In the hands of Yankees: Fitzgerald's "The Ice Palace" as a Northern American captivity narrative

Extract

[...] In the hands of Yankees: Fitzgerald's Ice Palace” as a Northern American captivity narrative The effective removal of the American Indian from North America failed to kill off the American tradition of captivity narratives established by the primarily female Anglo-American authors of Indian captivity narratives. In these memoirs of life among the Anglo-American women strengthen their Christian faith while warding off the threats and temptations of the “barbaric” Indians. F. Scott Fitzgerald revives the formula with the tale of a Southern belle displaced to the heathen North in his short story Ice Palace.” The Anglo-American heroine and old South romantic, Sally Carrol Happer, finds herself trapped in the land of snow. [...]

[...] After a week of the “dismal town” and its dismal residents, Harry finally takes Sally Carrol to the city's ice palace of which he had bragged, (64). Inside the massive castle are Northerners making music “like some paean of a Viking tribe traversing in an ancient (66). The scene of torch waving platoons Sally Carrol was the North offering sacrifice on some mighty altar to the pagan God of (66). The dark, Canadian-built fortress is the apotheosis of Northernness, the opposite of her Georgia house on which “sunlight dripped like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light,” (48). [...]