PERFORMING “THE SENSIBLE THING”: SUCCESS, CARE, AND THE LIMITS OF OPTIMIZATION IN F. SCOTTFITZGERALD’S PSYCHOLOGICAL POETIC DRAMA

Abstract

This article rereads F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Sensible Thing” (1924) as a cultural and psychological drama that anticipates the logic of modern self-branding and the emotional economies of late capitalism. Rather than a nostalgic vignette of lost youth, the story emerges as a sustained exploration of success as performance, affective labor, and moral restraint. Through George O’Kelly’s cultivated “atmosphere of success” and Jonquil Cary’s careful choreography of care and refusal, Fitzgerald stages the tension between hustle culture and the ethical limits of emotional optimization.The essay further argues that editorial re-casting—most notably the renaming of George Rollins to George O’Kelly—functions as a paratextual intervention that reshapes class signaling and readerly sympathy, revealing how even minor textual decisions participate in cultural re-signification. Drawing on performance theory (Goffman; Hochschild), paratextual and textual-critical approaches (Genette; McGann), and feminist ethics of care (Tronto), the article situates “The Sensible Thing” as an early critique of optimization logics, insisting that certain human values—love, timing, and moral awareness—resist repetition, scaling, and managerial control. In this way, Fitzgerald’s story operates as an ethical mirror of modernity, translating the mythology of success into theater while restoring the dignity of limit.