‘Dancing Modern Suggestive Dances that are Simply Savagery’: Fitzgerald and Ragtime Dance

Irene and Vernon Castle were stewards of the transition from Victorian to modern dancing, and Fitzgerald uses this period as the setting for two series of stories. The rigid rules of Victorian dances gave way to a more improvisation-based style, and this chapter argues that a similar shift can be seen in Fitzgerald’s manipulation of short story formulae. This chapter draws parallels between the production lines of Taylorist management philosophies and the dance manuals that broke dances down into fragmented gestures and machinistic imitative steps, contextualising this as part of a wider cultural shift from the artisinal to the mass produced. In the course of his search to regain the popularity of his explosive debut at the beginning of the 1920s, Fitzgerald parodies certain of his early heroines in his later work. The use of such parodic ‘ragging’ and syncopation draws upon musical techniques that emerged from African American culture, such as jazz. Rather than reading these reimaginings as symptomatic of Fitzgerald’s dwindling talents or financial desperation, this chapter argues that this self-parody serves creative aims as well as constituting Fitzgerald’s subtle criticism of the public’s insatiable demand for the formulaic flapper stories favoured by the ‘slick’ magazines.