Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Bernice arrives from Eau Claire for a long summer visit with her cousin Marjorie, a cool, calculating presence at the centre of the local college-aged social scene. From the first day Bernice is a disaster — too quiet, too earnest, too obviously a country cousin — and she overhears Marjorie complaining about her to her mother in the dark. Stung, Bernice extracts from Marjorie a promise of help. The instruction begins: which boys to flirt with and how, which lines to memorize, which mannerisms to drop. Bernice's signature line — a teasing threat to bob her hair, then the most scandalous gesture a young woman could make — becomes the success of the summer, and her growing popularity begins to threaten Marjorie's monopoly. Marjorie sets a trap that Bernice cannot escape without performing the very dare she has been using as bait.

Fitzgerald published the story in The Saturday Evening Post in 1920, the year he became a national phenomenon with the publication of This Side of Paradise. Bernice Bobs Her Hair is the funniest and best-engineered of his early stories and one of the founding texts of jazz-age fiction — the moment in American culture when young women's hair, hemlines, and behavior became visible markers of a generational break. The cruelty of teenage social politics, the precise choreography of summer-party power, and the icy intelligence of Marjorie are all rendered with a comic precision that the older Fitzgerald never recovered.

The story rewards readers who want to see Fitzgerald's social comedy at its sharpest, before the elegiac mode of Gatsby had settled in. The final scene — Bernice with her shears, a sleeping rival's blonde braids, and a long midnight walk to the railway station — is one of the most satisfying revenge endings in American short fiction, and a portrait, at once witty and devastating, of how a young woman discovers that the only way to win a game whose rules are designed to humiliate her is to overturn the board.