Teaching Tarleton: A Roundtable

Preface: Bryant Mangum

High school and university students—and I’ve taught both—like to communicate with mystery, which likely accounts for the persistence of rituals even in this day of a post-lost, millennial generation, now nearly a hundred years removed from the one that Fitzgerald declared “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (Paradise 260). Students, I think, are excited when they discover that some mysteries do, in fact, remain—and that contact with them is possible through works of fiction, quite often through short stories, taught in high school or university classrooms. These mysteries seem often associated with a place, whether a room, or a building, or a patch of soil, or a city that has been touched, even if just for a moment, by enchantment. Among many examples, Faulkner transforms Oxford, Mississippi, into Jefferson, located in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in “A Rose for Emily” (1930), just one of his many works located in this setting; Sherwood Anderson immortalizes Clyde, Ohio, as Winesburg, Ohio, in the often-anthologized story “Hands” from Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Zora Neale Hurston mythologizes her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, as the home of Janie and Joe Starks in “Matt Bonner’s Mule,” a section taken from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and frequently anthologized as a story. The list of literal places touched by a writer’s magic and transformed into mythic settings that house mystery—that is, settings that create representations of reality that defy easy access through the senses—is long.

Fitzgerald, of course, touched many actual places in this way, creating enchanted worlds sprung free of actual time and place and existing in a dimension filled with mystery. An actual Montana dude ranch that Fitzgerald once visited is now and forever also a diamond mountain as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Manhasset Neck and Great Neck, New York, will also never cease to be the mythical East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby, as Louisville, Kentucky, will remain the enchanted Louisville of Gatsby and Daisy’s first love, which keeps its actual name in Gatsby, but which also in the non-fictional world honors its mythic status through ongoing disputes over which house in Louisville was actually the house that belonged to Daisy Fay’s parents in the novel. A less-often discussed example of Fitzgerald’s touching a specific place with enchantment and, in the process, mythologizing it, is that of Montgomery, Alabama, which becomes the fictional town of Tarleton, Georgia, a thinly disguised Montgomery of the 1920s. The three stories in the group set in Tarleton—“The Ice Palace” (1920), “The Jelly-Bean” (1920), and “The Last of the Belles” (1928), now known as the Tarleton Trilogy—are among Fitzgerald’s best stories. Whether read and studied singly or as a group, these stories, in my experience, draw students in by inviting them to examine the ways by which Montgomery, the place where Scott and Zelda fell in love, becomes the mythic Tarleton, an enchanted place where the mystery that was and is romantic love, remained alive, though certainly not always entirely well, from the first story in the trilogy to the last.

Early in the final story in the trilogy, “The Last of the Belles,” the narrator, Andy, reveals retrospectively that love and mystery are at the heart of all three stories. He informs the reader that he has been told that there are “only three girls” in Tarleton, a fact that interests him because “there was something magical about there being three girls” (Short Stories 450). Each girl is loved romantically by at least one man in each story, and each of the love stories provides the central focus of its narrative: Harry Bellamy loves Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace”; Jim Powell loves Nancy Lamar in “The Jelly-Bean”; Andy loves Ailie Calhoun in “The Last of the Belles.” In each case the reader is led to question, not each man’s conviction that what he feels for each of...