SOURCE: Drushell, Barbara. “Fitzgerald's ‘The Ice Palace’.” The Explicator 49, no. 4 (summer 1991): 237-38.

In the following essay, Drushell investigates the role of earth, air, fire, and water in “The Ice Palace.”

In “The Ice Palace,” F. Scott Fitzgerald's interest in the lasting influence of birthplace on his characters¹ is manifested in the central conflict of the story: Can the protagonist, Sally Carrol Happer, from Tarleton, Georgia, go through with her marriage to the northerner Harry Ballamy? She yearns to escape the “lazy days and nights” of the South and to embrace the “energy” of the North, where “things happen on a big scale.”² But Fitzgerald's descriptions of the earth, air, fire, and water of the two locations, as Sally Carrol perceives them, preclude any possibility of the proposed nuptials.

Though earth and air in Georgia are “dusty” (113), the “tangled growths of bright-green coppice and grass and tall trees” bring...