The Interpretation of A Decade
---The Reading of “The Great Gatsby” As a Literary Sample of the Interpretation of Jazz Age
As what John Nash Smith emphasized on the methods of American studies in his Can
“American Studies” Develop a Method?, literary approach should go hand in hand with the sociological approach. There is doubtlessly no more perfect piece of
Americana in all of the literature than in “The Great Gatsby”. Horatio Alger,
rags-to-riches, the American dream, upward mobility, it is all there. So if we want to make a literary analysis of American society in the 1920s, “The Great Gatsby” is the perfect sample for us to anatomize the American societal pathology
under all its jazziness.
According to the structural tradition of literary analysis, there are three
distinct processes of composition in this novel: Fitzgerald writing the novel at large, Nick Carraway assembling the bits and pieces of Gatsby’s career, and Jay Gatsby in the act of inventing himself. We will deal with each process by putting them back in their respective social surroundings and see what we could get
.
F. S. Fitzgerald is the literary spokesman of the Jazz Age. In the 1920s, while it was getting less liberalistic and more conservative in political terms,
the intelligentsia group tended more to rebel against the Philistine stillness of social system. Most of them were, economically speaking, middle-class professionals of which many were posterity of immigrants, especially of German or Eastern European origins (Fitzgerald was of German origin). The reasons for their general dissatisfaction could be as listed below: (1) the alienation of labor work,
the development of material desire and the repression against humanism brought about by the general application of machines in the process of industrialization;
(2) the contradiction of the pre-war Wilsonian idealism versus the post-war failure of peace maintenance and the organization of international groups by America; (3) the rampant political corruption resulting from the re-coming of conservatism in the reign of Republican Party. They prophesied of this intellectual rebellion to be an expression against the gradual decadence of Western civilization.
Different from previous progressivism, the intellectuals in the 1920s got greatly influenced by the philosophical ideas of Nietzsche and other modern thinkers.
They sang about individual consciousness and feelings and demanded to be unstringed from traditional theories in order to totally change the whole ideology of
American thinking instead of legislating to solve individual cases. Echoing the
social and intellectual sentiments, Fitzgerald voiced out his disapproval toward
society through the death of Gatsby. “The Great Gatsby” is, in a sense, a Refusal Novel which targets its attack upon the core of American civilization, namely the Puritanism, which constrains the individual freedom and development through hypocrisy, and the Victorianism, with which one would singly pursue material
enjoyment. The greatness of Gatsby lies in his quest for spiritual satisfaction.
The economic thriving after the industrialization was about to strangle the spiritual vitality without which the greatness of Gatsby would flatly have been a cynical satire instead of an apocalyptical tragedy.
Sexual liberation and Jazz music has been two landmarks of Fitzgerald’s era. In the 1920s, with the industrialization reducing the importance of labor work, the woman began to ask for more freedom of divorce and equal rights. Many feminist phamphleteers and activists elbowed into mass recognition. Sex relations became unstable. The matrimonial fragility and dullness brought about out-of-wedlock affairs. Fitzgerald met his Flapper Girl, Zelda, whose luxuriousness doomed
Fitzgerald to be a lifelong Gatsby-like big-money earner. Jazz is etymologically
from a certain African tongue and is originally a name of a North African coast
. It has been connected with a form of African-American music which came into popularity in the 1920s. Jazz music could be vocal as well as instrumental accompanied by lively and free dancing. Its primitive undisciplined rhythm fitted well
in the vibration of the sexual liberation psyche and the rebellious tendency. This rebellious tendency had something to do with the change of familial structure
in the social flowage from the rural big extended families to the urban nuclear
families. When they lived in the rural or immigrant areas, a family usually consisted of, besides parents and their children, grand parents, uncles, aunts and
cousins who communicated with and supported each other, therefore people didn’t
easily get stricken by loneliness. However, when they came to the city, their traditional relative ties were broken up, and when they got into troubles no one
of ready help would come to their consultation. Their pastoral simplicity and openness were shattered through the process of urbanization. The Freudian theories
, which had been brought into America before the First World War, began to popularize in the Jazz Age. Being much simplified and distorted, his theories were reduced to “the desire of Id is the sexual desire, Id demands the immediate satisfaction of sexual desire” to fit in the ethos of Zeitgeist. Tom Buchanan is a sort of Freudian character under the pen of Fitzgerald whose way of showing off his masculinity is by unscrupulously maintaining several sexual relations with different women. In fact, Tom’s masculinity and aggressiveness had so attracted Fitzgerald that he supposed “he (Tom)’s the best character I’ve done---I think
he and the brother in “Salt” and Hurstwood in “ Sister Carrie” are the three best characters in American fiction in the last twenty years” (Letter 172). In comparison with Tom, Gatsby is hopelessly self-conscious and a little bit impotent. However, Gatsby stuck in Fitzgerald’s heart and became the ultimate hero
of the great novel, because he has the thematic significance without which the Jazz Age would have become soulless.
Throughout The Great Gatsby there are a number of curious, sometimes startling, references to an innocent pastoral existence which appear incongruous in a
novel apparently absorbed in the fashionable contemporary life of New York City
during the Jazz Age. Nick is being driven into the city by Tom Buchanan who on the way has picked up his mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Directly juxtaposed to the cheap and sordid sensuality of their escapade is Nick’s statement: “we drove over
to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner” (Gatsby 28). This image, with its Sunday-school echoes, is one in
a series of analogies which momentarily bring the rural and urban experiences together. Nick Carraway, the narrator, is from a Mid-Western city, so perhaps it
is reasonable to expect the rural associations of his past life to emerge in his
responses to the present. But Nick explicitly denies that the rural aspect of his background has any significance for him: “that’s my Middle West--- not the
wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the
shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow” (Gatsby 177). We are inclined to believe what Nick narrates here, for in his reflection there is no nostalgia for a specific place in the West or some unforgettable event in childhood. The pastoral elements in the novel seem to derive from an imaginative
source much deeper than a reference to an actual Mid-Western childhood. They are
an integral part of Nick’s sensibility, a habit of response which suggests a deep-seated yearning for the recovery of lost innocence. Since Nick is the narrator, they give a clue to a perspective of the novel that is most often overlooked
.
Simply speaking, pastoral involves a retreat in time and place to an enclosed green world, which expresses one’s dream of a simplified, harmonious existence from which the complexities of social ills and natural process (change, decay
and death) are eliminated. Mythically, pastoral returns us to a “Golden Age”,
when existence was ideally ordered and there was no conscious separation of subject and object. But psychologically, pastoral is more complex. On the one hand,
it represents the escapist desire of the adult to return to the securely ordered world of childhood. On the other hand, it involves a wish to relive the past in order to set right something that has gone wrong and that has prevented the adult from living meaningfully in the present. At the heart of pastoral is the keen sense of rejection and failure and the compulsive need to prove oneself worthy
of acceptance and love. The American imagination has been essentially pastoral
because the American experience, with its expanding frontier and unlimited resources for individual power, has provided the outsider with the opportunity of proving himself worthy. Compared to new Adam, average American has been buoyant inside with the optimistic outlook toward their future life in this magical land of
new Eden. However, it is necessary to point out since the very early history of
the foundation of American nation, there has appeared a beaten sense of failure
and unfulfilment of a grand Eutopian dream. It is this tension from the optimistic dream versus the disillusionment that gives Nick who observes most of the time from his unique perspective based upon his pastoral vision of the American Jazz Age the universal sympathy from every reader and his artistic credibility.
The death of Gatsby, the tycoon protagonist, is twice symbolic in the thematic significance, for it symbolizes the final failure of the promises of both the old European knighthood and the Puritan Franklinism.
The structure of “The Great Gatsby” develops a complex notion of how a talented young man may search for a heroic model in the American setting and why the search must fail in the absence of an authentic orthodoxy. As the ragged old copy of Hopalong Cassidy testifies, one of
Gatsby’s earliest heroic models must surely have been Hopalong, the modern American version of the White Knight, Sir Galahad. Like Sir Galahad, Hopalong was always polite to the ladies and was their “savior” whenever the opportunity was
presented. While Sir Galahad was white-hatted, Hopalong was red-hatted. Since Hopalong is Gatsby’s role model in his youth, then the quest and service for a fair lady, which originated at least as far back as from the Middle Age Holy Grail
legends, must have been a life motif for Gatsby. And his fair lady is self-supposed to be Daisy, as one would find out that all the wealth he has accumulated is only a means by which he could win back Daisy. He deliberately and unwearily conceives of many opportunities for himself to meet Daisy, and at last he tries to protect Daisy from being punished by law or being mal-treated by Tom. All this
romantic readiness within Gatsby is a manifestation of the old knighthood underlying Gatsby’s character. In fact, this makes Daisy not a real human being, but
a transcendental dream to satisfy his propensity for heroic achievement. But there has been no knighthood tradition in the new virgin land at all, and even Hopalong Cassidy is from comic book. So Gatsby is like the American Don Quixote. Don Quixote imitates Amadis de Gaul as the ideal embodiment of the chivalric code,
while Gatsby takes Hopalong Cassidy as an heroic example. There is no question
that both of them fail. As Gatsby fails, every American “knight” fails.
American nation is, most of all, a European migrant nation. The standard American identity is the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant. This identity is the root of the whole nation of which they have tried to get fast hold. However, this national identity has been transplanted from the old Europe, so it might be incompatible with the new environment of America, especially when America has been transformed into a culturally melting pot, then into a salad bowl. In competition with many different cultures, the mainstream conservative W.A.S.P. identity has been long and greatly challenged. When this W.A.S.P. wanted to counter-sting its opponents, it discovered that after so long a period of soi-disant Americanization
, its traditional European root had been gradually lost. When they struggled to
acquire the rejuvenating root again, they found out that they only fought for a
lost cause which had already gone with the wind. There is no authentic native-born gentle tradition before their European root for them to take as the orthodox
national model in the new world and their traditions have been gradually lost. This national ethos was generated during the Jazz Age by the so-called Lost Generation, and echoed in as modernly as the popular song labeled “Englishman in New
York” performed by the pop music “king” Sting, of which the lyrics go as follows:
I don't drink coffee I take tea my dearI like my toast done on the sideAnd you can hear it in my accent when I talkI'm an Englishman in New YorkSee me walking down Fifth AvenueA walking cane here at my sideI take it everywhere I walkI'm an Englishman in New YorkI'm an alienI'm a legal alienI'm an Englishman in New YorkI'm an alienI'm a legal alienI'm an Englishman in New YorkIf "manners maketh man" as someone saidThen he's the hero of the dayIt takes a man to suffer ignorance and smileBe yourself no matter what they sayI'm an alienI'm a legal alienI'm an Englishman in New YorkI'm an alienI'm a legal alienI'm an Englishman in New YorkModesty, propriety can lead to notorietyYou could end up as the only oneGentleness, sobriety are rare in this societyAt night a candle's brighter than the sunTakes more than combat gear to make a manTakes more than license for a gunConfront your enemies, avoid them when you canA gentleman will walk but never runIf "manners maketh man" as someone saidThen he's the hero of the dayIt takes a man to suffer ignorance and smileBe yourself no matter what they sayI'm an alienI'm a legal alienI'm an Englishman in New YorkI'm an alienI'm a legal alienI'm an Englishman in New York
Alienation is just one by-product of the anti-social sentiments aroused by
the loss of national root and identity and the fragile American dream broken when the Edenic pastoral turned into Sodomic industrialized land, when lyre turned
into jazz, and when self-realization turned into pecuniary emulation.
Gatsby’s juvenile schedule reveals another American model, Benjamin Franklin. Gatsby is an equally persistent suitor, although he is much more romantic and less realistic than his colonial predecessor. He shares Franklin’s love of making lists. The materials of Gatsby’s self-creation are archetypically American
. His true last will and testament is the tattered document of Americana Henry C
. Gatz carries East to his son’s funeral. The schedule on the inside cover of a
Hopalong Cassidy comic book and the general resolves as afterthought and afterword are as follows:
Rise from bed…………………………………………………6.00 A.M.
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling…………………………..6.15-6.30 “
Study electricity, etc…………………………………………..7.15-8.15 “
Work…………………………………………………………..8.30.-4.30 P. M.
Baseball and sports……………………………………………4.30-5.00 “
Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it…………………5.00-6.00 “
Study needed inventions………………………………………7.00-9.00 “
GENERAL RESOLVESNo wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]
No more smokeing or chewing
Bath every other dayRead one improving book or magazine per weekSave $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per weekBe better to parents (Gatsby174)
This is after the fashion of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. The general resolves catalogue those practical-moralistic pieces of cultural heritage of the root of Benjamin Franklin’s reading of experience. Though young Gatz looked
beyond Poor Richard to the master in his adolescent determination to study needed inventions. This love for inventions vibrated with the spirit of the Jazz Age.
Jazz Age is an age of inventions. For example, of all the new inventions that shaped the United States in the 1920s, the automobile led the way as harbinger of
the new society. In 1920, American auto manufacturers produced 1,905,500 cars;
in 1930, they produced 2,787,400, and there were altogether 26.5 million---one car for every five Americans. Gatsby has his cream coloured car which becomes sort of his identity signifier. Whenever it appears, people know Gatsby will show up. At last, his cream coloured car becomes the “yellow death car” and his identity signifier---the car, as the incarnation of the soul of the Jazz Age---brings Gatsby to his final death.
Unlike Tom, Gatsby is at home in the new machine age, preferring cars and hydroplanes to ponies and sailing as he prefers the modern American girl to the traditional fair heroine. He enjoys and welcomes the new and inventive, yet most of all when it is linked to the old world as is his experimentation with older masculine roles. Franklinism is the crystallization of American Puritanism with its diligence and self-reliance. Gatsby sets himself a schedule of study and self=improvement, and ends up a wealthy criminal. The guests at his parties, listed in one of the most breath-taking cadenzas in American literature, are mostly not old
money but new rich:
“…the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterwards strangled his wife… the Dewers and the Scullys and S.W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square. Benny Mclenahan arrived always with four girls…In addition to all these I can remember that
Faustina O’Brien came there at least once, and the Baedeker girls and young brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr P. Jewett, once head of the American legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be her chauffeur…all
these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.”(Gatsby 63)
The rise of Franklinian middle class is clearly depicted here. And Gatsby represents all their aspirations. He represents a nation at the peak of its pride
and self-confidence tainted by corruption but still reaching for the stars. The
sense of grief over doomed innocence in “The Great Gatsby” is timeless and is
all the stronger, and all the more sharply focused, because it comes out of the
last era in which innocence was an integral part of the American psyche.
After 1929, the collapse of the economy undermined the golden vision. The sweet dream curdled and the innocence fled. The depression wiped the smile off the face of Franklinian American culture for good and all. In the thirties and afterwards, the protagonists of serious American novels and plays tended to be brutalized and embittered by the life around them. They were usually destroyed by it
, whether they were farm laborers from the Middle West like the Joads in “The Grapes of Wrath”, patricians from the South like Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar
Named Desire”, or salesmen from the East like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman.
All these novels and plays could be called post-Gatsby American literature
in the sense that in “The Great Gatsby” the ideological change from Franklinian smiling belief in self-reliance to something like Spenserian social determinism is first masterly accorded. Franklinian self-realization is a process of pecuniary emulation. But the process doesn’t guarantee one of his spiritual fulfillment. Gatsby gains a great amount of wealth but he still has a lost soul. He fails to win back Daisy, a symbol of his spiritual quest. Thus there is an imbalance
between the external wealthy Gatsby and the internal low self-esteemd Gatz. This homo duplex (double character) within Gatsby foretells his final tragedy. I will further explain Gatsby’s double character through an example by comparing the pencil draft and the final copy of the novel. Gatsby is telling Nick about his experiences
during the war:
Rough Draft
“I was promoted to be a major / and every allied government gave me a decoration / even Bul Montenegro little Montenegro down on the Adriatic / Sea!” He Lifted up the w Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words / them
and nodded at it with a faint smile. My incredulity had / had turned to fascination now; Gatsby was no longer a it was / person he was a magazine I had picked up on like the casually train and I was reading only the climaxes of all the stories/ it contained in a magazine.
Final Version
“I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration
---even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!” Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them---with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles
of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through
a dozen magazines. (Gatsby 66,67)
In the final version, the smile of Gatsby is specifically described and a certain amount of substantiality is added to Gatsby’s character. Gatsby doesn’t
show his appearance in the first two and a half characters. In these chapters,
one hears what other people think of him, speak of him and know of him. One sees
the grand mansion and the extravagant parties of Gatsby and all these build up
a certain image of him within our mind. However, just as one expects a great first appearance scene, a casual, even shabby, image of the real Gatsby slips into
the sight. Just as one feels this Gatsby is too plain to be great, Gatsby shows
his charismatic smile. Fitzgerald added this smile intentionally to make the reader aware of the contrast between a smiling Gatsby and a non-smiling one, thus throwing light upon his double character. On one hand, huge amount of wealth gives him confidence and privilege. On the other hand, the anxiety for spiritual quest makes him nervous and uncertain and the rural family background creates a certain sense of low self-esteem within him.
While Gatsby’s double character is universally sympathetic, it is yet peculiarly American. Jazz Age is a period in American history noted for its overwhelming wealth and technical development. The solo flight of Charles A. Lindbergh,
Jr. across the Atlantic Ocean demonstrated not only the potential of air-planes
as a means of rapid transportation but also how advanced was American technical
prowess. The real Gross National Product (GNP) rose by 39 percent between 1919 and 1929, and real per capita GNP rose by 20 percent, while personal disposable income rose by 30 percent. The great capital accumulation affected mass communicative areas. People began to seek more free ways of self-expression and novelty became the aim of pursuit of popular culture. Flapper girls and Jazz music became
the catchword of the time. Chicago style led the way of fashion. People were enjoying the happiness of pursuit. But people couldn’t solve the spiritual crisis
simply by ignoring it. The flourishing of tabloids and the rising of crime rates plainly voiced out the de-solemnization of popular vulgarism and the burgeoning tendencies of anti-social alienation. The contrast between the jazzy surface and the weary and uncertain soul yeasted the typical double character of average
American.
During the First World War, many American youth went to European battlefields. A generation of young men lost their lives in the slaughter of the trenches
by the weapons of industrialized warfare. After the war, the survivors stayed in
Europe instead of going back home. Europe was for them a familiar yet strange acquaintance whose sobriety and sophistication startled yet attracted them. Since
the old Europe symbolized their lost tradition, they embraced Europe with more
or less a stylistically American simple mind to regain the past. But the old Europeanism turned out not to be as good as they originally had thought. They were
bewildered, betrayed, defeated and lost in the journey to the Promise Land. They
thought they had fought, according to poet Ezra Pound, “for an old bitch gone
in the teeth, / for a botched civilization.” Many American emigrants in Europe
would, regularly or irregularly, meet together in café shops, e.g. the Coupole,
Flora and Bateau in the Left Bank of Paris to discuss literary, political and other issues or simply to party together. Gertrude Stein trademarked them as the
Lost Generation. On the one hand, they were wealthy jolly Americans. On the other hand, their souls seemed lost in an alien world which happened to claim to be
the place of their origins.
Compared with the gentle Europeans, Americans seemed coarse and naïve.
However, as the biggest winner of the First World War, America couldn’t wait to share the world leadership with her old European counterparts. This anxiety of
double identity between the purity of the new Adam and the complexity of the heir of old system invoked alienation, disillusionment and cynicism with tradition
.
1920s for most Americans is the Jazz Age, the Aspirin Age, the Age of Miracles and Ballyhoo. All this is reflected in the text of “The Great Gatsby”. However, if one strips off the colorful cloak from this gilded decade, the social and psychological ailments are clearly shown. The death of Gatsby is the result of his greatness. This essay endeavors to analyze the personal tragedy underlying
the greatness of Gatsby and, with a combination of literary and historical approaches, to diagnose the social lostness and malade of the 1920s by applying the
literary text into the historical context. 1920s is a decade of paradox of promise and confusion. It is about an unrealized dream, of which I can hardly make a
thorough analysis within an essay about just 10 pages. Anyway, years ago when I
was watching the movie “Citizen Kane”, which is the biographical record of the
Jazz Age personified in the life and death of a commercial tycoon, I was touché
at the very last word of Kane: “Rosebud”. If I am allowed to give it a bolder
try to crystallize the main thesis of the essay into one word, that’s it. The
whole essay deals with the quest and failure in the sound of fury of the Jazz Age that is allegorized in “The Great Gatsby” as Daisy and in “Citizen Kane”,
rosebud.
Works Cited
Barrett, William, Fitzgerald and America---A Failure of the American Myth of the
Success Story in Partisan ReviewⅩⅤⅢ. New York: Penguin, 1951. 345-353.
Bloom, Harold, “Gatsby”. New York: Chelsea, 1991.
Cashman, Sean Dennis, American Ascendant---from Theodore Roosevelt to FDR in the
Century of American Power, 1901-1945. New York: NYUP, 1998.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, “The Great Gatsby”. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1925.
Humphrey, Terence M., The History of America. Beijing: Minzu&Jianshe PH, 2001.
Lindberg, Gary, The Confidence Man in American Literature. New York: OUP, 1982.
Turnbull, Andrew, The Letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. New York: Scribner’s,
1963.
