Refracting Blackness: Slavery and Fitzgerald's Historical Consciousness

Abstract

Refracting Blackness:Slavery and Fitzgerald's Historical Consciousness Garrett Bridger Gilmore When Amory Blaine declares in This Side of Paradise that he is "for the Southern Confederacy" (31), and when he reflects that patriotism comes easy "to a homogenous race" like the Confederacy (139), F. Scott Fitzgerald's youthful romanticism about the Lost Cause stands in full view. Fitzgerald's critics and biographers have thoroughly traced the evolution of his identification as the last son of a fallen Maryland planter family over the course of his career, arguing that aspects of southern and Civil War mythology provide an important language for the expression of Fitzgerald's sense of American modernity.1 For Fitzgerald as for any other Lost Cause thinker, the apparently admirable personal qualities associated with the Old South—honesty, honor, self-composure—mask a desire for the racial and economic relations that subtended them. Fitzgerald's readers, even as they have noted the importance both of the South and of racism in his fiction, have been seemingly uninterested in making sense of the role that the legacy of slavery plays in Fitzgerald's conception of modernity.2 While slavery [End Page 181] as such appears in Fitzgerald's fiction only in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (1922), it nonetheless determines the scope of history explored in his mature fiction. If slavery has so far been unrecoverable from Fitzgerald's fiction, it is because its secrets constitute the whiteness that grounds his historical consciousness. Slavery must remain hidden in order for Fitzgerald's sense of the political and psychic stakes of the present—the domain of the white moneyed class—to cohere. For Fitzgerald, the end of slavery is the beginning of history; Emancipation implicitly proves to be the moment economic and racial relations become (for him) unnatural, when modernity with all of its various alienations begins.3 Much like Fitzgerald's romantic vision of the Confederacy, slavery occupies a place of ill-fated youthful desire in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, the original owner of the story's titular diamond, moved west with "two dozen of the most faithful blacks, who, of course, worshipped him" (192). Fitzgerald revels in imagining and describing the world of the Washingtons, which includes still-enslaved black servants. These were, as Fitzgerald narrates, darkies who had never realized that slavery was abolished. To make sure of this, [Washington] read them a proclamation that he had composed, which announced that General Forrest had reorganized the shattered Southern armies and defeated the North in one pitched battle. The negroes believed him implicitly. (193) Clearly, then, the world of the Washingtons enacts an alternative—yet plausible—history. The enslaved people operate as a central piece of the [End Page 182] story's economic and racial imaginary. The Washington diamond is an economic paradox: the diamond in the mountain was approximately equal in quantity to all the rest of the diamonds known to exist in the world. There was no valuing it by any regular computation, however, for it was one solid diamond—and if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary with its size in the usual arithmetical progression, there would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth part of it. (193) To capitalize on the impossible value of the diamond, the Washington family engages in several forms of economic transubstantiation. On one hand, the diamond fragments that the first generation of the family brings to market are "invested with a history of enough fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied it from the days of the first Babylonian Empire" and thereby transformed into bearers of historical and social—rather than pure exchange—value. On the other hand, the second generation of Washingtons "converted [their diamonds] into the rarest of all elements—radium—so that the equivalent of a billion dollars in gold could be placed in a receptacle no bigger than a cigar box" (194). The economic reality of the diamond belies the apparent simplicity of its physical beauty, which "dazzled...