaining Mrs. Bray. At the sight of Josephine, who sits nearby, Mrs. Bray is moved to recall an incident from the past: “I remember your coming to me in despair when Josephine was about three! … George was furious because he couldn't decide what work to go to work at, so he used to spank little Josephine” (186). She then glances at the young woman sitting nearby and says, “And so this is Josephine” (186). This early episode, in which Josephine functions as the object and scapegoat of male economic concerns, is our introduction to the sixteen-year-old. She is now “an unconscious pioneer of the generation that was destined to ‘get out of hand,’” according to the narrator (188), a harbinger of things to come, like the war just over the horizon. But she is also a product of the past as signified by her mother and Mrs. Bray, a past in which women existed for the prestige and service of the men they married. Josephine is clearly caught between these conflicting ideals.

The Perry family is part of Chicago society, “almost very rich” (188) and firmly entrenched in the pecuniary culture (to use an expression made popular by Thorstein Veblen) of the early twentieth century. The fact that they are not a “new” family is emphasized from the outset, as is their relative position in the social hierarchy. All of this underscores the fact that the family's name and reputation have market value, as Josephine is reminded whenever her exploits threaten either. The irony of her position, and her responsibility, is underscored by her name, which means “she will add; increase.” Two generations removed from the source of the family's wealth (her grandfather produced the family fortune), she is of the new generation that accepts money and social position as a given. Josephine has been raised to appreciate the concept of “value,” especially her own, but it is not an understanding born of experience or supported by anything substantive. It is a value decreed by her family and social circle, not one substantiated by an awareness of self or any actual accomplishment. In fact, it is based on something inherent rather than earned, namely her appearance and her family connections. She has no intrinsic value of her own, and even her beauty is somehow separate and impersonal, something over which she has no control. It is an asset, one that grows “richer” as she matures (271), but also one she does not actually “possess.” Its worth is based on her ability to utilize it for the greater esteem of her family through marriage. By doing so she will replicate her parents' existence, thereby validating its value as well. If she is successful, the ritual of exchange for profit through marriage will continue for yet another generation.

In actuality, Josephine represents her father's ability to pay, not her own, although she frequently mistakes his power for hers. He is also able to make Josephine pay without her realizing it: taking her out of school when she might have stayed, forcing her to forego an education and experiences she is just beginning to appreciate, as well as compelling her to face the rest of the family's social circle in disgrace. Although he is supportive in some ways, Josephine realizes that her father also feels “a certain annoyance with her misfortune” (240; emphasis added). As a result of such regulation (after all, she is a commodity that must be protected at all costs), she is denied those things that might have helped her replenish her personal stores or enlarged the scope of her interests.⁴ She has no education to speak of, no training or skills, nothing except her beauty with which to bargain, and she instinctively uses it to exert some measure of control over men and her own life.

Both Josephine and the narrator use language associated with the economic sphere—the production and exchange of goods—to describe her condition at crucial moments in the stories. She is established as something “new”—“the newest thing of all”—in the opening pages of the first story, much like an innovative product on the market (188). She also has “the oppressive sense of being wasted” when exiled to Island Farms one summer (214). When she rather melodramatically considers the possibility of her own death after an unsuccessful love affair, she is moved to whisper to herself, “Oh, what a shame” (200), mourning the potential loss of valuable merchandise, not the actuality of death. The narrator also compares Josephine's eventual return to Lake Forest for her sister's wedding “to the moment when the robber bandit evolved through sheer power into the feudal seignior” (219), while later she is likened to “a [s]peculator retired on his profits” (227). Josephine instinctively uses the language of exchange and value, whether with regard to herself or other women: she decides that someone must “pay” for her ruined summer on Island Farms, and it is inevitably another woman.⁵ Similarly, a chance remark leads her to wonder about Adele Craw, a schoolmate, whether “only those who had known [her] all her life knew her at her true worth” (228). The value of things—of time, of people, of associations, but especially of the female sex—is an essential subtext in these stories, as it is in much of Fitzgerald's fiction.

Yet one of Josephine's “strengths” is her ability to recognize value in others and, conversely, to appreciate their valuation of her. In “A Snobbish Story,” she can appreciate that John Bailey, despite his lower social position, has “some particular and special passion for life,” just as “she knew that she herself was superior in something to the girls who criticized her—though she often confused her superiority with the homage it inspired—and she was apathetic to the judgments of the crowd” (253). But what might be strengths in a man are fatal flaws in a woman, affecting her pliability and, by extension, her value. Even Bailey recognizes that Josephine's worth is a measure of her father's: when she tells him at their first meeting that her last name is Perry, he immediately asks, “Herbert T. Perry?” (250). While she is able and willing to see the potential in Bailey, to him Josephine is primarily a means for obtaining financial backing for his play. The rest of the story highlights the connections between the marketplace, social class, and marriage in the two subplots: the attempted suicide of Bailey's estranged wife, and Mr. Perry's suspected affair.

Josephine's response to the latter “discovery” indicates that she is beginning to understand the rules of the game into which she is being initiated; she tries to use the information to “blackmail” her father, however innocently, into backing the play. This ploy fails when the truth emerges, and his position as “ideal” is inevitably restored. Gradually she comes to realize that public opinion and the marketplace can be safely ignored only when one has a wealthy male figure to serve as a buffer. Her father may consistently “rescue” her, even when she does not wish to be rescued, but his message is clear when he tells her “Nothing sordid touches you. If it does, then it's your own fault,” and in the next breath says to John Bailey, the aspiring playwright Josephine is trying to help, “I understand you need money” (264-65). Anyone in need of money is not a suitable match, and Mr. Perry's job is to safeguard his daughter until he can realize a return on his investment; this will take the form of another man who is financially able to take on that responsibility and produce the next generation of Perrys. Josephine has learned the lesson well by the conclusion of the tale, deciding to “[throw] in her lot with the rich and powerful of this world forever” (269). Her brief interlude among the bohemians in Bailey's circle is enough to convince her that such speculation is not worth the risks. The ideal marriage that she sees in her future is best represented by her parents, regardless of whatever other aspects of their lives she may appear to reject, and not the Bailey marriage with its melodrama, sordidness, and poverty.

Her father remains the yardstick by which Josephine measures all males, and a marriage like her parents' is the final “prize”; but the marriage is clearly one in which Mr. Perry has ultimate control, despite Josephine's romanticizing. His reemergence as loyal husband and supportive father also reaffirms the strength and inherent “rightness” of the economic and social systems he represents. In effect, her father's intrinsic soundness is contrasted with Josephine's apparently increasing corruption. It is beside the point to observe that to get what she wants Josephine has resorted to tactics that are widely used in the business world. However, it is worth noting that had she not been with a man like Bailey in the La Grange Hotel restaurant in the first place, she would never have been exposed to the sight of her father with another woman. Her assumption of an affair is evidence that she already has been overexposed, that she is increasingly in danger of becoming damaged goods.

One effect of these and similar experiences is to reinforce the ultimate power of men in the marketplace and the tenuous position of women. Josephine's very first romantic relationship, with her sister's friend Anthony Harker, underscores this point. Harker may be captivated by Josephine at the outset, but it is he who rejects and then returns to her, the tone of his letter making it very clear, starting with the salutation “Darling Little Josephine” (200; emphasis added), that he is asserting his power while seeming to succumb to hers. It is this show of power that frightens Josephine away, as well as the intensity of the emotions he displays, a far cry from the vague and shadowy romance depicted in the novels she reads. For all her maneuvering and manipulating, Josephine continually finds herself at the mercy of men, whether her father, John Bailey, or Dudley Knowleton. Even the man of her dreams, Captain Edward Dicer, must contact her in order for their relationship to continue. It is only when a male “sees” her that the chase can actually begin, so first she must do what she can to attract his attention. Similarly, Josephine realizes at a young age that the dance floor may be “the field of feminine glory,” but it is one from which a woman “slip[s] away … with a man” (191). Her earliest conscious understanding of the position of women in relation to men comes at her first prom at Yale, described by the narrator in “A Woman with a Past”:

One might have ten men to Adele's two, but Josephine was abruptly aware that here a girl took on the importance of the man who had brought her.

She was discomforted by the unfairness of it. A girl earned her popularity by being beautiful and charming. The more beautiful and charming she was, the more she could afford to disregard public opinion.

(230; emphasis added)

The social whirl, with its dances, proms, and parties, is a marketplace in women where a man like Dudley Knowleton is able to endow a woman with “value” despite the fact that he may not “know anything about girls at all, or be able to judge their attractions” (230). In this case, Josephine understands that Adele has acquired value solely by virtue of Dudley's “possession” of her. It is men who determine value and accord it, both by what they choose and by their association with it, not women.

Josephine's experience with Dudley also leads to what the narrator describes as her “first mature thought” (244): “One mustn't run through people, and, for the sake of a romantic half-hour, trade a possibility that might develop—quite seriously—later, at the proper time” (244).⁶ This is also her first, if unconscious, recognition of the economics of social transactions, as signaled by her use of the word “trade.” In other words, she is beginning to understand that one must exercise good “business” sense and that one's relationships with others are an investment in the future, with the potential for high returns if handled properly. Thus, what Josephine is engaged in is a form of speculation, a type of economic transaction for which she has neither the means nor the skill for long-term success. More than anything, it is her wanton wastefulness that condemns Josephine; she takes her beauty and social position for granted, and she is even willing to risk public censure (and her future potential for a “good” marriage) by associating with men who are beneath her. And while, as Thorstein Veblen demonstrated “conspicuous waste” is an element of leisure class life, Josephine is wasting something that does not actually belong to her, namely herself.

Josephine has yet to learn that the laws of supply and demand apply to her as well as to other products in the marketplace, that a woman is valued in direct proportion to the degree to which she withholds herself. Safely reabsorbed into the family circle after her increasingly precarious ventures, she is able to ignore the progressively higher stakes as well. Josephine's failure with Dudley Knowleton is her first realization that payment is coming due. It is even more devastating in view of what he represents: “the little city [New Haven] where men of three centuries had brought their energies and aspirations for winnowing” (233). But by his own admission, Dudley, the man every girl is supposed to want, “[hasn't] any ideas” (233). His value is dictated by his connections and his social position, making him the quintessential eligible bachelor. After Dudley rejects her overtures, Josephine captures the essence of her own dilemma when she tells him “I'm just paying for things” (244). But the statement is about more than kissing a few boys. In addition to paying for her sexual desire and her beauty, Josephine is paying for the inability of her society to deal with the “monster” it has created by consigning women to the position of objects for trade while also restricting their power in the marketplace.

One ramification of Josephine's blatant sexuality is the way she is demonized, even vampirized, by others, including the narrator: the expression on her face when she looks at Anthony Harker is “the very demon of tender melancholy” (194); she is referred to as “that little devil” (198); and she is even compared to Mephistopheles in Faust (222). And as noted above, the title of the first story in the sequence, “First Blood,” establishes her clearly as the “vampiric destroyer” Bryer and Kuehl find so common in Fitzgerald's fiction (Fitzgerald, Basil and Josephine xx).⁷ The description of Anthony Harker in “First Blood” (whose name brings to mind Jonathan Harker, a victim of the vampire in the original Dracula) is a classic account of an encounter with a vampire: he is mesmerized by her gaze, patently unable to resist her. He recognizes that a relationship with her could become “a rather dangerous little mess” (198), but he is only able finally to break it off in a dark anteroom where he is unable to see her face clearly. This repeated demonization suggests that Josephine's desire, and her willingness to act on it, is monstrous and unnatural. By the concluding story in the series, “Emotional Bankruptcy,” she has acquired all of the traits necessary for the “vamp” or vampire to which she has been compared throughout: she is without conscience or scruples, she has learned how to manipulate men without getting personally involved, and she recognizes, however unconsciously, the economic basis of gender relations.⁸

It is hard to ignore the connection between Josephine's exertion of “power,” limited and short-lived as it is, and her eventual comeuppance. As Gayle Rubin points out in “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” “the preferred female sexuality would be one which responded to the desire of others, rather than one which actively desired and sought a response” (Reiter 182). Josephine must be brought to the realization that it is only through men that she has any power or authority, and she must agree to lose herself in a man. Even her lack of passion for Edward Dicer, the war hero and supposed Ideal, is not something her mother would have understood; he is the perfect man, one she should marry despite her lack of desire. In fact, by the conclusion of the series Josephine has been brought to the ideal condition for woman-as-product: she has no desire left to distract her.

Ideal types of one sort or another guide Josephine's existence from an early age, including those of the “Ideal Benbower Girl” and the “Ideal Breerly Girl” (191). But the emphasis on the word “girl” suggests the foremost problem with these models: they give no clue as to what form a mature woman might take. Josephine is torn between her desires, which are very real, and the various ideals held up for her to emulate. Her emergence as a “vamp,” albeit a “baby vamp,” is partly a result of this struggle. The stories trace her movement back and forth between a dream vision of marital bliss and her desire for a more exciting and self-defining existence, her urge to “spend” herself when and how she likes. The alternative is to become like her sister, Constance, whose name aptly describes her most salient feature.

The existence for which Josephine is intended is clearly outlined in the wedding scene that occurs early in the sequence. The bride is described as “unsullied, beloved and holy with a sweet glow,” and the plot of her life's story is equally uncomplicated: “an adolescence of uprightness, a host of friends, then the appearance of the perfect lover, the Ideal” (201). Despite her mother's admonition that “Love isn’t like it is in books,” Josephine continues to idealize marriage, an attitude that seems to have been increasingly common in the early part of the twentieth century. According to Fass, marriage was perceived by young women of Josephine's type as “the entrance into a fuller and richer life; an opportunity for sharing joys and sorrows, with a mate who [would] not be merely a protector or provider, but an all-around companion. … [Marriage was regarded as] the one arena for expression, and the only sphere for personal satisfaction. Within a severely circumscribed sense of life-fulfilling possibilities, marriage was expected to serve every channel, implicitly more for women than for men. In that sense, the very expansion of possibilities now offered to women in marriage implied ultimate frustrations” (80, 82-83). In other words, marriage was perceived as the safest and surest route to self-fulfillment, a way to enlarge upon the freedoms experienced as a daughter of privilege.

The traditional reading of Josephine's dilemma in the last story in the sequence, “Emotional Bankruptcy,” is that she has spent herself too freely and wasted her emotional stores through countless meaningless affairs. But what Josephine consumes is men, and she poses a threat to the social order because she attempts to move from the position of product to that of conspicuous consumer in the marriage market. Her string of beaus has much in common with advertisers' emphasis on “multiple consumption” in the 1920s, the pressure to own “two or more radios and even automobiles” (Green 9), which was also a way to publicize one's wealth and power. However, her “romantic conquests,” to use James Nagel's expression (Bryer, The Short Stories 285), also resonate with another consumer activity: collecting. If, as Nagel observes, Josephine's various men are like “troph[ies] for temporary display” (285), then they can be seen as constituting a collection. Yet, as a woman, Josephine is herself a collectible object, a trophy to be won and displayed. She has therefore upended the traditional system by creating a collection of her own, one for which she has bargained with her sexuality and beauty.⁹

A woman of ever-growing desires and needs, Josephine is more than a match for the men with whom she comes in contact, and their frustration at their inability to possess her is matched by her increasing dissatisfaction with them. Yet it is one of these men whom she is expected one day to marry and spend the rest of her life with. Her only alternative is someone like Dudley, a man without ideas or imagination, and the lesson she learns from him is to be more selective in her consumption. Josephine must eventually pay for what she has done, for the sense of powerlessness that she has left in her wake, and for the danger she has posed to the status quo. As John Bailey so presciently tells her, “We all get what's coming to us” (258). Put in the terms of the marketplace, “ultimately, consumption is about power” (Douglas and Isherwood 89), and Josephine has attempted to claim the power of consumption for herself, with devastating results.

For example, one of Josephine's observations concerning the Yale prom is that it is “a function run by men upon men's standards—an outward projection of the New Haven world from which women were excluded and which went on mysteriously behind the scenes” (230). She attempts to exert her power in this world, but Dudley's reaction to her is telling, especially because he is its chief representative: she frightens him off by her experience with men, her blatant desire for him, and her beauty (just as she is herself frightened off earlier by the intensity of Anthony Harker). She is not afraid to go after what she wants or to acknowledge that she is in turn desirable. But the prom is run on male terms. By the time she attends a prom at Princeton one year later she has learned how to manipulate this world, although it is a shallow “victory” because the men over whom she now exerts her influence no longer appear as “heroes or men of the world or anything. … They [are] just easy” (277). The irony of the word “easy” in this context is lost on Josephine, of course, but not on the reader. It is because such conquests are easy for her that Josephine is herself thought to be “easy.”

What makes Josephine especially “dangerous” in the early stories is her failure to make conscious decisions. Many of her actions are attributed to instinct rather than to any actual thought process.¹⁰ She represents chaos, a threat to the “natural” order of things where wealth, class, and power give one ascendance over all others. She seems at times to realize the potential risks in her course of action, but whatever inclination she has to be “good” is overwhelmed by her desire to live her life on her own terms. She also does not know what she wants, and so the description of her as an “unconscious pioneer” is not accidental (188). As Josephine dances with Anthony Harker for the first time, the narrator explains that she “did not plan; she merely let herself go, and the overwhelming life in her did the rest” (196). By the last story of the sequence, however, she is planning every detail, right down to the way she is arranged in Dicer's arms just before he kisses her. She is now vividly aware of the passage of time, of “the seconds passing, each one carrying a load of loveliness toward the future” (285). Instead of living in and for the present, Josephine is anticipating movement into the future.

As Bram Dijkstra points out in Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood, woman is often figured as “the enemy of time” (35). He observes that in Darwin's The Descent of Man women are perceived as having an “instinctive compulsion to re-create, to reproduce, to repeat themselves, until the end of time” (35). And, in fact, at a key moment in the sequence Josephine decides to forego the future for “the immediate, shimmering present” (269). But the decision is moot; she must live in and for the moment because she is unprepared for and not entitled to anything else. Yet, paradoxically, Josephine's entire existence, as understood by her family and society, is predicated on the future: she is supposed to be “saving” herself for her future husband and hoarding what there is of her “self” to spend on him and her children. Thus, she is the product and prisoner of a social class whose members celebrate living for the moment, who spend freely without thought of future consequences, but who expect delayed gratification from their offspring, in particular their female offspring. The women upon whom Josephine is expected to model herself have no choice but to live in the present, since the future is not theirs to control, either sexually or economically. In an interesting “slip,” Josephine asks one prospective beau, “Don't you want to marry and have children and make some woman a fine wife—I mean, a fine husband?” (213). Of course, that is the very question she must answer; but while men have the option to reply in the negative, Josephine does not. Once she gives herself up to Dicer there will be no future; the search will be over, and the one arena in which she has had some measure of power will be closed to her. She will be in thrall to one man, and that man an actuality rather than an ideal.

It is this that makes the final scene with Dicer so ironic and yet so tragic as well. She has created a scenario that no longer has the power to captivate or hold her; she has had passion, love, and romance. Now she will need more, but there is no indication that anything else awaits her. She turns to Dicer to help her, as she has turned to men all her life, but he is indifferent. She believes he is everything she has always wanted, and she anticipates his arrival at her door with the old thrill, but the present moment is no longer enough. Had he agreed to help her when she pleaded with him to do so this might well have opened a future for them both, one with a plan and a goal. She finds her basket empty because it was filled with only one thing, and she believed there was more.

Josephine has fallen into the sort of trap described so well by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex: “It is woman's misfortune to be surrounded by almost irresistible temptations; everything incites her to follow the easy slopes; instead of being invited to fight her own way up, she is told that she is only to let herself slide and she will attain paradises of enchantment. When she perceives that she has been duped by a mirage, it is too late; her strength has been exhausted in a losing venture” (716). Josephine has, in de Beauvoir's words, given “herself completely to her idol in the hopes that he will give her at once possession of herself and of the universe he represents” (717). But what Josephine receives from Dicer is emptiness and apathy. Instead of saving herself, she has dived feetfirst into the shallow world provided for her, growing increasingly dissatisfied with the role she is expected to play. She has had the one “experience” granted to women, the wielding of power in the snaring of a man, and she has squandered it. But the fault is not in Josephine; it is in the society, depicted so precisely by Fitzgerald, that has given her no other options. Without education or experience of the world outside her social circle, she poses little threat to the social order. Straining to understand the limitations that have been established for women, Josephine finds only lack and confusion.

“One cannot both spend and have,” Josephine finally realizes (287). Yet a character like Basil Duke Lee, the protagonist of the allied story sequence, is given the means to recoup his “losses,” while Josephine is not. Although women have limited emotional capital to spend, Basil's similar romantic experiences lead to maturity and wisdom. Josephine, meanwhile, loses the very “vitality” that Bryer and Kuehl suggest is Basil's greatest strength (Fitzgerald, Basil and Josephine xxi). The Josephine stories even cover a much shorter time period; only two years in her life are recounted, while the reader follows Basil from boyhood to young manhood. One effect of such a narrow focus is the suggestion that this is the only part of Josephine's existence of any interest or importance, not how she got to this point or even where she will go afterward. In the final story of the sequence, she is left in a state of limbo. Basil, on the other hand, is described by Bryer and Kuehl as living in “the future, always glowing like a comfortable beacon.” But there is good reason for this. Basil has a future, one “which holds achievement and power” (Fitzgerald, Basil and Josephine xix). Josephine is expected to spend the last of her self in the snaring of a husband, and the rest of her life living off whatever emotional and intellectual reserves he allots to her.

In a letter to his daughter Scottie, Fitzgerald wrote: “Our danger is imagining that we have resources—material and moral—which we haven't got. … Do you know what bankruptcy exactly means? It means drawing on resources which one does not possess” (Letters 55). Josephine learns early on that she must, as Emma Goldman puts it, “pay for her right to exist … with sex favors” (185). Her error is in thinking that her stores are hers to use as she pleases, that they can be replenished, and that she will not be punished for indulging her sexual nature. The blame is not hers alone. She is a product—in both senses of the word—of social, class, and economic forces that turn everything into a transaction, one in which women are unable to participate equitably. It is too late when Josephine finally begins to understand the intractability of the sexual marketplace: how high a price she has unwittingly paid, and must continue to pay, for so small and uncertain a return.

Notes

1. Arthur Mizener (The Far Side of Paradise) was the first to recognize the importance of the theme of emotional bankruptcy in Fitzgerald's work. Since then a number of critics have addressed themselves to this idea in the Josephine stories. However, the emphasis has continued to be on Josephine's emotional depletion. Drake, in “Josephine and Emotional Bankruptcy,” focuses on Josephine's emotional wastefulness, her having experienced too much too soon. Both Mangum in A Fortune Yet and Potts in The Price of Paradise refer to Josephine's “reckless emotional spending” (Mangum 114), but they do not pursue this line of analysis, emphasizing instead her eventual “emotional depletion” (Mangum 115). Finally, in “Initiation and Intertextuality in The Basil and Josephine Stories,” James Nagel discusses the Josephine stories as “an abbreviated feminine bildungsroman,” but he also sees the stories primarily as a record of “Josephine's progressive debasement of emotions” (Bryer, New Essays 289). Nagel is also among the most recent critics to argue for the narrative unity of the sequences, and he provides an excellent overview of the criticism.

2. The years 1928 to 1931 were marked for Fitzgerald by the collapse of the economy and the collapse of Zelda. In his ledger for 1929, Fitzgerald wrote, “The Crash! Zelda + America” (Ledger 184). The two are inextricably intertwined in his imagination, and this combination is crucial for an understanding of the Josephine stories. For a complete review of the publishing history of the sequences, see Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl's introduction to The Basil and Josephine Stories.

3. For more about the impact of science and management theories on the domestic life of women, see Green and Lears.

4. As Gilman notes, “It is among the wealthy classes that the economic dependence of women is carried to its extreme. The daughters and wives of the rich fail to perform even the domestic service expected of women of poorer families. They are from birth to death absolutely non-productive in goods or labor of economic value” (170). It was, of course, this very class that provided Fitzgerald with the material for his fiction. In addition, while education was strongly encouraged for elite young men, women of the same class were not encouraged to attend college. According to Green, “Ninety percent of all junior and senior high school girls in the United States in the 1930s were directed into home economics classes. … Nearly all of those women who went to college did not do so to pursue a career outside the home” (127).

5. Whenever she believes she has been ill-treated or spoken badly of, Josephine's reaction is to blame “ugly and jealous girls” (206). This response is representative of the attitudes and behaviors described by Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy as contributing to the position of women in relation to men, especially with regard to social class: “The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining ‘respectability’ and ‘deviance’ according to women's sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women” (217).

6. Fass uses very similar language when describing the mating game among young people in the 1920s: “Since mating was one of the chief aims of both rituals [dating and petting], immediate sexual satisfaction had to be carefully weighed in view of long-term goals” (268).

7. In Evil Sisters, Dijkstra explains that in the first two or three decades of this century, the biological sciences in particular were used to confirm the dangers of female sexuality (5). His study focuses on the image of woman as vampire, and his descriptions are strikingly similar to the descriptions of Josephine. I am also indebted to Dijkstra for the expression “baby vamp” (used by Fitzgerald in The Beautiful and Damned [29]), which I have used in connection with Josephine.

8. Fass points out that “it was emotional commitment above all that legitimated eroticism, for the young were true romantics who believed strongly in love” (273), so much so that even premarital sex was not condemned in a love relationship, such as that between engaged couples. However, love is the ingredient missing from most of Josephine's affairs. Instead, she is driven by more mundane emotions: curiosity, pride in her physical attractiveness and sexuality, and the joy of acquisition.

9. Jean Baudrillard's observation on the completed collection—“madness begins once a collection is deemed complete and thus ceases to centre around its absent term” (93)—has interesting connotations when considered in the light of Josephine's state at the end of the story.

10. Dijkstra writes of “a growing conviction among physicians, biologists, and other such theologians of the scientific age, that all women were, in fact, ‘real’ vampires, driven by nature to depredate the male” (46-47).