F. Scott Fitzgerald’s student experience at Princeton University in the years 1913-17 is usually described as a period of Fitzgerald’s intellectual restlessness and coming of age. Dissatisfied with the traditional and socially irrelevant curriculum of “a surprisingly pallid” English Department, Fitzgerald channeled his energy into the cooperation with the Nassau Literary Magazine and the drama group, Princeton Triangle Club, for which he wrote lyrics and scripts. This paper proposes to reevaluate Fitzgerald’s Princeton musical comedy production and frame it against the discourse of eugenics and the tradition of American burlesque and satire. In the second decade of the twentieth century, eugenics, defined as a science of good breeding, was no longer a scientific oddity but a cutting-edge science, which took by storm American universities, Princeton including. One of leading eugenicists at Princeton was Prof. Edwin Grant Conklin, who as a chair of the Department of Biology was instrumental in promoting a eugenic gospel. Eugenics was taught not only in Princeton courses on evolution but also in courses on hygiene, psychology and philosophy. It is also at that time that the science of eugenics was becoming a major social and cultural discourse: it was a theme of Hollywood propaganda movies (D.W. Griffith’s The Escape (1912), For Those Unborn (1914)) ––or plays such as Percy McKay’s, Tomorrow (1912).
When seen against academic and popular triumph of eugenics, Fitzgerald’s burlesque for the Princeton Triangle Club Fie! Fie! Fi! Fi! reads not merely as a witty musical comedy with limited social message but as a brave satire on excesses of the science of good breeding. Its significance lies in its ability to engage the viewer in a dialogue with the staples of popular eugenic discourse: the dream of bodily perfection and a belief that racial bio-politics can assure the rise of a brave new American nation (misconceptions addressed later in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). I propose to see Fitzgerald’s satirical play as one of the first American manifestations of the critique of eugenics which by a decade proceeded anti-eugenic satirical plays, movies, cartoons and literature authored by H.L. Mencken, E. Hemingway, S. Lewis or George S. Schuyler.
About the presenterEwa Barbara Luczak
Ewa Luczak is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw and Vice President of the Polish Association for American Studies. Luczak is the author of Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century and How Their Living outside America Affected Five African American Authors: Toward a Theory of Expatriate Literature.