30 pages • 1 hour read
F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: World War I and the Lost Generation
Fitzgerald was a member of the so-called Lost Generation, a group of expatriate artists in the interwar period who exerted a profound influence on culture and ideas. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein and popularized by Ernest Hemingway. Benjamin Button’s progress through life is marked by an alternating succession of war and peacetime, a reflection of the worldview shaping Fitzgerald and other postwar authors.
World War I was a cataclysm that defined the first decades of the 20th century. Millions of soldiers and civilians were killed, tens of millions more were injured, and countless scores on top of that were traumatized. The war inaugurated an era of technological and chemical warfare, contributing to the distinctly dehumanizing character of the conflict.
Fitzgerald, unlike his friend Hemingway, did not see combat. He enlisted and was mobilized to Alabama for training, but Armistice Day arrived before he was deployed overseas. The near-miss with the conflict colored his view of war and influenced his depictions of it in “Benjamin Button” and other works, including The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to Fitzgerald’s relationship with Hemingway, including the differences in their depictions of war and masculinity. Scholar James H. Meredith writes,
War itself is not the central feature in Fitzgerald’s fiction, but it is rather another part of the social fabric of the modern world, an essential factor that a serious writer had to confront whether he had participated in combat or not. As such, Fitzgerald’s work concentrates on the bitter peace rather than the bloody war (Meredith, James H. “Fitzgerald and War.” A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Kirk Curnutt. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 165).
The Lost Generation emerged in the wake of the First World War, inhabiting a world where traditional values and beliefs lost their authority because they had led to senseless slaughter on an unprecedented scale. In their place was a desperate and perhaps doomed will to create a new scale of values, or at least to create distractions from the moral chaos through sexual promiscuity, drunkenness and drug use, and a cult of appearance and youth.
Historical Context: The Jazz Age
Fitzgerald popularized the term Jazz Age and was its definitive chronicler. It refers to the extraordinary developments of the 1920s (“The Roaring Twenties”) and 1930s, when jazz music become a driving force in popular culture, and new attitudes and temperaments captured the national imagination. The emblematic figure of the period was the flapper, regularly depicted by Fitzgerald in the early magazine stories collected in his first book of short fiction, Flappers and Philosophers, and continuing into the characterization of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Flappers were fashionable and alluring women who characteristically participated in dance crazes, engaged in love affairs, and sometimes smoked and drank, activities considered shocking for women of the time.
Fitzgerald was a keen observer of, and participant in, this movement. But he perceived deep disillusionment beneath the riotous façade of gaiety. His second story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, in which “Benjamin Button” appears, is marked by an undercurrent of deception and tragedy that belies the live-for-today ethos associated with the collection’s title. “Benjamin Button” is a period piece that is not primarily set in the Jazz Age proper. Yet, its depictions of attitudes toward youth and ideas on the fleeting qualities of age, and its protagonist’s brush with World War I, are signature preoccupations of the 1920s and Fitzgerald’s broader oeuvre. Hildegarde Moncrief is of the many reflections of Fitzgerald’s own Jazz Age muse, Zelda Sayre, whom he married.
Authorial Context: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald
The legendary and ultimately tragic romance of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most heavily scrutinized relationships in American literature. Zelda Sayre was the daughter of a wealthy family in Montgomery, Alabama, whose beauty was known throughout the region. Fitzgerald met Zelda when he was stationed in Montgomery for training during his brief enlistment in the army, and he fell deeply in love with her. She initially rejected him because he was not successful enough. This motivated him to return to his home of St. Paul, Minnesota, and write his debut novel This Side of Paradise, which became a publishing sensation and made Fitzgerald an overnight celebrity. Zelda then accepted his overtures.
The couple embarked on a lavish world tour that lasted years and put them at the center of the postwar international literary scene. They were prodigious drinkers with a taste for luxury, and Zelda was known as the quintessential flapper and socialite of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald financed their lifestyle by selling stories to leading publications of the day, most notably the Saturday Evening Post.
Zelda was a talented artist in her own right, and decades of scholarship have led to a critical reevaluation of her writing and painting, as well as her role in Fitzgerald’s creativity. She published one novel, Save Me the Waltz, and engaged in voluminous correspondence and diary-writing that have been researched in connection with Fitzgerald’s life and work. Nancy Milford’s 1970 book Zelda: A Biography was a catalyst in this movement, and numerous works of criticism and fiction have followed.
Zelda Fitzgerald’s career was cut short by a mental illness that was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia. Her mental health resulted in extended stays at psychiatric hospitals, which Fitzgerald fictionalized in his acclaimed novel Tender Is the Night. She died in a tragic fire in 1948, eight years after her husband’s premature death from a heart attack.
From the beginning, Zelda was Fitzgerald’s muse. Traces of her personality, their love affair, and her final decline can be found throughout his work. In “Benjamin Button,” the setting and circumstances of Benjamin’s first meeting with Hildegarde are clearly inspired by the fateful night in Montgomery when Zelda changed Fitzgerald’s life forever.
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