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After Dexter breaks off his engagement to
be with her, she remains dissatisfied and
leaves him again. Judy’s character is only
drawn to Dexter when he shows signs of
success and independence. If Judy’s character
is to be given more depth, it could be
stated that she is drawn to Dexter’s idyllic
version of love, which would die with his
possession of Judy. Dexter resolves, “he
did not possess in himself the power to
move fundamentally or to hold Judy Jones”
(Fitzgerald 1656). In the end, the man who
Judy chooses to marry supposedly “treats
her like the devil” (Fitzgerald 1657). As predicted,
Judy found her cavalry captain. Her
husband is a younger man who “drinks and
runs around” while Judy “Stays at home
with her kids” (Fitzgerald 1657). Judy
found a man more young and restless than
her and found a lifetime’s challenge in trying
to satisfy his ideals. Much like the character
of Elizabeth Willard, Judy’s marriage
seems to be her surrender to the common
fate of all misunderstood women.
But the reader doesn’t know what actually
happened to Judy after leaving Dexter,
besides Devlin’s assertion that her beauty
faded “just-like-that” (Fitzgerald 1656).
Dexter laments his loss of Judy but callously
speaks of breaking his conventional
engagement with Irene saying, “There was
nothing sufficiently pictorial about Irene’s
grief to stamp itself on his mind” (Fitzgerald
1656). He doesn’t mourn over losing
Judy herself, he barely knows her, but he
does mourn the loss of his dream of Judy
as the perfect image of desire. Martin analyzes
Judy Jones’ ending: “Men are enraptured
by her because the women of their
creation - tamed, protected, idealized - are
pallid in comparison . . . Yet the men in
the story do all they can to deny and eliminate
that mystery” (168). Dexter convinces
himself that Judy is, in the end, no different
from any other woman: a wife and a
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Carraway
mother. James M. Mellard uses Lacanian
psychology to explain Judy’s ending as a
successful resolution of her oedipal complex
and narcissistic tendencies, blaming
the Family Romance. Perhaps this explanation
is not too far-fetched, since Judy’s
father is in fact the wealthy, powerful, and
distant Mortimer Jones. But Fitzgerald
leaves no proof to provide any resolution to
Judy’s conclusion, because Dexter’s complex
feelings of loss at the end of the story
in a way depend on Judy being converted to
a faulty illusion of beauty and truth instead
of a person. Fitzgerald successfully kills off
the mystery and allure of Judy by turning
her marriage into an anecdote for Dexter’s
disillusionment and loss of hope. Fitzgerald
says, “He had thought that having nothing
else to lose he was invulnerable at last
- but he knew that he had lost something
more, as surely as if he had married Judy
Jones and seen her fade away before his
eyes” (1658). This implies that Dexter feels
Judy’s ending is inevitable, that her ambitions
are destined to fade with her beauty.
Society offers very few viable options for
dreamers like Dexter, and even fewer for
their female counterparts. Judy’s failure of
expression ends with the same ambivalent
tone in which it began.
In “Mother,” Anderson introduces the character
of his own mother, to whom he dedicated
Winesburg, Ohio (Rigsbee). Marilyn
Judith Atlas explains the large effect that
Anderson’s mother had on the development
of this character: “His mother, Emma
Smith Anderson, dying in her forties, worn
out from having to maintain a family of
six children with insufficient financial and
emotional support from her husband”
(251). Elizabeth’s story is a personal and
retrospective account of the modern white
woman’s motivations, desires, and failures.
We meet Elizabeth in her old age; she has
lost her youthful hope, she is in a loveless
Research Articles