The Delusions of Isolation in Winter Dreams by F. Scott Fitzgerald and A Wagner Matinee by Willa Cather
It is important for everyone to frequently interact with many different people. Otherwise a person will be unable to accept that the ideal world they envision is not reality. By alienating himself from other people, he will create imaginary scenarios that he will begin to believe are real. Each of these three stories each illustrate this theme differently. In Winter Dreams, a young man begins to idolize a beautiful girl. After being separated for some time, he is shocked to discover. That she is not actually the exciting and perfect future wife he had convinced himself she was.
The woman in A Wagner Matinee experiences a similar. Shock after many decades of suppressed emotions become apparent after she finally revisits the city of her youth. In contrast, however, the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper goes into a state of postpartum psychosis and gradually sinks further into her delusions and eventually goes entirely insane after she is forced into isolation by her husband. The main character in Winter Dreams, A Wagner Matinee, and The Yellow Wallpaper each deceive themselves of different things, though all of these deceptions stem from their isolation.
In Winter Dreams, a teenaged golf caddy named Dexter meets an eleven-year-old girl named Judy Jones; he quits his well-paying job at the golf course after deciding that he would rather be unemployed than caddy for Judy. Later in life, a now-rich Dexter reencounters Judy Jones, who is now not only "arrestingly beautiful," but also a huge flirt (Fitzgerald). After having dinner together, Dexter "decide[s] that he had wanted Judy Jones ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy" (ibid). He begins to fall in love with Judy and chooses to ignore the fact that he is only "one of a varying dozen [men] who circulated about [Judy];" he even "wanted to take Judy Jones with him [to move to New York]," presumably as his wife (ibid).
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Shortly after getting engaged to a woman named Irene while Judy is away, Judy convinces Dexter that she would marry him if he broke off his engagement to Irene. He does so, unaware that "Judy's flare for [Dexter] [would endure] just one month" (ibid). Dexter leaves town, and many years later, he learns that Judy Jones has lost all her beauty and is now just a housewife with an alcoholic husband who "treats [Judy] like the devil" (ibid), Dexter is outraged at this, as this is the kind of boring life he had not imagined for a woman whose "deficiencies were knit up with a passionate energy that transcended and justified them" (ibid).
He then realizes that his idea of Judy was nothing more than a dream, and now he felt as if "[s]omething had been taken from him" (ibid). Dexter's journey demonstrates that, even if a person is a fully participating member of society, he can still generate delusions about another person if they are separated from them for long enough. It is then a painful, but liberating experience when the person who was previously isolated is forced to face the fact that their delusions are different than reality.
A similar situation occurs in A Wagner Matinee, when a woman named Georgiana visits her nephew to settle an estate in Boston, the town where she had spend her youth and fostered a love of music as "a music-teacher at the Boston Conservatory" (Cather). She now lives in Nebraska, having moved there thirty years ago after eloping with her current husband.
Since then, she has lived a quiet life in "a dugout in the red hillside" and has not been more than fifty miles away from it in the decades she has lived there (ibid). Her nephew, Clark, takes her to see a symphony concert of music written by Wagner, even though she seems disinterested and "altogether too timid" at first (ibid). As soon as they enter the concert hall, Georgiana "was a trifle less passive and inert, and seemed to begin to perceive her surroundings" (ibid). Just before.
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The Delusions of Isolation in Winter Dreams by F. Scott Fitzgerald and A Wagner Matinee by Willa Cather. (2023, May 31). Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/the-delusions-of-isolation-in-winter-dreams-by-f-scott-fitzgerald-and-a-wagner-matinee-by-willa-cather/
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