Bernice Bobs Her Hair
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Bernice Bobs Her Hair is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1920 and first published in the Saturday Evening Post in May of that year. It appeared shortly thereafter in the collection Flappers and Philosophers.
Background
The story was based on letters Fitzgerald sent to his younger sister, Annabel, advising her on how to be more attractive to young men. The original text was much longer, but Fitzgerald cut nearly 3000 words and changed the ending to make the story more attractive to publishers.
Plot summary
The story concerns Bernice, a wealthy girl from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who goes to visit her cousin Marjorie for the month of August. Marjorie feels that Bernice is a drag on her social life, particularly on her efforts to land one of the town's highly eligible bachelors, Warren.Bernice overhears a conversation between Marjorie and Marjorie's mother where the younger girl complains that Bernice is socially hopeless. The next day, Bernice threatens to leave town, but when Marjorie is unfazed, Bernice relents and agrees to let Marjorie turn her into a society girl. One step in that process is styling her hair in a bob cut.
The new Bernice is a big hit with the boys in town with her new look and attitude, although she hasn't had her hair restyled. When it becomes clear that Warren has shifted his interest from Marjorie to Bernice, Marjorie sets about humiliating Bernice, including tricking her into bobbing her hair. When Bernice comes out of the barbershop with the new hairdo, the boys suddenly lose interest in her, and Bernice realizes she's been had.
The next night the family of a young man who is about to take orders are holding a social event in Bernice's and Marjorie's honor, but Marjorie's mother points out that Bernice's haircut (which at the time was only seen on "liberated" women) would cause a scandal. After the family has gone to bed, Bernice packs her trunk and intends to leave on a train at 1 a.m. Before she goes, she sneaks into Marjorie's room and cuts off her cousin's two pigtails, taking them with her on her run to the station and throwing them on Warren's front porch.
Film adaptation
The story was made into a short TV production by PBS in 1976. It was directed by Joan Micklin Silver and starred Shelley Duvall as Bernice and Veronica Cartwright as Marjorie.
Cultural references
The Irish pop group The Divine Comedy turned the story into a song on its 1993 album Liberation.
| F. Scott Fitzgerald Books |
| Novels: This Side of Paradise | The Beautiful and Damned | The Great Gatsby | Tender is the Night | The Love of the Last Tycoon |
| Short Story Books: Flappers and Philosophers | Tales of the Jazz Age | All the Sad Young Men | Taps at Reveille | The Pat Hobby Stories | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| Other works: The Princeton Tiger | The Vegetable | The Crack-Up | Winter Dreams | Babylon Revisited | Bernice Bobs Her Hair | The Cut-Glass Bowl | Benediction | Head and Shoulders |
External links
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