The Medical College - Page 22
Passage I (Questions 1–7)
In the early 1920s, dozens of F. Scott
Fitzgerald's
short stories such as "The Offshore Pirate,"
"Head and
Shoulders," "Rags Martin-Jones and the Prince
of
Wales" as well as his first two novels, This
Side of Par-
adise and The Beautiful and Damned contained
strong,
free spirited female characters; and early in
his profes-
sional career he realized that he had created a
type, the
Fitzgerald Flapper, for which there came to be
increas-
ing public demand. "I know that the magazines
want
only flapper stories from me," he told his
agent Harold
Ober in 1922. In the years leading up to the
composi-
tion of The Great Gatsby (1920–1924) he
struggled
with the difficulty of beginning his fictional
work, both
the popular stories for magazines like the
Saturday
Evening Post, the more serious ones for
magazines like
The Smart Set and Scribner's Magazine, and his
novels
with independent women, whose very
independence
fitted them in advance into the broad cultural
stereo-
type of the American Flapper. It was
inevitable, how-
ever, that Fitzgerald, who would go on to
create
complex female characters, among many others,
like
Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night and
Kathleen in the
unfinished The Last Tycoon, characters who defy
easy
stereotyping, would have to sacrifice the
flapper he had
created or else begin over and over again with
a type
solidly constructed by the public whose
appetite he
had, for some time, satisfied. The process by
which
Fitzgerald created the flapper with a gallery
of memo-
rable characters allowed her to ride the wave
of popu-
lar opinion into a permanent place in the
American
psyche, and then laid her to rest in the
service of his
own artistic development is a classic study of
the cen-
tral dilemma of professional authorship: how
one who
earns his living through his writing can, at
the same
time, move beyond the dictates of popular
culture and
create enduring art.
Fitzgerald proclaimed in 1922 that "There
always
were flappers." And while this is, of course,
true in the
sense that there have always been women who
openly
and proudly defied the social conventions of
their time,
the term "flapper" as Fitzgerald is broadly
using it origi-
nated in Britain in the years just before 1918,
where the
term characterized a young girl who had not yet
been
introduced into society. John O'Hara, in
calling attention
to the misuse of the term "flapper" in America,
offers a
slight variation of this usage describing
"flapper" as
British slang referring to "a society girl who
had made
her debut and hadn't found a husband." The word
"flap-
per" came into wide currency in the postwar
decade in
America to describe "a girl or young woman
whose con-
duct and dress [were] characterized by somewhat
daring
freedom and boldness"--particularly one who
wore
rouge, flapping galoshes, dresses whose
hemlines were
more than 9 inches above ground, and bobbed
hair. The
American Flapper historically is a product of
what Fred-
erick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday
characterizes as the
revolution in manners and morals brought about
by an
interaction of forces related to World War I
and its
aftemath. Among these Allen cites the
"eat-drink-and-
be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die spirit that
accompanied
the departure of the soldiers to the training
camps and
the fighting front"; the war neurosis, which
led individu-
als to find solace in unconventional diversions
like
drinking, smoking, and dancing; the winning
of
women's suffrage in 1920; the "growing
independence
of the drudgeries of housekeeping," brought
about by
the introduction of household appliances; an
increasing
tendency of women to join the work force and
gain a
measure of financial independence. Additional
forces,
according to Allen, included prohibition (with
its invita-
tion to rebel against restrictions), the
automobile, the
confession and sex magazines, and the
movies.
The MCAT
Model Examination
VERBAL REASONING
9 PASSAGES
65 QUESTIONS
85 MINUTES
DIRECTIONS:
The questions are based on the accompanying
passages. Read each passage carefully, then
answer the following questions. Consider only
the material within the passage. For each
question, select the ONE BEST ANSWER and
indicate your selection by marking the corre-
sponding letter on the Answer
Form.
Adapted from "The Fitzgerald Flapper," VCU,
1995 and used
with permission of Dr. Bryant
Mangum.
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