"The Great Gatsby": HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 

THE JAZZ AGE AND THE LOST GENERATION

The decade following the First World War in America has become popularly known as the Jazz Age. Jazz music set exalted standards in terms of musicianship during the 1920s, especially in the soloing of trumpeter Louis Armstrong (1901-71) and the compositions of Duke Ellington (1899-1974), but affluent, young white Jazz Age listeners tended to favour a diluted form of the music, danceable, exuberant and carefree. The 1920s were also known at the time as the Golden Twenties or the Roaring Twenties. F. Scott Fitzgerald played a major role in characterising these years as a period of pleasure seeking, and of reckless exuberance. Many of his short stories provide an entertaining picture of youthful hedonism and especially the antics of those liberated young women known as 'flappers', affronting conventional values with their short skirts, short hair and make-up. But in his more substantial fiction a far more  gloomy and at times sinister version of the age emerges.

Gertrude Stein, an American writer living in Paris, referred to the Lost Generation of the post-First World War world. The novel usually cited as capturing the essence of this Lost Generation is The Sun Also Rises (1926), by F. Scott Fitzgerald's close friend, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway depicts a group of expatriate Americans, wandering aimlessly through Europe, sensing that they are powerless and that life is pointless in the aftermath of the Great War. But the feeling of loss and emptiness had already been identified by F. Scott Fitzgerald when, at the end of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), he wrote of a new generation ' grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'. The Great Gatsby may also be seen to encapsulate this perception of life without purpose, of restlessness, dissatisfaction and drifting.

It is this general ennui that makes Jay Gatsby's capacity for hope appear such a rare quality. The novel was published in the middle of the decade, and reveals a mindless quest for pleasure and a loss of direction in life to be t w o sides of the same coin. As F. Scott Fitzgerald shows so memorably, the indulgence of the 1920s in all forms of excess was never far from a collapse into desperation.

ADVERTISING AND THE MASS MARKET

The population of America more or less doubled in the half-century before The Great Gatsby was published. The nation had to face the problem of how to meet the basic requirements of this growing population, and one solution came in the development of mass production  techniques in factories. In 1913, Henry Ford first used an assembly line to produce his Model T automobile, but the technique was already well established in the production of other goods for the mass market.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel was written against the background of this explosive growth in commodities available for purchase, most of which were standardised products. Standardisation seemed appropriate to a modern democracy, where all citizens might have the right to buy items which were available to all. Companies and large stores based in big cities produced catalogues that enabled Americans living in remote areas to make mail-order purchases,

 The early years of the century saw a corresponding change in advertising. Products were given brand names, often promoted as a sign of reliability. I n 1903 an academic psychologist named William Dill Scott published The Theory and Practice of Advertising, following it up in 1908 with The Psychology of Advertising. Such studies signalled a fundamental change of approach. Advertising had for a long time been intended to inform potential buyers what was available for purchase. But new advertising techniques sought to create the desire for commodities, to shape the taste of the nation.

Packaging became much more important, designed to entice potential buyers, and salesmen were trained in new marketing techniques, new means to persuasion. In 1927 the American writer Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) published a novel entitled Elmer Gantry,  whose hero combines the techniques of persuasion of the salesman and of the evangelist with masterly cynicism. F. Scott Fitzgerald created Jay Gatsby at a time when the American workplace was increasingly ruled by doctrines of scientific management, by time and motion studies which aimed to gain maximum efficiency from workers. Henry Ford actually employed a team to monitor the private lives of his workers, to ensure that energies were not being squandered during the hours of leisure.

Gatsby is a figure whose sense of time is not reflected on any clock face; he is a romantic figure who transcends the standardised, regulated world that was a reality for many Americans at the time. But he surely belongs to the brave new world of American advertising, for his act of self-creation can be seen as new packaging, the shift from Gatz to Gatsby as a change of brand name, while the mansion and the parties are strategies of marketing. He rises above the marketplace of his time in the sense that he is creating a unique product, intended not for mass consumption, but for Daisy Fay.

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

The term 'conspicuous consumption' was coined by a social scientist named Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). Born in the American Midwest in 1857, he published a book in 1899 entitled The Theory of the Leisure Class. It was a response to the rise to power in America of extremely rich businessmen, who displayed their wealth in ostentatious houses and extravagant behaviour. This display Thorstein Veblen called 'conspicuous consumption', and he was critical of it on the grounds that it was invariably wasteful, and because, in his view, it implied increasing poverty amongst the lower classes in society.

The Great Gatsby presents a graphic illustration of how conspicuous consumption might become a measure of social status. Tom Buchanan, who is certainly a member of the leisure class, so wealthy that he does not need to work, has a load of polo ponies which he takes with him on his travels. They provide him with entertainment, but they also announce his status to others. Jay Gatsby has his mansion, he stages lavish parties and he is proud of a new hydroplane. The flamboyance of his lifestyle is seemingly remote from the drab world inhabited by George Wilson. The worlds collide in the accident that kills Myrtle, and it is yet another example of conspicuous consumption, Gatsby's expensive car, that leads Wilson to his victim.

PROHIBITION AND ORGANISED CRIME

At the time The Great Gatsby appeared, the production and sale of alcoholic drinks were prohibited in America. This Prohibition commenced on 16 January 1920, following the passing of the Volstead Act a year earlier. Prohibition, championed by the Anti-Saloon League, was intended to raise the nation's moral standards, but to a large extent it had the opposite effect. In practice it was difficult to enforce and it was not difficult for drinkers to find alcohol, as F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel makes very clear. In 1925 there were apparently one hundred thousand speakeasies, as unlawful drinking dens were called, in New York alone. Bootlegging, the illicit production and provision of alcohol, became big business, making fortunes for criminals such as the gangster Al Capone. This appears to be the principal source of Gatsby's wealth, the core of corruption within his lifestyle.

The illegal economy was organised by powerful gangs of criminals, who engaged in other unlawful activities such as gambling and protection rackets. In reality, figures such as Capone and 'Legs' Diamond became legends. They provided models for the gangster movies of the 1930s such as Little Caesar (1930), Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932). Celebrity did not conceal the fact that these were ruthless and extremely dangerous men.

In The Great Gatsby the criminal underworld is represented by Meyer Wolfsheim, based on the real-life gambler Arnold Rothstein. His Jewishness is significant as F. Scott Fitzgerald seems to be indicating that while legitimate power in America is held exclusively by Anglo-Saxon men, the 'Nordics' (Chapter 1, p. 18) with whom Tom Buchanan identifies civilisation, the only route to prosperity open to members of other racial and cultural groups is crime. A critical reading might argue that F. Scott Fitzgerald endorsing racial stereotypes in these depictions, and is actually fuelling distrust. Still, there is historical evidence that Prohibition actually provided a means to advancement for ambitious Americans who were excluded from lawful and institutional channels, and bootlegging certainly became an extremely lucrative national industry. Prohibition was repealed in 1933.

MASS CULTURE

In the 1920 census America was shown, for the first time, to be an urban nation, with more people living in cities than in the countryside. It is true that some of the places classified as cities were actually moderate-sized towns, but nonetheless the trend towards an urban America was unmistakable. The growth of the population due to immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and the continuing flow of black Americans from the South, where their families had formerly been held in slavery, caused rapid and highly visible expansion of urban areas. The anonymity fostered by city living, where a citizen is just one amongst many, coupled with the increasing standardisation of production techniques, contributed to the sense that America had entered a new phase in its history, in which culture belonged to the masses.

Millionaires such as John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) and John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) - both of whom F. Scott Fitzgerald mentions in the novel - might build unique art collections in the manner of Old World aristocrats, but Americans generally flocked to the moving pictures of the flourishing film industry. They read mass-circulation newspapers and magazines (such as Town Tattle, which Myrtle Wilson reads) that imposed unprecedented uniformity on the information reaching Americans across the continent. They spent their money to watch sporting spectacles, or indulged in the pleasures of the gaudy new amusement parks, such as Coney Island. In response to the consolidation of America's urban masses, John Dos Passos (1896-1970) wrote Manhattan Transfer (1925), a novel of mass society, without a hero, while F. Scott Fitzgerald made a different decision and created the figure known as "The Great Gatsby'.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Photographs of a crude kind were produced as far back as the 1820s. Their evolution was vastly accelerated when, at the end of the 1870s, a young American bank clerk called George Eastman (1854-1932) became interested in photography. Within a short while he made a series of crucial innovations that revolutionised the practice, making it more readily available to all who could afford the basics and extending its potential as a means for art. Eastman was not the only significant figure active in photography at this time but he was a well-known one and made a real difference.

In 1888 he patented a new camera, relatively small, conveniently box-shaped and using strips of film rather than cumbersome plates. He coined the trademark Kodak to launch this vastly improved photographic system. A craze for taking photographs soon followed, especially after Eastman introduced the Brownie camera in 1900. By the 1920s, when important advances were being made in motion pictures, still photography was widespread as a hobby and it played a key part in cultivating contemporary America's fascination with the glamorous image, encountered in newspapers, magazines and advertisements.

Photography provides a recurrent motif in The Great Gatsby. The thematic significance of the photograph is that it appears to freeze time, and frames an experience which is preserved for later contemplation. Gatsby has a photograph of Cody upon his wall, and his father carries a picture of Gatsby's mansion. But such photographs can be seen as metaphors for the vision that makes Gatsby great. He has dedicated his life to pursuit of a moment which was actually frozen in his past, the moment he fell in love with Daisy. But his is not a passive contemplation; rather it is dynamic, as if Gatsby wishes to break through the frame and so recapture the instant caught by the camera of his imagination.

In contrast to Gatsby's dynamism, the photographer McKee is a failed artist. His photographs belong to a world of purposeless despair, and have tell-tale names such as 'Loneliness' and 'Brooklyn Bridge'. The bridge was a symbol of American modernity realised in the language of engineering, but it was also the site of numerous suicides. In fiction, a character named Bud Korpening leaps from the bridge to his death in Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos, also published in 1925.

LITERARY BACKGROUND

Contemporary commentators and more recent critics have remarked upon the striking difference between R Scott Fitzgerald's first two novels and The Great Gatsby. It has been generally accepted that the advance is basically one of technical resourcefulness. R Scott Fitzgerald had become a far more skilful and controlled writer. It should not diminish our sense of his achievement to recognise his debt to the novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), a debt that R Scott Fitzgerald himself readily acknowledged. Joseph Conrad was born in Poland, but lived and worked in England, and he aimed in his writing to raise the English novel to the level of seriousness attained by practitioners in France, such as Gustave Flaubert (1821-80). Joseph Conrad regarded the novel as a very serious form of artistic endeavour, one that could respond appropriately to the complex reality of the modern world. His best-known expression of the seriousness of the novelist's art is to be found in a preface written in 1897 for his novella The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'. F. Scott Fitzgerald read that preface while writing The Great Gatsby, and drew from it support for his own aspirations.

Joseph Conrad's preface opens with the assertion that any literary work that claims the status of art should carry its justification in every line; there should be no word or phrase that does not contribute to the overall meaning of the work. This neatly summarises the literary faith that informs F. Scott Fitzgerald's third novel, and makes it such a dramatic advance on This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned.

F. Scott Fitzgerald followed Joseph Conrad's example in producing a novel carefully composed through the intricate patterning of language and of narrative events. He also added the model used by Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim (1900) and, with still more sophistication, in Heart of Darkness (1902), of the narrator who is also a participant in the story, and whose point of view demands the reader's attention and interpretation. This important technical issue of narrative point of view was also explored by Joseph Conrad's English friend and collaborator Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), notably in The Good Soldier (1915), and by the expatriate American novelist Henry James (1843-1916).

 Henry James also developed the scenic method, constructing narrative through a series of interlocking set pieces. F. Scott Fitzgerald was aware of the technique in Henry James's novels and in the work of Edith Wharton (1862-1937), notably Ethan Frome (1911). F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing during the period of intensive experimentation with literary forms and techniques, classified as Modernism. He admired the work of radical innovators such as Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and James Joyce (1882-1941), but his own approach to writing in The Great Gatsby is closer to the example of Henry James, Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad.

A number of critics have suggested that the novel is indebted to T. S. Eliot's Modernist poem The Waste Land (1922), but the debt seems to be more in terms of the portrayal of the 'valley of ashes' (Chapter 2, p. 26) as a sterile, spiritually desolate landscape, than of a technical or formal nature. F. Scott Fitzgerald did send a copy of the novel to T. S. Eliot, inscribed to the 'Greatest of Living Poets'.

A case might be made for drawing a parallel between Nick Carraway and the character J. Alfred Prufrock in T. S. Eliot's poem 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1917). They share a combination of reticence and desire that leaves them painfully inactive, wanting to make a move but unable to doso. Nick, like Prufrock, panics at the prospect of growing old, and they share the sense that they were not meant to be central players upon life’s stage. Nick, however, has found in Gatsby a surrogate self.