One of F. Scott Fitzgerald's finer early short stories, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920), turns on a clash between two styles of femininity. The first, embodied in the painfully conservative teenager Bernice, hearkens back to nineteenth-century sentimental ideals, and in particular to the Victorian celebration of pliancy and emotional responsiveness as cardinal feminine virtues. The second, represented by Bernice's cousin, Marjorie, is New Woman head to toe. An assertive, sexually acquisitive and, above all, unsentimental “society vampire,” Marjorie has little time for her cousin and her dainty ways (The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scribner, 1989, 37). “Oh please don't quote ‘Little Women’!” she cuts Bernice off during a heated exchange. “What modern girl could live like those inane females?” (33).
With her blanket rejection of the sentimental ideal and proclaimed aversion to the “ghastly inefficiencies that [pass] as feminine qualities,” Marjorie would...
