The themes of love and loneliness are portrayed through character development and symbolism. "Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a perfect example of how the theme of the story is created through symbols. One father who made some mistakes in his past that cost him his wife and daughter is now coming back to patch things up. His life went down the tubes with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and paralleled the Great Depression. There was a terrible price for Charles to pay for the loss of time. This story represents the love between a father and a daughter and to what lengths the father will go to get her back.
The setting at the Ritz bar creates its own significance within the two themes. The setting in Paris, where the Ritz bar, a popular gathering place for Americans, was not an American bar anymore (Larson 7). " When the story starts, Charles goes to the bar before he even goes to see his daughter. This is a clue that had to do with the past. The first thing that he sees is how much it has changed. The tone is a combination of nostalgia, a way Paris used to be, and the reality of the present, Paris has changed as has Charles Wales" (Beetz 1452). As he goes through the remembered ritual of placing his foot on the bar rail and turning to survey the room, only a single pair of eyes fluttered up from a newspaper in the corner (Fitzgerald 211). This is also an example of how many times he had been there in the past, since he has a ritual. There is much evidence how different his life was back then, when he says to the bartender that he is back to see his daughter, and the bartender relies, "You have a little girl"(Fitzgerald 211). He practically lived in this bar, but he had failed to mention that he had a daughter. This represents the fact that he had practically missed out on the whole life of his daughter, considering that the people at the place where he spent most of his time did not even know about his family.
The most important aspect of symbolism concerning the Ritz bar is dealing with the past and the present. It only takes its significance at the end of the story after Charles's defeat (Gross 53). "The opening pages are an evocation of the silence and emptiness in the Ritz bar, which had been filled only a year of so earlier with a shouting drunken crowd. When Charlie Wales asks the barman for news of old friends, he later responds with the names of men who have lost their health, their reason is their money" (Way 171). In the bar only the "strident queens" remain, they go on forever (Male 63). "This appearance in the bar implies that the apparent separation of the past from the concerns, needs, and desires of the present" (Gross 53). In the last pages Charles ends up back there having to deal with the fact that he may never have his daughter back, his mistakes in the past may be affecting him for the rest of his life.
Not only did these themes take place throughout the story, but carry on into the author's actual life. It is almost impossible to ignore the story being somewhat of a representative of Fitzgerald and his times. The setting in Paris is evoked so well because Fitzgerald and Zelda lived there for a time, on the same street where sits the apartment building of Marion and Lincoln Peters (Beetz 1452). Staying in Switzerland while having his daughter back in Paris gave Fitzgerald the perspective that is at the heart of "Babylon Revisited", the separation of Charlie Wales from his daughter Honoria and the details of Fitzgerald's visits to Paris to see Scottie materialize as details in the story. As Fitzgerald explains in the December letter, he visited Scottie for four of five days on these bimonthly visits. In "Babylon Revisited", Charlie Wales tells Alix, the waiter at the Ritz bar, "I'm here for four of five days to see my little girl"(Larson 617). Many occasions in his life are played out almost exactly to "Babylon Revisited." A day shared between Fitzgerald and his daughter became a day shared between Charlie Wales and his daughter.
"Babylon Revisited" is one of the only stories that Fitzgerald wrote that concerns the love of father for daughter, but is said to be one of the best (Stanton 97). Charlie's fight for his daughter represents the actual love there is between them. Fitzgerald also uses love as one of the most valuable aspects presented in the Great Gatsby (Escanlar1). However, this love is more at an intimate level. The scene in which Charles goes to talk to his sister-in-law about returning the custody of Honoria has a direct contrast with the Ritz bar. In both scenes Charlie is fundamentally isolated from the radical quality of the life going on around him. In the bar he is isolated because of his maturity and in the home he is isolated because of his position as a suppliant (Gross 53).
Charlie shows his love for his daughter when he intelligently continues to fight with his sister-in-law for custody. This portrays the theme of love in that he will not give up on his daughter. He is maintaining that he is now a responsible person but denying responsibility for his wife's death, he says, "Helen died of heart trouble, yes heart trouble," Marion retorts," as if the phrase had another meaning for her,"(Male 63). "In 'Babylon Revisited' Fitzgerald has Charlie remember that one terrible night when he had locked Helen out, and Marion, who had seen with her own eyes and who imagined it to be one of many scenes from her sister's life of marriage, the line from Babylon certainly recalls Rosalind's own witnessing of such an incident between Scott and Zelda" (Larson 5). His relentless begging for her to forgive his mistakes is not enough for her and this is when he realizes that he had messed up his life too bad to try and fix it in a late period of time like then.
The theme of loneliness is portrayed when Charlie starts feeling separated from his daughter. He is going through and pre-Depression period alcoholic and later a post-Depression equivalent (Mizener 261). He has chosen to be in the situation of returning exile which is that of freedom and responsibility (Male 63). Fitzgerald put his own past into Charlie Wales and what he hoped might be his own future. "In this macabre image of the unfamiliarity of the familiar Fitzgerald conveys the first shock of the Depression more effectively than any other American writer" (Way 171). There can be little doubt that by this time Fitzgerald was well aware what alcohol was doing to him, but he could do little about it except attempt to justify his drinking to others and to minimize its effect on him in others' eyes (Larson 2). Charlie is forced to realize how real it was and how much of his life and of his world has been swept away by the whirlwind. "A playboy during the Twenties, to the extent of becoming at least partly responsible for his wife's death" (Perosa 50). He lost a large portion of his life due to his drinking habits. Charles was unable to make a home for Honoria like he thought his wife would want him too. "His astute recognition that the Jazz Age would not be returning any time soon and that the Depression was only in its infancy would dictate the surrender of his daughter, putting both Charlie Wales and Fitzgerald himself into limbo, awaiting, along with a nation, the return of a better day" (Larson). The inner conflicts and the outward circumstances of Fitzgerald's personal decline in the 1920's are matched with the decline of the Jazz Age itself in Babylon, so closely it is tied to that time (Male 63). "The Great Gatsby was also considered a vastly more mature and artistically masterful treatment of Fitzgerald's early themes, scrutinizes the consequences of the Jazz Age generation's adherence to false values"(DISCovering Authors). He almost had her and them spoiled it for himself and felt as if he had failed his wife as well as his daughter (Butterfield 103). He started on the bottom and ended up on the bottom.
"Babylon Revisited" is an example of a further development of the themes (Perosa 50). The use of theme in this story is creating a more meaningful feeling throughout the whole of it. "The very fact that Charlie can return to the hub of a life which had cost him his wife and his child does not at all indicate, as the story's most recent commentator has it, that the old way of life "still appeals to him," but rather demonstrates the extent and depth of his self-mastery and the confidence he feels in his belief that his wildly squandered yesterdays are over and done with, that there is no tab left for him to have to pick up" (Gross 53). Charlie Wales in the story represents combination of the need and want of love and the loneliness that occurs when the love isn't truly there, which can and will most likely effect a major emotional part of a person's life. Both of these impacted the emotions in Charles's life, especially with the love between a father and a daughter. The meaning is very clear. "It has some symbols, but they are not mysterious; some ambiguity, but it is not hidden; considerable irony, but it is readily discernible" (Male 63). The frame setting of the Ritz bar is also a main aspect of the love and loss of the whole story. The protagonist went through the story creating many themes and symbols on the way. Each was straight forward, but had its own uniqueness. Fitzgerald wants to send the message of how important someone's life is and how easily it can disappear, he continuously portrays this idea through out the entire story. The complex and interesting story of Charles Wales becomes the reality life story of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Back to Essay Page Back to Homepage