In 1915 nineteen-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a remarkable letter to his younger sister Annabel, criticizing her social deportment and arguing that a successful debutante's popularity is composed of a concerted appeal to male egotism (“Boys like to talk about themselves … always pay close attention to the man.”) and accomplished acting (“Your natural laugh is good, but your artificial one is bum.”) Abandoning the traditional role of elder brother as protector of innocence, he both instructs Annabel in the rudiments of sex appeal and endeavors to inoculate her with cynicism: “Learn to be worldly. Remember that in society nine girls out of ten marry for money and nine men out of ten are fools.” Fitzgerald saved the letter and between November 1919 and February 1920 transformed it into a short story for the Saturday Evening Post—“Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Lest anyone doubt the short story's origin, Fitzgerald scribbled “Basis of Bernice” on the letter to Annabel.¹

Published in the Post on May 1, 1920, and gathered almost immediately into Fitzgerald's first collection of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” has since received little critical attention and less respect. Writing to H. L. Mencken, Fitzgerald labeled the story “trash.”² Many critics, while admiring its lively plot development, sharply drawn characters, Wilde-like dialogue, whimsical imagery, and comic denouement, appear to accept Fitzgerald's disparaging estimate of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Matthew J. Bruccoli has called it “not one of Fitzgerald's greatest short stories,” “obviously commercial,” “written as an entertainment.” Henry Dan Piper allots the story two sentences in a book-length study of Fitzgerald's work. John A. Higgins ranks it as “juvenilia.” Brian Way views “Bernice” [“Bernice Bobs Her Hair”] as “marred by immaturities of style and a sentimental ending.” Sergio Perosa dismisses it as “purely humorous.” Bryant Mangum labels the story “light.” And John Kuehl, who believes that Fitzgerald “underrated” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” nevertheless has little to say about it. Only Alice Hall Petry has called “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” “excellent.”³

Yet Fitzgerald's valuation of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” as “trash” was almost certainly insincere, an attempt to appease Mencken, then editor of The Smart Set and interested in more self-consciously “literary” fiction. In 1935 Fitzgerald expressed an entirely different opinion of “Bernice” when he suggested that Chatto and Windus include it in a collection of his best stories. It must be noted that the critics accepting Fitzgerald's remark to Mencken are exclusively male and perhaps ill-equipped to appreciate a short story about the gender socialization of young women, written for the predominantly female market of the Saturday Evening Post.⁴

Neglect of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” may be reinforced by the story's rich structure of allusion to a source unacknowledged by Fitzgerald and still unrecognized by critics—a classic novel traditionally handed down from mother to daughter in American culture, seldom or never read by males of any age, and undoubtedly borrowed by Fitzgerald from Annabel's shelf—Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. In This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald lists the books his autobiographical hero Amory Blaine has read in his childhood. There, among such boyish favorites as For the Honor of the School, Dangerous Dan McGrew, and The Police Gazette, Little Women is conspicuous as a book Amory has read not once, but twice. When, in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” Fitzgerald has Bernice quote Alcott, one suspects that he too read Little Women more than once. Indeed, comparison of the short story and the novel reveals that Fitzgerald borrowed his major plot elements and themes from Little Women, turning them upside down in a Jazz Age revision of what Amory Blaine calls “the dull literature of female virtue.”⁵

Fitzgerald mentions Little Women directly only once in his short story, when Marjorie urges her burdensome cousin, Bernice, to go home, and Bernice tries to make Marjorie see her rudeness:

“Don't you think that common kindness … ?”

“Oh, please don't quote Little Women!” cried Marjorie impatiently. “That's out of style.”

“You think so?”

“Heavens, yes! What modern girl could live like those inane females?”

“They were the models for our mothers.”

Marjorie laughed.

“Yes, they were … not! Besides, our mothers were all very well in their way, but they know very little about their daughters' problems.”⁶

Marjorie and Bernice do experience problems (how to be popular, how to attract an eligible suitor, how to compete with other girls in the marriage market) experienced by their mothers and by all adolescent women before them. Yet “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” demonstrates that modern girls, whatever their mothers might have done, no longer solve such problems by emulating Little Women.⁷

“Bernice Bobs Her Hair” begins with two minor but significant allusions to Alcott's novel. In the story's opening paragraphs, middle-aged ladies with “sharp eyes and icy hearts” watch the country-club dances and postulate “that every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge.”⁸ In Little Women, when Meg considers marriage to an impoverished tutor, another middle-aged lady with sharp eyes and an icy heart, Aunt March, puts forth the same postulate: “You ought to marry well and help your family. It's your duty to make a rich match and it ought to be impressed upon you.”⁹ “Marmee,” mother of Little Women's four female protagonists, sounds the novel's moral keynote by overruling Aunt March's advice: “I'd rather see you poor men's wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones without self-respect and peace” (LW, 116).

A second borrowing from Little Women is the three-year engagement of Fitzgerald's Jim Strain and Ethel Demorest. In Alcott's novel, Meg consents to a three-year engagement in which she and the poor tutor, her beloved John Brooke, work to afford marriage. After doing his duty “manfully” in the Civil War, John devotes himself to “preparing for business, and earning a home for Meg,” while she spends the three years “in working as well as waiting, growing womanly in character, wise in housewifely arts, and prettier than ever, for love is a great beautifier” (LW, 268). Alcott's characters contrast sharply with Fitzgerald's “… Jim Strain and Ethel Demorest, who had been privately engaged for three years. Everyone knew that as soon as Jim managed to hold a job for more than two months she would marry him. Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar” (“BBHH” [“Bernice Bobs Her Hair”], 117).

One Victorian ideal, then, that Fitzgerald intends to shatter by revising Little Women as “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is the notion of “love in a cottage,” of sentimental poverty. The middle-aged ladies with their “hunted partridge” postulate prove Marjorie's point that their mothers were never so unworldly as their lip service to Alcott's novel might suggest. Fitzgerald's modern girl appreciates the inestimable advantage of a large income in sustaining married bliss. Even Bernice, reared on Little Women, has nothing but contempt for Jim and Ethel, “mooning around for years without a red penny” (“BBHH,” 120).

Fitzgerald drew a large portion of his plot from chapter 9 of Little Women, “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair,” where unspoiled and innocent Meg goes to stay for a fortnight with her sophisticated friend Annie Moffat, just as gauche and unworldly Bernice goes to visit her worldly wise cousin Marjorie Harvey. Meg overhears the Moffat girls and their mother discussing her dowdy clothes and inability to capture a desirable suitor, just as Bernice overhears Marjorie and Mrs. Harvey discussing her social shortcomings and unpopularity. Humiliated, Meg allows herself to be “made over” by Belle Moffat and her French maid, Hortense:

They crimped and curled her hair, they polished her neck and arms with some fragrant powder, touched her lips with coralline salve, to make them redder, and Hortense would have added “a soupçon of rouge,” if Meg had not rebelled. They laced her into a sky-blue dress, which was so tight she could hardly breathe, and so low in the neck that modest Meg blushed to see herself in the mirror. … A laced handkerchief, a plumy fan, and a bouquet in a silver holder finished her off; and Miss Belle surveyed her with the satisfaction of a little girl with a newly dressed doll.

(LW, 106-7)

Bernice, too, allows herself to be “made over.” Marjorie chooses a dark red dress to set off Bernice's “shadowy eyes and high coloring,” arranges her cousin's hair, and sets it glistening with brilliantine (“BBHH,” 130). Just as the Moffat girls “drill” Meg on the proper management of her skirt and “those French heels,” so Marjorie coaches Bernice on graceful deportment, instructing her not to lean on a man when she dances and to develop more “ease of manner” (LW, 107; “BBHH,” 126-27).

Meg is a social success in her borrowed finery. Several young ladies, who have not noticed her before, become “very affectionate all of a sudden,” while several young gentlemen, who have hitherto only stared, ask “to be introduced,” and say “all manner of agreeable but foolish things” (LW, 108). Meg's normally modest demeanor dissolves. She drinks champagne, dances and flirts, chatters and giggles, and “romps” in a scandalizing way. “I'm not Meg tonight,” she tells a friend. “I'm a ‘doll’ who does all sorts of crazy things” (LW, 112). Meg in her new persona inspires her good friend Sallie Gardiner's jealousy by attaching the affections of Sallie's beau, Ned Moffat.

Like Meg, Fitzgerald's Bernice scores a social success by “follow[ing] instructions exactly,” and is cut in on so frequently that she is “danced tired” for the first time in her life (“BBHH,” 131). Bernice, who in Marjorie's view is “no case for sensible things,” also behaves crazily. In her new persona, Bernice inspires her cousin's jealousy by attaching the affections of Warren McIntyre, “Miss Marjorie's best fella” (“BBHH,” 132).

Here the similarities between “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” end. After her makeover, Meg fails to have a “good time” (LW, 112). The champagne gives her a “splitting headache,” and two men she admires, the dignified Major Lincoln and the charming Teddy Laurence, disapprove of her “fuss and feathers” (LW, 109, 113). Meg feels “uncomfortable and ashamed” and wishes she had been “sensible” (LW, 109). After being sick all the next day, Meg returns home and confesses all to Marmee, who draws a moral from Meg's unhappy experiment in vanity: “[Enjoying praise and admiration] is perfectly natural, if the liking does not become a passion and lead one to do foolish or unmaidenly things. Learn to know and value the praise which is worth having, and to excite the admiration of worthy people by being modest as well as pretty, Meg” (LW, 115). Alcott makes it clear that Meg is more happy and attractive at a “small party” she attends before her makeover. Clad in her shabby but spotless white tarlatan, adorned solely by flowers from Teddy, Meg dances “to her heart's content”; receives three compliments from worthy admirers on her fine voice, fresh appearance, and lively dancing; and enjoys herself “very much,” achieving an inner contentment she cannot find when preening “like the jackdaw in the fable” (LW, 107).

Unlike Meg, Bernice is “sorta dopeless” before her metamorphosis into a “society vampire” (“BBHH,” 118, 129). Despite her “dark hair and high color,” Bernice's dresses are “frights” and her “straggly” eyebrows are a blemish (“BBHH,” 123). She never says “anything to a boy except that it's hot or the floor's crowded or that she's going to school in New York next year,” and “turns an ungraceful red,” exclaiming “Fresh!” when Warren McIntyre tells her that she has “an awfully kissable mouth” (“BBHH,” 119-20, 122). Marjorie must coax her own beaux to dance with the “lame-duck visitor,” and Bernice, feeling “a vague pain that she is not … popular,” has “a bum time” (“BBHH,” 121, 122).

Under Marjorie's tutelage, Bernice, like Meg at Vanity Fair, becomes “‘a doll’ who does all sorts of crazy things” (LW, 112). Adopting Oscar Wilde's principle that “you've either got to amuse people or feed 'em or shock 'em,” Bernice amuses men with invitations to a fictitious bobbing (“Of course I'm charging admission, but if you'll come down and encourage me I'll issue passes for the inside seats” [“BBHH,” 129]), feeds them with flattery (“I want to ask your opinion of several people. I imagine you're a wonderful judge of character” [“BBHH,” 129]), and shocks them with sexual suggestion (“I always fix my hair first and powder my face and put on my hat; then I get into the bathtub and dress afterwards. Don't you think that's the best plan?” [“BBHH,” 132]).

Meg learns that virtuous and modest behavior is its own reward; Bernice learns that “foolish and unmaidenly” antics pay enormous dividends in popularity, which is “everything when you're eighteen” (“BBHH,” 121). Exchanging Louisa May Alcott's mores for Oscar Wilde's, Bernice finds herself a “gardenia girl” like Marjorie, with “three or four men in love with her,” cut in on “every few feet” (“BBHH,” 122). Glowing with gratified vanity, Bernice becomes attractive and genuinely enjoys herself: “Yes, she was pretty, distinctly pretty; and tonight her face seemed really vivacious. She had that look that no woman, however histrionically proficient, can successfully counterfeit—she looked as if she were having a good time” (“BBHH,” 130).

Fitzgerald inverts Little Women in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” in part to portray a generation adrift without moral guidance. In his country-club world, where parents are socially ambitious for their children, the moral destiny of little women who “give their hearts into their mother's keeping” is ambiguous at best (LW, 268). Meg, in a moral or social quandary, turns to her mother for advice. Even when Meg cannot “cry and rush home to tell her troubles,” her mother's influence is omnipresent—Meg carries a note from Marmee in her pocket as a “talisman against envy, vanity, and false pride” (LW, 103). Bernice, on the other hand, has no intention of rushing home and telling her troubles. Meg visits the worldly Moffats in spite of her mother's misgivings; Bernice's visit with her cousin is “parent-arranged” (“BBHH,” 120). Instead of longing for maternal advice, Bernice fears her mother's reaction to her social disgrace: “‘You're my cousin,’ sobbed Bernice. ‘I'm v-v-visiting you. I was to stay a month, and if I go home my mother will know and she'll wah-wonder …’” (“BBHH,” 124).

Young men, as well as mothers, can be sources of moral guidance in Little Women. Meg is especially devastated by Teddy's disapproval of her tight, low-cut dress and gaudy makeup. He is handsome, charming, and rich—a boy whose good opinion even a Fitzgerald flapper might value. In Fitzgerald's world, however, young men who offer moral guidance to debutantes are priggish figures of fun. Draycott Deyo, studying for the ministry, cuts in on Bernice because he thinks she is a “quiet, reserved girl” (“BBHH,” 131-32). Bernice earns his disapproval by treating him “to the line which began ‘Hello, Shell Shock,’” and to her story about doing her hair before getting into the bathtub: “Though Draycott Deyo was in the throes of difficulties concerning baptism by immersion and might possibly have seen a connection, it must be admitted that he did not. He considered feminine bathing an immoral subject, and gave her some of his ideas on the depravity of modern society” (“BBHH,” 132). Draycott Deyo is no Teddy Laurence. To Bernice, his disapproval is merely an “unfortunate occurrence,” more than offset by her “signal successes” with desirable young men like the Harvard lawyer G. Reece Stoddard (“BBHH,” 132).

In Alcott's fictional world, active resistance against “envy, vanity, and false pride” ensures young women not only present happiness, but also future success in the marriage market. While Marmee warns her daughters that they had “better be old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands,” she also assures them that “poverty seldom daunts a sincere lover. Some of the best and most honored women I know were poor girls, but so love-worthy that they were not allowed to become old maids” (LW, 116). The novel bears her out as Meg, Amy, and Jo each find husbands attracted by their “love-worthiness,” their ability to fulfill “woman's special mission” of “drying tears and bearing burdens” (LW, 531).¹⁰

In “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” the world in which women were married for “mysterious womanly qualities, always mentioned but never displayed,” is a thing of the past (“BBHH,” 121). While Mrs. Harvey remembers that “when she was a girl all young ladies who belonged to nice families had glorious times,” her daughter pronounces that “these days it's every girl for herself” and sneers at Bernice's reliance on Little Women as a moral guidebook: “‘The womanly woman!’ continued Marjorie. ‘Her whole early life is occupied in whining criticisms of girls like me who really do have a good time’” (“BBHH,” 122, 125).

In addition to Alcott's “Vanity Fair” scenario, Fitzgerald borrowed the central episode of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” from Little Women. In both works, a young girl impetuously visits a barber shop and orders her long hair cut off. Jo March's decision comes in chapter 15 of Little Women, when Marmee receives a telegram informing her that her husband, a chaplain in the Union Army, lies dangerously ill in a Washington hospital. The family is too poor to purchase a train ticket, and Marmee, who is “not too proud to beg for Father,” humbles herself to borrow money from a grudging Aunt March (LW, 180-82).

Jo, who identifies strongly with her mother's proud hatred of borrowing, finds herself “wild to do something for Father” and “bound to have some money, if I sold the nose off my face to get it.” Sent out to buy nursing supplies, she passes a barber shop with “tails of hair with prices marked” displayed in the window. Here she encounters a shrewd and miserly barber: “He rather stared at first, as if he wasn't used to having girls bounce into his shop and ask him to buy their hair. He said he didn't care about mine, it wasn't the fashionable color, and he never paid much for it in the first place. … I begged him to take it, and told him why I was in such a hurry” (LW, 185). Jo finally sells her hair for twenty-five dollars.

After her makeover, Bernice's “line about the bobbing of her hair” is “the best known and most universally approved element” of her conversation, though her “tonsorial intentions” are strictly dishonorable (“BBHH,” 132). Marjorie, outraged by Warren McIntyre's sudden interest in her cousin, publicly calls Bernice's bluff, hoping to expose her as a fraud without title to either Warren or popularity (“BBHH,” 133). Bernice tries to save face by reaffirming her intentions of bobbing her hair, but Marjorie and her friends demand immediate proof of sincerity. Bernice accepts their challenge:

Out of the group came Marjorie's voice, very clear and contemptuous.

“Don't worry—she'll back out.”

“Come on, Bernice!” cried Otis, starting toward the door.

Four eyes—Warren's and Marjorie's—stared at her, challenged her, defied her. For another second she wavered wildly.

“All right,” she said swiftly, “I don't care if I do.”

(“BBHH,” 135)

Jo's decision to sell her hair to help her family is a conquest of personal vanity as well as an exercise in humility. The least attractive of the four March sisters, Jo is thoroughly unfeminine in person. “Very tall, thin, and brown,” she resembles “a colt,” and has “round shoulders,” “big hands and feet,” and “long limbs which were very much in her way” (LW, 14). Her “long, thick hair” is “her one beauty” (LW, 188). Jo does shed a tear for her shorn hair, but proclaims “it will be good for my vanity, I was getting too proud of my wig” (LW, 184). Her mother congratulates her on sacrificing her “vanity … to her love” (LW, 184).

Jo cuts her hair out of altruism, imitating her mother and swallowing her pride to assist her beloved father. Bernice bobs her hair out of narcissism, braving maternal disapproval (“Even the thought of her mother was no deterrent now” [“BBHH,” 133]) to salvage her pride. While hitherto Bernice has justified Marjorie's contempt for “the womanly woman” by whining and taking refuge in her mother's opinions when criticized, she stands firm when Marjorie makes her sincerity about bobbing her hair a public question. Viewing Marjorie's thrown gauntlet as “the test supreme of her sportsmanship, her right to walk unchallenged in the starry heaven of popular girls,” Bernice undergoes her bobbing with lifted chin and clenched fists (“BBHH,” 135).

Jo sacrifices her vanity to her love when she cuts her hair; Bernice sacrifices her vanity to her pride. Both sacrifices are considerable, for both girls dread the mutilation of their looks as they would physical dismemberment. When Jo sees “the dear old hair laid out on the table,” she feels “as if I'd had an arm or leg cut off” (LW, 187). Fitzgerald borrows an even stronger image from Little Women to describe Bernice's dread—Jo's sister Amy is particularly horrified because she “would as soon have thought of cutting off her head as her pretty hair” (LW, 223). Bernice also equates the bobbing of her hair with decapitation: “It was a guillotine indeed, and the hangman was the first barber, who, attired in a white coat and smoking a cigarette, leaned nonchalantly against the first chair. … Would they blind-fold her? No, but they would tie a white cloth round her neck lest any of her blood—nonsense—hair—should get on her clothes” (“BBHH,” 135). Fitzgerald embellishes and extends Alcott's decapitation imagery for his own purposes. Bound for the barbershop in Warren's car, Bernice has “all the sensations of Marie Antoinette bound for the guillotine in a tumbrel” (“BBHH,” 135). As Marie Antoinette, last queen of a doomed aristocracy, was dragged to her execution by savage rebels of the new republic, so Bernice, the last “quiet, reserved girl” raised on Little Women, is dragged to her bobbing by the cruel adolescents of the “jazz-nourished generation” (“BBHH,” 117, 132, 121). When Bernice bobs her hair, a “little woman” dies in the barber's chair and a flapper is born.

For Alcott, long hair worn elaborately restrained is a badge of mature womanhood, which the wearer must strive to merit through equally restrained behavior. In Victorian times, little girls wore their long hair loose or in pigtails; young women who were “out” wore their long hair bound in nets or snoods, or braided and pinned atop their heads. In the opening chapter of Little Women, Meg chides Jo for whistling when she is old enough to wear her hair “turned up” in a net, and Jo responds by unleashing both her bundled-up hair and her pent-up frustration with the behavioral restraint expected of her as she approaches womanhood: “I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and be as prim as a China aster! It's bad enough to be a girl” (LW, 13).

Alcott treats Jo's decision to cut her hair as her initiation into the womanhood she has rebelled against. When her father returns home from the war, he congratulates Jo on her new “womanliness,” a state of feminine virtue she has attained not merely by binding up her hair, but by cutting it off altogether. Along with her chestnut mane, Jo has sacrificed her tomboyish demeanor:

“I see a young lady who pins her collar straight, laces her boots neatly, and neither whistles, talks slang, nor lies on the rug as she used to do. Her face is rather thin and pale just now, with watching and anxiety, but I like to look at it, for it has grown gentler, and her voice is lower; she doesn't bounce, but moves quietly, and takes care of a certain little person [Beth, recovering from scarlet fever,] in a motherly way which delights me.”

(LW, 250)

“Womanliness” for Alcott is an asexual and subdued condition. Jo is most “womanly” when she has divested herself of her long, thick, beautiful hair, the emblem of her sex. “Womanliness” also involves conformity to societal norms of virtuous feminine behavior: Unlike young men, young ladies must pin their collars straight and lace their boots neatly; they must not whistle or talk slang. In Little Women, femininity is a ruthless suppression of sexual and personal identity.

In 1920, when Fitzgerald composed his short story, American attitudes toward women—and their hair—were in transition. Although popular dancer Irene Castle began the vogue for bobbed hair in 1918, short hair for women was not generally accepted until 1924. In 1920 “young ladies who belonged to nice families” still had long hair, worn atop their heads in the Victorian manner if they were “out” (“BBHH,” 122). Fitzgerald lets us know that “little Madeleine Hogue” is very young by remarking that her hair “still feels strange and uncomfortable on top of her head,” but the rage for bobbed hair is spreading—Mrs. Deyo devotes fifteen minutes to the subject in her speech on “The Foibles of the Younger Generation” (“BBHH,” 116, 137). Yet not even the fearless and unsentimental Marjorie can number herself among the avant-garde young women who dared to bob their hair in 1920. When Bernice bobs her hair, then, she severs herself symbolically from the Victorian ideal of womanliness that Alcott reluctantly espoused.

When Jo cuts her hair, she exchanges her one physical beauty for spiritual beauty. Bernice exchanges an illusion of spiritual beauty for physical ugliness. The hair that once “hung in a dark brown glory down her back” now lies shorn in “lank, lifeless blocks on both sides of her suddenly pale face.” The “Madonna-like simplicity” of her appearance gone, Bernice looks “well, frightfully mediocre—not stagy; only ridiculous, like a Greenwich Villager who had left her spectacles at home” (“BBHH,” 136).¹¹ Neither poet nor reformer, Bernice has abandoned the pretty, virginal appearance of a “little woman” for the hard, experienced appearance of a New Woman. Her bobbed hair is “ugly as sin”—a phrase Fitzgerald repeats twice to underscore his misgivings about the flapper's moral destiny (“BBHH,” 136).

Revenge is one of the first evils Jo rejects in Little Women, long before she cuts her hair. When, after a quarrel, Amy burns the sole manuscript of Jo's book, Jo refuses to accept an apology and deliberately does not warn her sister when she skates onto thin ice in the middle of a river: “The little demon [Jo] was harboring said in her ear … ‘let her take care of herself’” (LW, 94). Amy does fall through the ice and is rescued unharmed, but Jo is overcome with remorse and confesses all to her mother. Marmee offers her usual sympathetic counsel, and Jo struggles from that day forward to hold her substantial temper in check. For Alcott, the ability to suppress anger is an important step toward womanliness.

By contrast, when Bernice cuts off the hair that is the emblem of “appropriately and blessedly feminine” qualities she once admired, her capacity for vengeance is unleashed (“BBHH,” 120). For a short time, Bernice silently endures injury after injury—the bobbing has made her ugly, Marjorie wears a mocking smile, Warren deserts her, her aunt and uncle reproach her, she burns her hair and fingers in an unsuccessful attempt to repair her looks with a curling iron. Bernice's gathering rage spills over when Marjorie comes into her room to prepare for bed:

Bernice winced as Marjorie tossed her own hair over her shoulders and began to twist it slowly into two long blond braids until in her cream-colored negligee she looked like a delicate painting of some Saxon princess. Fascinated, Bernice watched the braids grow. Heavy and luxurious they were, moving under the supple fingers like restive snakes—and to Bernice remained this relic and a curling iron and a tomorrow full of eyes. … Marjorie had made a fool of her.

(“BBHH,” 138)

“Something” in Bernice—perhaps the last restraint of her Victorian upbringing—“snaps” at the sight of Marjorie braiding her hair. An expression flashes into Bernice's eyes “that a practiced character reader might have connected vaguely with the set look she had worn in the barber's chair—somehow a development of it. It was a new look for Bernice and it carried consequences” (“BBHH,” 139). After packing her clothes for flight, she creeps into her sleeping cousin's room and “amputate[s]” Marjorie's braids. Escaping into the night, Bernice flings the severed remains of his “crush's” beauty onto the fickle Warren's front porch. Unlike Jo, Bernice feels no remorse for her act of vengeance. After disfiguring Marjorie, she is “oddly happy and exuberant,” and, having conceived Warren's punishment, she must “shut her mouth hard to keep from emitting an absolute peal” of laughter (“BBHH,” 139-40).

Formerly able only to imitate Alcott's idea of a “little woman” or Marjorie's notion of a “modern girl,” Bernice now makes decisions of her own without regard for convention. Before her bobbing, she dreaded the idea of returning home early and making explanations to her mother. Now, with only a note to her aunt and no thought of her mother's reaction, she leaves secretly and unescorted, catching a taxi at the Marlborough Hotel and departing on a 1:00 A.M. train. Bernice has lost the “dark brown glory” of her hair but has gained a new independence of thought and action. The bobbing releases her essential nature. Earlier, Marjorie attributes Bernice's unpopularity to her reputed American Indian ancestry: “I think it's that crazy Indian blood. … Maybe she's a reversion to type. Indian women all just sat around and never said anything” (“BBHH,” 122). After her barbershop trauma, Bernice does indeed revert to type and goes on the warpath. Running down the moonlit street, Bernice is never more like a savage: “‘Huh!’ she giggled wildly. ‘Scalp the selfish thing!’” (“BBHH,” 140).

Despite their differences, what Little Women and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” have most in common is their intense ambivalence about the gender socialization of young women. Modeling her novel on Pilgrim's Progress, Alcott intended each incident in Little Women to illustrate a moral lesson. Yet the metaphors surrounding Jo's hair express Alcott's uncertainty about the “womanly woman” that Fitzgerald's Marjorie derides. In chapter 1, Jo is a “colt” with a free-flowing chestnut “mane,” a wild animal rebelling against restraint, reveling in liberty (LW, 13). After her visit to the oily little barber, Jo is a shorn “black sheep,” humiliatingly bereft of the fleece that endowed her with a separate identity (LW, 250). Her new “womanliness” seems a regrettable taming, a sad domestication. Patricia Meyer Spacks points out that Jo's “fictional vitality” stems from “her deep awareness of how the limitations of feminine possibility make it difficult to express what's in her.”¹²Little Women is a classic precisely because generations of female readers have identified with Jo's suppressed rage against the behavioral restraints imposed on women.

Jo March, who wrote sensational stories like “The Phantom Hand” and “The Curse of the Coventrys” for pulp magazines titled the Weekly Volcano and the Blarneystone Banner, would have exulted guiltily over the Saturday Evening Post conclusion of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” which sees Bernice transformed from silent, passive squaw into whooping warrior. As Bernice avenges herself by chopping off Marjorie's braids and flinging them on Warren's porch, as she dashes giggling into the moonlight, readers gloat over her unholy triumph for the same reason that they agonize over Jo March's sacrifice—Bernice has broken the yoke that Jo has determined to shoulder.

Like Jo March, Louisa May Alcott herself, using the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, wrote romantic thrillers such as “Behind a Mask” and “Pauline's Passion and Punishment” for pulp weeklies, including Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and the Flag of Our Union. Nearly all these stories, recently recovered by Madeleine Stern, feature wicked heroines who wreak vengeance on various oppressors while masquerading as virtuous women.¹³ Behind the mask of A. M. Barnard, Alcott could express a feminist rage imperfectly suppressed in Little Women. Instead of automatically denigrating Fitzgerald's attempts at commercial fiction, scholars might well ask whether pulp formulae permitted him certain kinds of expression forbidden the serious novelist.

Fitzgerald's very choice of Little Women as an allusive subtext for “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” suggests his own ambivalence about the gender socialization of the 1920s' debutantes. Only superficially comic, the short story does little to conceal profound misgivings about a world where popular girls are “dangerous,” young men are “stags” and “partridges” to be hunted, and couples with “artificial, effortless smiles” and “the very worst intentions” dance “weird barbaric interludes” to “African rhythm[s]” (“BBHH,” 116-17). Marjorie Harvey, hard and selfish and without a feminine quality, reigns supreme in this “shifting, semi-cruel world” (“BBHH,” 116), and each of Fitzgerald's allusions to Little Women underscores its sinister features. We cheer Bernice as much for counting coup on the individuals who would make her a “doll” and a sex object as we do for casting off her lame-duck dullness.

Finally, Fitzgerald combined a fatal obsession with glamour and an unbending morality worthy of Bronson Alcott. His mothlike attraction to and moral revulsion from alluring, convention-flouting women is the source of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” 's dialogue with Little Women. While Bernice has freed herself from the mores of Louisa May Alcott, readers cannot know where she is going as she dashes recklessly into the night. Her new freedom is merely license. Bernice has exchanged dullness for glamour, but she has nothing to replace the past's “prosy morals.” She is not so much running free as running wild. This ambivalence of Fitzgerald's makes “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” his jazz elegy for Little Women, for the passing of Victorian womanhood, regretted and not regretted. The adolescent savagery of this early work has not yet gone trending into the senseless violence of The Great Gatsby; its sparkling zaniness has not yet become the dark insanity of Tender Is the Night. But the seeds have been sown, making “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” written on the eve of Fitzgerald's tragic marriage to Zelda Sayre, something more than “purely humorous.”

Notes

1. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, eds., Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 15-18; Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 112.

2. Bruccoli and Duggan, eds., Correspondence, 68.

3. Matthew J. Bruccoli, “On F. Scott Fitzgerald and ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair,’” 217-23; Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait, 67; John A. Higgins, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Stories, 23; Brian Way, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction, 57; Sergio Perosa, The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 31; Bryant Mangum, A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Stories, 35; John Kuehl, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Short Fiction, 33; Alice Hall Petry, Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories—1920-1935, 10. Significantly, Petry, the story's lone female critic, is the only one to note Fitzgerald's reference in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” to Annie Fellows Johnston and Louisa May Alcott (19). However, Petry misses the importance of Fitzgerald's allusion to Alcott by dismissing her work as “saccharine.”

4. Bruccoli and Duggan, eds., Correspondence, 401. According to Mangum in Fortune Yet, magazine president Cyrus Curtis founded the Post on the financial success of the Ladies' Home Journal (29). Curtis was adept at appealing to the middle-class morality and domestic values of the wives and mothers who purchased the Saturday Evening Post for family reading, and the magazine's female readership should be considered largely responsible for its rise from a circulation of two thousand in 1899 to three million in 1937.

5. F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, 17. See also Tender Is the Night, 71, where Rosemary notices that the sinister women in Cardinal de Retz's palace appear to be “fashioned by Louisa May Alcott.”

6. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers, 125. All subsequent page references to “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (“BBHH”) are to the 1920 edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

7. Marjorie's mother, Mrs. Harvey, is named Josephine, perhaps for the protagonist of Little Women (137).

8. Of course, Fitzgerald is paraphrasing the famous opening sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

9. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 116. All subsequent page references to Little Women (LW) are to the 1962 reprint edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

10. The saintly Beth meets a different bridegroom by dying young.

11. In 1920, Greenwich Village was a flourishing center of Bohemianism, whose notable women included (or had recently included) Emma Goldman, proponent of birth control, pacifism, and anarchy; Mabel Dodge, critic of New York's high society and leader of intellectual and aesthetic movements; and Edna St. Vincent Millay, cynical poet and playwright. From a Victorian moral standpoint, these women paid the unthinkable price of promiscuity, divorce, and alcoholism for their independence and substantial achievements.

12. Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination, 99-100.

13. Madeleine B. Stern, ed., Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott.