From Conflict to Identity: Main Issues Explored in US Literary Education - Sykalo Eugen 2023

How does F. Scott Fitzgerald depict the longing for love and connection in “The Beautiful and Damned”?

There’s something obscene about beauty when it does not love back. Something almost cruel. Fitzgerald knew this—oh, he built on it—laid brick after gilded brick of longing into the architecture of The Beautiful and Damned, until what he had was less a novel and more a mausoleum of wasted desire. Love here is not a redemption arc. It’s a slow bleed. An aesthetic of yearning so finely detailed that one begins to suspect Fitzgerald wasn’t trying to depict romance at all—but its ghost.

But wait. Let’s take a step back. Who really believes in love the way Fitzgerald’s Anthony Patch believes in it? Not as a feeling, but as an inheritance. A divine right. A culmination of money, charm, lineage—and, not least, boredom. Anthony doesn’t fall in love with Gloria Gilbert because he sees her. He falls in love because she reflects his fantasy of himself: exquisitely doomed, a little above everyone, suspended in that gauzy pre-WWI moment where decadence hadn’t yet grown its fangs. And Gloria—let’s not turn her into a victim too easily—is no stranger to the game. Her beauty is capital, and she trades it like a professional. Their courtship is not so much a seduction as a performance of seduction. But aren’t most relationships?

(I know, it sounds cynical. Maybe it is. But love without cynicism is just sentimentality in drag.)

Fitzgerald stages their romance like a cruel joke in slow motion. Every moment of connection between them is undercut by an echo of its own failure. The more they try to become real to each other, the more fictional they feel. It's the paradox of desire: the closer you get, the more it dissolves. And Fitzgerald writes that dissolution with an intimacy so sharp you could bleed on it. Not melodramatic heartbreak—but something quieter. A drift. Ennui, alcohol, and the smell of old money.

This is where the deconstruction starts: love in The Beautiful and Damned is not a stable term. It’s a placeholder for things the characters can’t name—security, validation, narcissism, rebellion. Gloria doesn’t want a man; she wants to matter. Anthony doesn’t want a woman; he wants the idea of being a man who wins a woman like Gloria. Their so-called love is a hall of mirrors, where what’s reflected is less each other and more a carefully curated emptiness. It’s almost theological in its absence.

(I once dated someone who made me feel like that—like we were starring in a film neither of us had written, both hoping the ending would somehow make sense if we just kept acting.)

And this is precisely why Fitzgerald’s portrayal is so unsettling. He doesn’t mock his characters. He pities them. Which is worse. Pity assumes failure is baked into your DNA. That you were always going to be this sad. This drunk. This exquisitely unhappy. Love here isn’t a transformative force—it’s a trap. An aesthetic ideal tied with a velvet ribbon. And no matter how hard Anthony and Gloria pull, they can’t untie it. Only unravel.

Of course, there’s the obvious reading: that Fitzgerald was writing a cautionary tale about the idle rich, about the rot beneath Jazz Age glitter. But that’s the kind of thing literature teachers say when they want to wrap ambiguity in a tidy moral bow. The truth is, Fitzgerald loved the glitter. He loved it so much it broke him. His critique is never clean. The beauty is always tangled up with the damage. There’s something almost erotic about it—the way decay becomes desirable.

(Actually, decay is erotic in Fitzgerald. Think about it: the languor of Gloria, the slow self-destruction of Anthony, the drunken tableaux of their evenings. There's something Baroque in the way their love dies—ornate, prolonged, indecent.)

And then there’s class. You can’t ignore class. You shouldn’t. Anthony’s love isn’t just doomed—it’s bourgeois. A kind of spiritual rot only available to people who don’t need to work for a living. Fitzgerald’s critique isn’t just about personal failure—it’s systemic. The novel reads like a requiem for a generation taught to believe that the world owed them transcendence simply for being beautiful and American. Love, for them, is just another entitlement. When it fails to deliver, they don’t fight—they wilt.

Gloria, meanwhile, is caught in a trap that’s both ideological and gendered. Her worth is tied to youth, to desirability, to being seen but not too much. It’s hard not to see her as a victim of a culture that promises women worship in exchange for silence. The tragedy is not that she grows older—it’s that the world punishes her for it. The way her charm curdles into bitterness is a masterclass in gendered disillusionment. Love? It’s a stage direction she was taught to perform, and when the script stops working, no one offers her another.

By the way, I always wondered why no one talks about how passive Gloria is allowed to be. Not because she’s weak—but because her beauty gives her the illusion of power. She doesn’t need to act—until it’s too late. She’s like a doll someone forgot to wind up again. (Or maybe that’s the point: beauty is always a kind of paralysis in this novel.)

But this isn’t just about character. It’s about us. The reader is implicated. We want them to be in love. We crave it, even as we see it falling apart. Fitzgerald is seducing us, too—offering the aesthetics of passion without its weight. We watch Anthony and Gloria dance their slow apocalypse and think, yes, but at least they were beautiful. At least they felt something. It’s a dangerous lie. Or maybe it’s not a lie at all—just a very expensive kind of sadness.

There’s also something distinctly American in this tragedy—the obsession with personal destiny, the faith in individual triumph over structure, over time, over entropy. It’s a novel that whispers, in every chapter: you could be extraordinary... if only. And when the extraordinary doesn’t arrive, love becomes the scapegoat. The failure isn’t in the self—but in the other who didn’t save you.

Can we talk about the writing for a second? Fitzgerald’s prose in The Beautiful and Damned is a strange mix of brittle elegance and emotional cruelty. It’s beautiful, yes, but it also judges you a little for admiring it. There’s a snideness just beneath the surface, as if the author himself is wincing at the very metaphors he’s using. It’s part of what makes the text feel modern—this self-loathing wrapped in lyricism.

And yes, the novel is dated. Of course it is. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still alive. Reading it now feels like flipping through an old photo album and realizing everyone in it is faking their smiles. The tragedy isn’t just what happens—it’s that it was always going to happen. That’s the cruelty of Fitzgerald’s vision: there’s no before the fall. The fall is the point.

(Another digression: I remember once, in college, sitting on a rooftop at 3 a.m., drunk and vaguely in love, quoting Fitzgerald like I meant it. I didn’t. But I wanted to. That’s the thing—this novel makes you want to believe in its illusions, even when you know better.)

In the end, what is love in The Beautiful and Damned? A dream deferred? A performance? A mechanism of self-harm? Perhaps all of it. Perhaps none. Fitzgerald doesn’t give answers—he gives atmospheres. That’s his genius. He doesn’t say love is hopeless—he just shows you how it dies when fed nothing but champagne and resentment.

And maybe that’s the most honest depiction of love we’ve got. Not the grand gesture, but the slow erosion. Not fireworks—but ash. Not I’ll die without you—but I’ll drink myself to death beside you, wondering why nothing feels real anymore.

Love, in Fitzgerald’s hands, is a chandelier in a collapsing ballroom. Stunning. Pointless. And unforgettable.