Winter Dreams the Tension Between Democratic and Essay

Winter Dreams" the tension between democratic and aristocratic values in America

"Winter Dreams" depicts the struggles of a middle-class character who is attempting to prove himself 'worthy' of a woman of American, blue-blooded aristocracy. At the beginning of the story, the hero Dexter is acting as a caddy at a golf course where most of the patrons are of a far higher social class than the caddies. Dexter, a member of the middle class and the son of a grocer, is offended by the treatment he receives at the hands of a much younger girl and abruptly quits, in an attempt to preserve his dignity. This determination to seem like a member of the elite classes will remain with Dexter for the rest of his life. He is continually torn between the value of democracy and the unpretentiousness of his home and the sort of society he covets, which is of the upper echelons of the American class system.

This determination to seem of a higher class than he is haunts Dexter for most of his life. "Thee quality and the seasonability of these winter dreams varied, but the stuff of them remained. They persuaded Dexter several years later to pass up a business course at the State university -- his father, prospering now, would have paid his way -- for the precarious advantage of attending an older and more famous university in the East, where he was bothered by his scanty funds." Dexter is determined to seem as if he is of 'a better sort,' and he manages to prove himself as a businessman, investing in a chain of laundries after college. However, this line of work is almost as tainted with the hint of lower-class striving as the bootlegging of another famous Fitzgerald hero, Jay Gatsby. When Dexter falls in love with Judy Jones, a tan, athletic woman who is loved by members of the elite, Dexter's desire to get ahead and his desire for her beauty are fused into one. Gazing at his rivals he muses: "He knew the sort of men they were -- the men who when he first went to college had entered from the great prep schools with graceful clothes and the deep tan of healthy summers. He had seen that, in one sense, he was better than these men. He was newer and stronger. Yet in acknowledging to himself that he wished his children to be like them he was admitting that he was but the rough, strong stuff from which they eternally sprang." Dexter knows he has qualities of hard work and cunning that these blue bloods lack and he has values of perseverance they do not possess, that enables him to get ahead. But for…