"THE GREAT GATSBY" Critical Context (AO3)

"THE GREAT GATSBY"

Critical Context (AO3)

Contemporary criticism

When The Great Gatsby was first published in 1925, many reviewers recognised it as a fulfilment of the promise Fitzgerald had shown in his previous novels.  Isabel Paterson wrote that he ‘managed somehow to pour his glowing youth on the page before it could escape forever’.  Others, such as H. L. Mencken, a critic for whom Fitzgerald had the greatest respect, were more overtly critical.  He called the novel a ‘glorified anecdote’, complaining that it is ‘simply a story’, and that ‘only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes’.  He dismissed the other characters as ‘mere marionettes’.  Nevertheless, he was full of praise for Fitzgerald’s craftsmanship and the ‘charm and beauty of the writing’.

 

The novel excited considerable interest among other writers. Gertrude Stein told Fitzgerald that, in The Great Gatsby, he was ‘creating the contemporary world’ in the same way that W. M. Thackeray had in his novels.  This is a significant choice of verb, implying that he was not merely reflecting 1920s America but helping to construct it.  T. S. Eliot was also ‘interested and excited’ by it, grandly claiming that it represented ‘the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James’.

 

Posthumous revival and criticism

 

In spite of its largely favourable reception by the critics, the novel did not sell well.  However, Fitzgerald’s death in 1940 reawakened interest in the writer and his books.  Several obituaries praised The Great Gatsby, but some felt that it was a product of its time and was already outdated.  Fitzgerald’s writing was linked to his life, and his decline into alcoholism was seen by some as being related to what they felt was his inability to fulfil his early promise.

 

William Troy

 

Nevertheless, several new editions appeared in the 1940s and William Troy claimed that The Great Gatsby was a characteristically American novel.  He argued that Fitzgerald manages to achieve something like T. S. Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ [an external equivalent for an internal state of mind] by splitting his own divided self between the two central characters.  He is able to observe objectively through ‘the ordinary but quite sensible narrator’, as well as to bring life, in Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s own Romantic dreams.  Troy claimed that Gatsby is a ‘mythological creation’, a product of the wish-fulfilment of a whole nation: ‘Gatsby becomes…..a symbol of America itself, dedicated to “the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty”.’

 

He observed that the novelist had employed the technical device of an involved and sympathetic narrator, in the tradition of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, which makes for ‘some of the most priceless values in fiction – economy, suspense, intensity.  And these values The Great Gatsby possesses to a rare degree’.  By linking Fitzgerald with established writers such as Eliot, James and Conrad, Troy was signalling that The Great Gatsby was worthy of academic study.

 

Arthur Mizener

 

Another 1940s critic who rated the novel highly and suggested ways in which its themes and techniques could be more deeply explored and analysed was Arthur Mizener.  Like Troy, he explored the novel’s ‘modified first-person form’ and Nick’s importance as narrator.  He called the novel a kind of ‘tragic pastoral’, with the East representing urban sophistication as well as corruption, and the West representing simple virtue.  Mizener explored the title of the novel, observing that: ‘Insofar as Gatsby represents the simple virtue which Fitzgerald associates with the West, he is really a great man; insofar as he achieves the kind of notoriety which the East accords success of his kind, he is about as great as Barnum was.’  He judged that the irony of the book lay in Gatsby’s inability to understand himself and how society judged him.  Mizener recognised that Fitzgerald was fundamentally a poet, and he praised the ‘formal perfection’ of The Great Gatsby.

 

The new criticism of the 1950s

 

In the 1950s, Fitzgerald began to be studied in many American universities and The Great Gatsby achieved the status of a classic American novel.  Lionel Trilling was the first of many to make the claim that Gatsby represents America: ‘Gatsby, divided between power and dream comes inevitably to stand for American itself.  Ours is the only national that prides itself upon a dream and gives its name to one, “the American Dream”.’

 

The academic debates had begun.  In 1955, R. W. Stallman wrote an essay in which he argued that it had become a great novel because Gatsby is ‘a modern Icarus…who…belongs not exclusively to one epoch of American civilisation but rather to all history inasmuch as all history repeats in cycle form what Gatsby represents – America itself’.  Troy had argued that Nick was an admirable character who had grown in moral perception by the end of the novel. Stallman disagreed, calling him ‘a prig with holier-than-thou airs’.  Mizener had interpreted the novel as a ‘tragic pastoral’, celebrating an idealised version of rural life in the Midwest; whereas Stallman argued that Fitzgerald showed that the apparent division between the corrupt urban East and the moral rural Midwest exists only in Nick’s imagination.  Since these essays many critics have joined in the debates and written books analysing The Great Gatsby.

 

Ethnic criticism

 

Not until 1947 was Fitzgerald first criticised for the anti-Semitism of his presentation of Meyer Wolfsheim.  Not until 1967 was he criticised for his derogatory portrayals of African-Americans, as well as the way Nick interprets the American Dream as being only for people like himself.  In 1973, Peter Gregg Slater observed that Native Americans were ignored in Nick’s vision of the founding moment of American.  It is easy to criticise the novel for its narrow outlook, but it is important to remember that it reflected the attitudes of the 1920s.  We should be wary of judging Fitzgerald for being a product of his time.

 

Feminist criticism

 

Feminist critics attempt to describe and interpret women’s experience as depicted in literature.  They question the long-standing dominant male ideologies, patriarchal attitudes and male interpretations in literature.  They challenge traditional and accepted male ideas about the nature of women and how women are, according to male writers, supposed to feel, act and think.  Fitzgerald limits his portrayal of his women characters by having as his narrator a misogynist who declares that ‘Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply’ [pp. 58-59].  Such a narrator cannot be expected to reveal any empathy with a woman’s feelings.

In 1977, Judith Fetterley published The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, in which she argues that, with very few exceptions, at the time she was writing, American literature had been mostly written by men and so their attempts to define what it means to be American were made from a male perspective.  She argues that, in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald portrays America as female, writing of her green breast that ‘had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams’ [p. 171], whereas the dreamers are male.  ‘Daisy’s failure of Gatsby is symbolic of the failure of America to live up to the expectations in the imagination of the men who “discovered” it.  American is female; to be American is male; and the quintessential American experience is betrayal by a woman.’

 

Feminist critics take Nick to task for his double standards; he excuses Gatsby’s lies because he is reconstructing himself to achieve his dream.  Gatsby’s whole life is a pose but, as soon as Nick realises why, he enthuses that ‘he came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour’ [p. 76].  Nick takes this image of rebirth further when he glorifies Gatsby as having sprung from ‘his Platonic conception of himself.  He was a son of God… and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretriciously beauty’ [p. 95].  Even while he recognises the falseness of Gatsby’s dream, he speaks of it as if it were holy.  By contrast, Nick accuses Daisy and Jordan of adopting poses that are inexcusable because they are designed to put men, and specifically Nick, at a disadvantage, ‘as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to extract a contributory emotion from me’ [p. 22].  For Nick, women’s attraction lies in their inaccessibility and he assumes that, once Gatsby has met Daisy again, ‘his count of enchanted objects had diminished by one’ [p.90].  Judith Fetterley wrote: ‘Nick’s dishonesty goes unrecognised by most of the novel’s readers: it is not perceived as dishonest because it is common, pervasive, and ‘natural’ to a sexist society.  The Great Gatsby is a dishonest book because the culture from which it derives and which it reflects is radically dishonest’.

 

Judith Fetterley also claims that The Great Gatsby is a classic male drama of poor boy achieving wealth and challenging rich boy, and that the story is a struggle for power, with the prize being the girl.  When the poor boy dies, it is not the rich boy who becomes the scapegoat, but Daisy, because she failed him.  Nick shakes hands with Tom, but there is no such reconciliation with Daisy– she alone bears the blame.

 

Psychoanalytic criticism

 

Fitzgerald was born four years before Sigmund Freud published one of the founding texts of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1900.  Psychoanalytic critics see literature as like dreams.  Both are fictions, inventions of the mind that, although based on reality, are not literally true.  The theory is that much of what lies in the unconscious mind has been repressed, or censored, by consciousness and emerges only in disguised forms, such as dreams, or in an art form, such as painting or writing.  They interpret the author’s purpose in writing as being to gratify secretly some forbidden wish that has been repressed.

 

Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby at the time when psychoanalytic ideas and techniques were being developed and circulated.  Freud first discussed his structural model of the psyche in his 1920 essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, introducing his concepts of the ‘id’, the ‘ego’ and the ‘super-ego’.  These concepts were formalised and elaborated upon three years later in The Ego and the Id.  According to Freud’s theory, the id represents our inner desires, amoral and egocentric, ruled by the pleasure/pain principle. The super-ego is a symbolic internalisation of our upbringing and cultural regulations that acts as our conscience.  The ego’s task is to find a balance between these two opposing forces so that we can function in the real world.

 

Fitzgerald followed his inner desires and followed [or rather led] the decadent lifestyle of his generation, but his tragedy was that his super-ego made him despise himself for doing so.  Like Fitzgerald himself, Nick Carraway shows evidence of being torn between his id and his super-ego, ‘simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life’ [p. 37].  Nick has a highly developed super-ego, therefore his upbringing and training in the rules of society lead him to disapprove of all the other characters in the novel.  However, his id, representing his inner desires, encourages him to forgive Gatsby, excusing his dishonesty because he admires, perhaps envies, Gatsby’s romantic vision.  Thus he is able to present Gatsby as ‘Great’, a tragic hero.  At the beginning he tells his readers that Gatsby ‘represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn’, but ‘there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life’ [p. 8].  Fitzgerald uses a driving metaphor to illustrate how Nick’s highly developed super-ego is preventing him from indulging his id, and from forming meaningful relationships: ‘I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires’ [p. 59].

 

Nick’s imagination and his dreams offer the key to understanding his character and how the events in the novel change him.  We learn that his ego tries to balance his desires and his conscience through a dream of secret casual affairs with romantic women he meets on Fifth Avenue, to whom he does not have to commit himself [p. 57].  By the time he returns to the Midwest, Nick’s ‘fantastic dreams’ are of West Egg, as if in a painting by El Greco [p. 167].  No longer does he find the metropolitan twilight ‘enchanting’.  Even the moon has lost its lustre and romance, and the sky appears ‘sullen’, an example of the pathetic fallacy that neatly sums up his disappointed romantic dreams.

 

Marxist criticism

 

The Marxist perspective is that works on literature are conditioned by the economic and political forces of their social context.  Not only does Fitzgerald explore class tensions between the wealthy and the despairing poor who scrape a living among the ash-heaps of New York’s waste, but his narrator explores the divisions between East Egg and West Egg.  Those who live in East Egg glory in inherited wealth and think themselves superior to those, like Fitzgerald himself, who are self-made men having become rich in entertainment, the financial sector or crime.

 

Fitzgerald writes about New York, giving valuable insights into the negative aspects of the postwar economic boom. His novel can be read as a penetrating criticism of the uncaring, materialistic and corrupt ruling classes. Nick’s criticism of Tom and Daisy [p. 170] can be read as a prophecy of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. Central to the story is the allegation that, at the inquest, the authorities put the blame for Gatsby’s murder on Mr Wilson, ‘in order that the case might remain in its simplest form’; to investigate the truth might have uncovered corruption at a high level.