Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Situated between World War I (1914-1918) and the Great Depression (1929-1939), the Jazz Age was a time of excess in the United States. After the horrors of the Great War, many wished to celebrate life’s joys, as demonstrated by the parties of the Roaring ‘20s. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, traveled often between the American East Coast and France, epicenters of these great social gatherings. At the same time, the postwar age saw a rise in existentialism and concern over what would now be understood as the aftermath of trauma. For the Fitzgeralds, this was evident in F. Scott’s alcohol addiction and Zelda’s declining mental health. The social gatherings in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” with matrons supervising from balconies, align more with the previous generation’s upper-class practices than with the more egalitarian extravaganzas thrown in Fitzgerald’s later novel The Great Gatsby (1925). Regardless, as Marjorie and her mother discuss, ideas of appropriate behavior for young women are already shifting in their circles.

Economic change and consumerism were also hallmarks of the era. Industrialism, leading into the Gilded Age that followed Reconstruction, allowed for more social mobility and a rise in “new money” families who sought legitimacy from their “old money” counterparts. Many of the young men in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” attend Ivy League colleges, an old-money social marker, yet they show off their automobiles and vast wardrobes, indicating a rising consumer ideology.

With the rise in existentialism came a surge in literary Modernism. Modernist literature explores the anxieties that follow the loss of old norms and structures, and the unprecedented scale and violence of World War I caused widespread sociocultural trauma and destabilization. When Bernice struggles to understand her unpopularity as she clings to traditional concepts of feminine morality, she demonstrates this uprooted mindset. At the end of the story, the reader is unsure what will become of Bernice as she leaves her aunt and uncle’s home. She’s been changed in a way that could make returning to her familiar life in the Midwest challenging, an issue personally experienced and portrayed by Fitzgerald and a common aspect of Jazz Age Modernism.