Sally Carrol Happer, a young woman from the fictional city of Tarleton, Georgia, United States of America, is bored with her unchanging environment. Her local friends are dismayed to learn she is engaged to Harry Bellamy, a man from an unspecified town in the northern United States of America. She brushes off their concerns, alluding to her need for something more in her life, a need to see "things happen on a big scale."
Sally Carrol travels to the north during the winter to visit Harry's home town and meet his family. The winter weather underscores her growing disillusionment with the decision to move north, until her moment of epiphany in the town's local ice palace. In the end, Sally Carrol returns home.
Background
F. Scott Fitzgerald traced the origins of the story to events that occurred in 1920.[3]
The first was the despairing remark of an unidentified girl he met in St. Paul, Minnesota:
"Here comes the winter," she said as a scattering of confetti-like snow blew along the street. I thought immediately of the winters I had known there, their bleakness and dreariness and seemingly endless length…[4]
The second was an exchange he had with his spouse, Zelda Sayres, while visiting Montgomery, Alabama, shortly after the publication of his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920):
She told me I would never understand how she felt about the Confederate graves, and I told her I understood so well that I could put it on paper. Next day on my way back to St. Paul, it came to me that it was all one story.[5][6]
The ice palace referenced in the story is based on one that appeared at the 1887 St. Paul, Minnesota, Winter Carnival.[7] A native of the city, Fitzgerald probably heard of the structure during his childhood. The ice labyrinth contained in the bottom floor of the palace appeared as part of the 1888 Ice Palace.[7]
Critical appraisal
The Ice Palace represents Fitzgerald's most successful handling of two contrasting settings that serve to "unify and intensify" the story. The contradictions that emerge in his portrayal of Northern and Southern social relationships present them as mutually exclusive, dramatizing "a clash between two cultures, temperaments, and histories."[8][9][10][11]
Biographer Kenneth E. Eble points out that "The Ice Palace" is not limited to examining the South alone, and by inference, his strained relationship with his spouse Zelda Sayre, a Montgomery, Alabama raised Southern belle. Eble writes:
Perhaps the reason "The Ice Palace" is so successful is that Fitzgerald [examined] the warring strains in his own background: the potato-famine Irish and his Maryland colonial ancestry; the provincial and the Princetonian; poverty, cold and control [vs.] richness, ripeness and passion.[12][13]
Elbe considers "The Ice Palace" "as good a story as Fitzgerald ever wrote…clearly the best story" in his 1920 collection Flappers and Philosophers.[14]
Of Fitzgerald's three tales that treat the topic of "Southern women"—including "The Jelly-Bean" (1920) and "Last of the Southern Belles" (1929)—literary critic John Kuehl reports that "neither of these matches "The Ice Palace" for complexity…his first trenchant exploration of the North-South antithesis."[15][16]
Sequel
Fitzgerald later wrote another short story, "The Jelly-Bean", which was published in the 1922 collection Tales of the Jazz Age. A sequel to "The Ice Palace", it returned to Tarleton with several references to many of the characters in the earlier work.
^Bruccoli, 1998 p. 67: "...examined the cultural as well as social differences between the North and South.
^Kuehl, 1991 p. 34: "...best renders the North-South conflict."
^Bruccoli and Baughman, 2001 p. 187: "...the first of Fitzgerald's Southern stories. He had a special perspective on the South as a Yankee who experienced love and heartbreak there."
