Recentering “Crazy Indian Blood”: Reversion to Type in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”

A modest number of critics have addressed Bernice of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” as Native American, but none has taken her seriously as Native. Even critics who celebrate Bernice’s new energy at the end of the story tend to do so in a context that sees American Indians as generic, “savage” heroes of white popular culture, not as living peoples of Fitzgerald’s contemporary world. This article takes Bernice seriously as Native. Bernice’s nemesis, Marjorie, complains about what she calls Bernice’s “crazy Indian blood.” To Marjorie, Bernice is boring, “a reversion to type.” Caught up in colonialist stereotyping, Marjorie imagines Indians as living in the past rather than in Marjorie’s adolescently narcissist present. “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” not only satirizes Marjorie’s manners but also offers a counternarrative to her settler-colonialist suppression of Bernice’s Native expressiveness. At the end, Bernice’s humor defies the stagnation in a feminine past of humorless stoicism that Marjorie imagines for Bernice. Bernice adapts, while Marjorie retreats back to her colonialist denial of Bernice’s contemporaneity. Finally, it is Marjorie, and not Bernice, who reverts to type.