Interpretation The Ice Palace

The Ice Palace
I am to give the interpretation and a general stylistic analysis of the short story “The Ice Palace” written by an American writer Scott Fitzgerald. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most famous authors of the Jazz Age, best known for his novel "The Great Gatsby." After reaching success, he struggled with alcoholism and died at the age of 44. “The Ice Palace” appeared in the May 1920, and represents an early Fitzgerald work.
The story is about 19 year old Sally Carrol Happer, a young southern girl, who fall in love with the northerner Harry Bellamy. She is bored by her unchanging environment and decides to go to the North, to her fiancée. When she arrived, she feels everything is different from what she was expected. She feels cold and uncomfortable. At the end she returns home to the South.
At the beginning of the story the author got acquainted us with Sally Carrol, a typical southern girl. She is 19, she calls herself “summer child” as she doesn’t go well with cold. She loves South and her southern friends, but she wants to go places and see people, her mind to grow and to live where things happen on a big scale. She feels that she is wasting herself in Tarleton and tied down there she’d get restless. The part of her makes her do wild things. She is optimistic about her fiancée, northerner whom he met up in Asheville and about life in the North, which she associates with intellectualism and personal progress. Harry Bellamy is a typical northern boy, he is tall, broad and brisk chap. As he is northerner, he has a strong connection with his family. He is reserved in expressing emotions.
The story has a frame structure. It begins and ends almost in the same way. The story begins with Sally Carrol’s sitting "up in her bedroom window” and watching Clark come to her. She is eating an apple. Clark invites her to go swimming. The end of the story is the same, but there is some modification. This time she is eating a "green peach”. And that is a symbol of her return. It seems as if nothing has changed. But Sally is a bit different now. She has become more mature. She failed and got some new experience.
When her visits her fiancée, Harry Bellamy, they go for a walk to the cemetery full of confederate dead and Old Southerners, one of her favorite places. She is exited. That demonstrates that she is proud of the southerners.
Fitzgerald describes her as restless and shivering on the train, and it is clear that the adjustments for her will be difficult. When she gets off the train, she finds herself surrounded by cold Northerners, fair and Nordic-looking, and very foreign. She doesn’t enjoy her life, finds the men too inhibited. She is an outsider. Sally Carrol finds the people she meets to be as cold as the climate they live in. North, cold and dismal, makes her depressed. Her boyfriend Harry is not so caring as she used to believe. She finally understands that they are completely different.
Once she says "You see I always think of people as feline or canine, irrespective of sex". And it was before we understood that they don’t suit each other. Sally Carrol claims that she and most of the Southerners are feline, while Harry and most of the Northerners are canine. So, from the beginning we can see high contrast between them.
The climax of the story is the moment when Sally Carrol and Harry come to the Ice Palace. Sally is dazed by the magic of the great crystal walls. She is lost when they pass along the passages. She is frightened and freezes and even sees the ghost of Margery Lee. When she is found, she cries in passion that she wants back home.
The conflict of the story is a cultural gap. Sally Carrol represents southern people: light-minded and emotional. Harry represents northern people: cold and restrained. They are absolutely different and belong to the different worlds. South versus North symbolize stagnation versus progress, respectively. The ice Palace is a symbol of the coldness of the Yankees. The ghost Margery Lee is a symbol of South that calls her back.
The message of the story sounds as “Like should marry like”. That means that you should choose your partner carefully, and have much in common ground. I do think so, otherwise you have to be very flexible and patient. As for Sally Carrol, I do not blame her, she is young and she got a valuable experience. Only that who risks once finds success.