3-14-07
I really loved this short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It reminded me of the “Brady Bunch” when Marsha gets her long blonde braids cut off when she is sleeping by her sister Jan. With a few modifications, like taking out the central part being about the dance and bobbing hair and making it clubbing and shaving hair off, this story could be as current as yesterday. I was surprised that F. Scott Fitzgerald knew so much about the cattiness of young women and how they pretend to care about each other when deep down they cannot stand them. It is the cycle of the movie “Mean Girls.” The main character transforms Lindsay Lohan to be one of them, the plastics (the popular girls). Then all of a sudden when the queen bee’s ex-guy starts falling for Lohan, everything turns. The plastics start sabotaging Lohan and spreading rumors about her. Lohan joins with her old friends and begin to get back at the queen bee plastic. It is what girls do though. In one second girls are best friends, the next they are stabbing each other in the back over a guy. It has happened with one of my roommates this year. The one roommate hooked up with this guy she liked, told my other roommate not to hang out with him or get involved with him why she was studying abroad. Next thing she knows when she comes back from Spain in a month, they are in love and in a Face Book relationship. The sabotage started there; things that I cannot discuss, however very bad. Even though she did not know these things were being done to her my roommate who came back from Spain felt better, similar to Bernice.
Fitzgerald creates Bernice’s identity to change through out his sort story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Bernice transforms from beginning to end. Even when she is transformed back to no one being attracted to her, she has still altered personality wise. Socially and I feel that when she returns home from her visit with her cousin, she will continue to be successfully socially active in society. In the beginning of the story, Bernice is socially hopeless, very quiet, and awkward at speaking with young men. Her teeth are a little muddled and she does not dress pleasingly. Bernice begins her transformation when she confronts her cousin at breakfast about her cousin Marjorie and Bernice’s aunt were talking about her. Suddenly, she is standing up for herself, to her cousin. I think Marjorie is a little taken back at first, then continues to criticize in more detail how Bernice is a social failure. Bernice asks for help from Marjorie. And the physical transformation begins. Bernice picks out a dress for her, teaches her how to speak to boys, and gives her ideas of what to speak about. That night at the dance, all the young men notice her and her outgoing personality. Some young men cannot believe it is the same girl and are confused as to why so many young men are cutting in on dances after a couple steps with Bernice. The next big transformation to happen to Bernice was that Warren, Marjorie’s main man was paying a lot of attention to her while she was dancing. He noticed the way she had her hair arranged, her becoming dark red dress, her shadowy eyes. Warren eventually cut in on dancing once he realized how outgoing and social she had become that night. The next week gave Bernice a feeling of being enjoyed in social situations. For the first time she felt that people really took pleasure in being around her, looking at her, listening to her. She gained self-confidence. Soon Marjorie noticed Warren and Bernice getting close and she told her to stay away from him. Marjorie spread rumors that Bernice never planned to follow through with bobbing her hair like she had told everyone previously. Marjorie wanted to make Bernice unattractive so Warren would be interested in her again. Bernice thought she had to prove something to her new friends. She went through with bobbing her hair. It looked horrible. She asked her audience in the barber shop if they liked it, some replied “sure.” This could be looked at as the down fall of her transformation, but I look at it as a continuum of her transformation. Bernice still had all the social skills, just not the beautiful long, wavy hair. She was still the same person, but none of her new “friends” could see that. Bernice wanted revenge on Marjorie for forcing her to follow through with bobbing her hair. While Marjorie was sleeping, Bernice packed her trunk. She went into Marjorie’s room and cut off her long braids. Bernice left and as a symbolic mark, since Warren loved long flowing hair, she threw Marjorie’s braids on his front porch. By the end of the story, Bernice has obviously changed drastically. She stands up for herself and she is not afraid of what people think of her. However, she sort of becomes Marjorie by the end of the story when she cuts off her braids to give her a taste of her own manipulative medicine.