#expatriation

Published in 1881, The Portrait of a Lady was Henry James's seventh novel and marked his transition away from the novel of manners that only three years earlier had made his novella Daisy Miller a succès de scandale toward the more meticulous, inward study of individual perception, or what would come to be known as psychological realism. The story of an independence-minded young woman named Isabelle Archer who visits distant relatives in England, the novel broadens James's trademark theme of American innocents confronting the corrupt sophistication of European cosmopolitans to explore the sussing out of hidden and deceptive motives. As Isabelle is drawn into a marital trap set for her by a conniving Madame Merle and the odious, controlling aesthete Gilbert Osmond, James questions not only the meaning of marriage, money, and friendship but how we read social signals. Only too late does Isabelle recognize that a gesture can be a guise, but her response to her predicament makes her one of the most compellingly ambiguous heroines in American literature.     

In late 1930 as Zelda Fitzgerald remained hospitalized in a sanitarium trying to regain her sanity her husband cranked out a frenzied series of stories to pay for her treatment. Out of this whirlwind of effort came "Babylon Revisited," which appeared originally in the February 21, 1931, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and later anchored the fourth and final story collection of his life, Taps at Reveille (1935). "Babylon" is the mack daddy of all Fitzgerald stories, widely hailed as the best of his short fiction and his most widely anthologized. This episode asks why the story enjoys that exalted status. While celebrating its virtuoso craftsmanship and complex characterization, we also note that the story appeals in part because it offers such a capsule portrait of the Fitzgeralds' own biographical tragedy, a hymn to their own self-destruction against the sudden shift from the Boom to the Great Depression. The story also captures the romance of expatriate Paris, which many of its central sites---the Right Bank's Ritz Bar, most famously---still attracting Fitzgerald fans galore each year. This story is hard to top, but we also recognize that it's important not to let its reputation overshadow his other stories.