Dexter Green feels that there is some magical quality about the rich that is embodied in Judy Jones, the quintessential model of the "glittering things and glittering people" of the world of wealth that he covets. It this aura of the spectacular to which Dexter reacts emotionally, impetuously, and around which he constructs his "winter dreams." But, for Dexter--to rephrase an aphorism--all that glitters is only gold and nothing else; thus, his dreams fail him as merely illusions, just as snow melts away.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" is a story not unlike Charles Dickens's classic tale, Great Expectations, in which the wealth and the life of the upper class lures the innocent Pip into the falsity of material values, social status, and snobbery and hypocrisy. Like Pip,after being smitten by Judy Jones, Dexter leaves home to attain "the glittering things" himself as he feels that wealth bestows upon people a certain power; and, he becomes very successful in a private business. One day he again encounters Judy when he is extended an invitation to play golf at the Sherry Island Golf Club, where he has an accidental meeting with Judy Jones who has become "arrestingly beautiful." When he sees her later that day, on a whim she invites Dexter to dinner, once again "her casual whim gave direction to his life."
Dexter again surrenders himself to his "winter dreams" of Judy. While Judy possesses an excitability that Dexter finds exquisite, she is only entertained by having her own desires gratified, and by "the direct exercise of her own charm"; that is, she is "nourished" only from within herself. So, after bringing Dexter "ecstatic happiness and intolerable agony of spirit" Judy leaves Dexter who later becomes engaged to Irene Scheerer. But, like winter, Judy re-enters his life again, disrupting Dexter's future with Irene as he abandons her for the seduction of his Siren as Judy invites him inside. This affair lasts only a month.
Having tasted "the deep pain" that follows "a deep happiness," Dexter leaves town for New York, but the World War takes him off, "liberating" him from "webs of emotions."
Seven years later, only solid realities are left to Dexter; all dreams have vanished as he learns of Judy's tragic marriage, and her loss of beauty. The fickleness of Judy's self-absorbed emotion, the gilded veneer of her selfishness created but illusions. With characteristic poetic lyricism, Fitzgerald writes,
The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, or youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.
These are Dexter Green's thoughts as he gazes with melancholy out the window at the New York sky-line, sensing the mutability of life as he grieves for the capacity to grieve. All "winter dreams," mere romantic illusions, have been lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment