their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire

p. 17:

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire.

These women aren’t quite human, but they’re exactly what a young man sees when he’s confronted with their unattainable allure. Fitzgerald is sometimes criticized for his depiction of women, but I think the critics miss the point – he doesn’t know women, and his writing does a perfect rendering of that area of inexpertise.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s