The Cut Glass Bowl
A commentary on 1920s America, from the Jazz Age’s most hailed critic and voracious participant
Fitzgerald’s short stories are the precursors to his acclaimed novels — forerunners to the themes that he would write about throughout his life. Reading his earlier, shorter fiction is integral to grasping the wider narrative foci and implications of his more critically probed works. Aspiration, optimism, excesses; vacant chasms — or worse, malign growths — veiled by vacuous, glittering displays of wealth. Originally published just a few months after This Side of Paradise, his first and (at the time) most commercially successful novel, the Cut Glass Bowl is no exception. Fitzgerald comments on the profound, the perverse and the hauntingly beautiful ways that life hurts all its creatures. But there’s an undercurrent of nihilism there too: perhaps everything really is just as meaningless and cold as a cut glass bowl on a mantelpiece.
The short story is about the ‘beautiful’ Mrs Evylyn Piper and, on the surface, her deification of a cut glass bowl which she was presented with, in bitterness, by a former lover. Believing the bowl to be the central kernel from which all evil in her life is spawned, she cultivates an increasing resentment for it. The psychological warfare between woman and bowl builds to its climax with the news that Evylyn’s son has died in the war. And the letter that consigns his death to formal register is found — you guessed it — within the insidious clutches of the cut glass bowl. Although easily dismissed, her prophecy appears fulfilled when she trips to her apparent death when trying to remove it.
But, dig a littler deeper, and the story is about the stagnation of domesticity, the conflict between duty and satisfaction, acquiescing to age, the fading of youth. Favourite tropes of writers from across the realm, but refreshed by an unlikely anchor. A cut glass bowl — perhaps one which does not pervade the Piper household with a cancerous rot, but which reflects the inner imperfections and angst of its inhabitants.
How would we characterise the society Fitzgerald presents?
The mould in which the story is cast is one befitting the eternal paradox; the duality of American society. There is a sense of willful conformity — Fitzgerald plants the idea of stiffness, repression and censorship in Mrs Fairboalt’s refusal to confront Evylyn about her affair — which pushes up against a gleeful dissemination of secrets. Mrs Fairbolt sees catching her contemporary in the act of an affair as a glittering social prize; ‘a triumph’. Thus, the reader understands that the value of a relationship is only so deep as the gossip fodder that can be extracted from it. Such gossip is the ultimate social capital — the currency by which Fitzgerald’s lonely, superfluous women wield the power and wealth usually exclusively endowed to their husbands. Quite literally, relationships are transactional and, as a result, Fitzgerald sets the scene for his critique on a surface-level, superficial society.
Even the sanctity of marriage is desecrated; the beginning of the story divulges Evylyn’s affair. Symbolically, the reader doesn’t learn this from Evylyn herself, but from the inner monologue of the morally abhorrent Mrs Fairboalt, divesting Evylyn from even the basic discretion of her own private life. In this society, nothing is sacred and the lull of domesticity hides a more sinister undertone of an accelerated form of Schadenfreude. It would seem that the purpose provided by work has been replaced with a dark fascination with besmirching the neighbours. But the strict tenets of propriety can only be violated in secret, highlighting the disparity between the public persona and the private soul.
The reader isn’t so acutely aware of this idea as when Evylyn ushers Gedney, her secret lover into the house, him having turned up announced. She’s ‘dismayed’, a little inconvenienced and a lot concerned that her husband will sniff out his presence when he, too, comes home unexpectedly. Evylyn justifies her haste to Gedney by saying she gave her husband her ‘word of honour’. The sense of a fundementally corrupt society germinates in the mind of the reader. This woman, who had no moral compunction with infidelity previously, is now happy to manipulate the boundaries of honour and duty to further her agenda. ‘Honour’ becomes an appendage to Evylyn’s self-serving motives, suggesting that the affair was simply a diversion. A symptom of dissatisaction.
This is later affirmed when Evylyn realises that she has never loved her husband so much as the moment that she is caught with Gedney. In comparison to the stability and security of her marriage, the affair is diminished in importance. Her lack of conviction in her actions also betrays a childlike immaturity — yet another indicator of an inane upper class.
That the holiness of conjugal relations has been debased for such pitiful reasons hints at a collective loss of God in this community. And thus provides evidence to support the idea that the cut glass bowl simply reflects the malign lifeblood of society — and the microcosm of the Piper household.
And so it falls to men, such as Mr Piper, who are ‘preoccupied with their own broadness’, to present an outward-facing, upstanding front. This is where the dichotomy of respectable society suffuses the narrative most evidently. He dismisses his wife’s affair as simply an ‘imprudent friendship on your part’. His inveterate eschewal of the unpleasant indicates a wider societal issue —willful ignorance breeds stasis, which precludes any sort of progression or social reform. Interestingly, 1920 is the last year to be included under the umbrella of the ‘Progressive Era’; a period characterised by activism and change.
Is there anything obviously American about this?
Just before Gedney leaves, Evylyn attacks him in an uncharacteristic burst of compressed violence. Really, she’s attacking her own foolishness, and Gedney is just the unfortunate manifestation of it. But nonetheless, it’s a perfect storm of immorality; deceit, infidelity, violence.
America behind closed doors.
Does Fitzgerald take a sympathetic view of society?
In a way, the author does empathise with his tortured female protagonist. She is the owner of eyes that harbour a ‘sadness’ that was once ‘eternal’ and now ‘only human’. Not only this, but her melancholic appearance is glamourised. Her beauty is seen as significantly diminished when she loses this redeeming feature of sobriety. The underlying vapidness, papered over by parties and gold and flashed money, and the melancholy that this proliferates, is idealised. Manipulating the beautiful melancholy of the human disposition to her advantage, Evylyn is both a profiteer and a victim of the cultural context in which she operates. After all, placing perpetual sadness on the pedestal of beauty standards is a sure-fire way to spread sorrow. Much like the contemporary fascination with malnourishment, the slender physique taken too far, the masochism of eating disorders — it is a symptom of a society out of joint. Consequently, Evylyn can’t be blamed for her actions when she is so fundamentally dissatisfied.
Her beauty — and the analysis of how it has lessened over the years — is a common focus of the story. As a result, the reader develops an understanding that Evylyn’s appearance is a central cornerstone of her identity. Not only are her actions scrutinised, but also her looks, creating a pressure-cooker of constant inspection. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that she buckled, feeling the need to validate her halcyon youth and former beauty by seeking a private lover.
Perhaps the portrait isn’t so bleak as we initially imagined… just a human one.
The ‘impenetrable barrier’ between Evylyn and her husband spurs her into becoming acutely attuned to her children’s needs. She throws herself into motherhood, lacking any other occupation to top up her self esteem and fill her days. The breakdown of her marriage is symbolic of a deeper crisis — the disintegration of the self. Evylyn suffers from an identity crisis, of which her time bestows upon her no name, validation or rallying community. Her absolute devotion to her children (she ‘flew’ to the calls of her daughter and ‘hurried down the stairs’ to aid her injured thumb) is Fitzgerald’s effort to reclaim some of Evylyn’s morality for the reader. He evokes pathos for his unlikely heroine then, when she loses a son, knocking her completely out of orbit.
Of course, Julie’s injury to her thumb is a byproduct of the cut glass bowl’s presence; its pervading evil has, for the first time, suffused the innocence of childhood. When Julie later goes on to contract blood poisoning, it could be interpreted as pollution of her pure flesh, hinting at the disillusionment that Evylyn has undergone through marriage, and the similair process that awaits her daughter. In her haste to get to her suffering child, she trips over her lace dress. The detail of the lace is an important detail easily missed. It is the harbinger of luxury, indulgence and expense. As a result, when it condemns Evylyn to fall and delay attendance to her sick child, Fitzgerald warns his readers how an obsession with material acquisition ultimately presages moral decay and a sharp decline in fortunes.
Friendly relations between Mr Piper and the invitees to his impromptu dinner party break down upon the injection of business into the dynamic. The talk of ‘the Clarence Ahearn Company’ injects a definite air of business jargon into the dialogue, reflecting the rapid industrialisation that fueled the snowballing wealth the nouveau riche. This is another point of tension between Mr Piper and his associates, when he complains about gauche new money in his drunkenness (an unfortunate state that can, yet again, be traced back to the bowl). Fitzgerald was perhaps critiquing the divisions and immoral exploitation that corporate capitalism and ruthless competition — the sour flip-side to the hailed, enshrined free market — encourage.
And it isn’t only Evylyn that Fitzgerald sympathises with. Her husband, Harold, is emasculated throughout the story. He becomes incapacitated with drink, and is plagued by embarassment the next day. His fortunes take a turn for the worse, leaving him to grapple with the humiliation of failing to sufficiently provide for his family. His role with his children has been usurped, by a societal default, by his wife. He clearly wants to help Julie when she comes down with blood poisoning, but the strict doctrines of gender roles would normally assign Evylyn this role. And when he suggests assisting her in this duty, Evylyn feels ‘a wave of pity’. Harold has stooped so low as to become a receptacle for commiseration. Suddenly, the power within the dynamic of the relationship is subverted. He is marginalised in his own household to the extent that he feels the need to exert to his power by preference of punch bowl. Fitzgerald deliberately makes him a secondary character, placing his wife centre stage; reflective of the social repudiation that he suffers both publicly and privately.
So, although Fitzgerald clearly scorns this superficial society which he so disdains, he empathises with the human stories of its products.
What does the bowl symbolise?
Our final question. And one that has a multitude of different answers.
I would encourage you to take a read of the story, which can be found online for free from a number of sites, before forming your own conclusion.
But, for me, the answer lies in the drawn-out moment in which Evylyn hesitates before opening the letter that confirms her son’s death. Time stretches out, drawing attention to the inner workings of the house — the ‘faint sounds of upstairs’ and the ‘grinding racket of the pipe behind the bookcase’ — that normally go unnoticed. This contrast of such a life-shattering moment as the announcement of a child’s death with the precise operations of a household that are hallmark of the banal would seem to suggest that domesticity is the enemy.
The bowl is the product of the tensions, the sequestered longings and ultimate sadness of a household that moulders in division and disillusion. It is this that presages the slow and painful decay of a life, as chartered in the story — not the malign power of an inanimate object. It is a projection of Evylyn’s multi-faceted dissatisfaction — and a commentary on a wider disconnect between surface and self. A final illusion to this is made in Evylyn’s idealisation of her youth, in which she held men, such as the one who gifted her the bowl in mocking, in her power, when it is this relic of her past which eventually condemns her to despair and death.
The Cut Glass Bowl is a tale of the flawed and fallible human form, in an age that germinated the idea of invincibility.
