In ‘First Blood’ (1930), Fitzgerald's rebellious teenage protagonist, Josephine Perry, gives her parents grave cause for concern and begins to show signs of the ‘Emotional Bankruptcy’ (1931) with which she will end the cycle of short stories. Emotional bankruptcy, closely linked to the concept of dissipation that is central to ‘Babylon Revisited’ (1931), is the act of calling upon emotional resources that have already been spent and finding oneself devoid of any capacity for experiencing emotion. It is a condition Fitzgerald self-diagnosed in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays of 1936, as well as a state he attributed more widely to certain flappers of the late 1910s and early 1920s, such as Josephine. ‘One cannot both spend and have,’ realises Josephine, after being kissed by her true love (BJG, 286). She is devastated to perceive that she feels nothing.

Fitzgerald's first use of the term ‘emotional bankruptcy’ is in the title of the 1931 story, the fifth and final one in the Josephine sequence, which in turn are linked by socio-historical context and theme to the nine Basil stories, published between 1928 and 1929. Josephine is a product of her time – her rebelliousness and flirtation are ultimately quashed by her lack of skills and education.By the end of the ‘quietly terrifying little morality “play”’, she still has no visible prospect of future emotional fulfilment, despite her epiphanic self-knowledge.Reader sympathy for her is limited, especially in comparison to Basil, who repents his selfish behaviour and matures, but Josephine (who ages only two years in the sequence of stories, compared with Basil's six) remains vain, shallow and often spiteful right up until her dramatic realisation with which the sequence ends.

Josephine considers dances, and the music that accompanies them, to be of paramount importance in her life. The social whirl in which she operates gives rise to several instances of her theorising on the gender relations of her society. When attending a dance at Yale, she becomes ‘abruptly aware’ that ‘a girl took on the importance of the man who had brought her’ and realises that ‘the more beautiful and charming she was, the more she could afford to disregard public opinion’ (BJG, 230).