The Pursuit of the American Dream:
In Search of Happiness and Wealth in Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby and Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer
Supervisor: Dr. B.P. Moore MA Thesis
June 29 2018
Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture University of Amsterdam
Acknowledgement
With this acknowledgement, I acknowledge that I have read and understood the UvA’s rules about plagiarism.
Saskia Ouwendijk
Abstract
The thesis looks at two leading texts from 1920s America, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer in their relation to the American Dream. As Chapter One will give a historical analysis of the American Dream by examining how the origin of the Dream, its idealistic roots, have changed towards a material, wealthy, prosperous version of the dream. It is a chapter where the conceptual framework of the American Dream, the concept of power of money and wealth, and changing vision and values of American society are examined and contextualized in 1920s America. Chapters Two and Three will give an explicit analysis of how the American Dream, the power of money and wealth, and the attenuating values of 1920 America affect the texts of The Great Gatsby and Manhattan Transfer. Chapter Two sees The Great Gatsby as a text in which the original American Dream ethic of (Protestant) hard work is challenged through the ideas of determination and self-conception through the rise of consumerism and the idea of humans seen and treated as objects therefore classified as commodities. Chapter Three will examine Manhattan Transfer as a city novel which chronicles many characters’ fragmented lives in their disillusioned quest and mostly unsuccessful search for wealth and happiness. The American Dream seems then to have taken its toll in Manhattan Transfer as it portrays New York as an American
nightmare microcosm. Chapter Two and Three seek to analyze the characters’ dreams and how they fare in life. Both chapters will analyze how the texts differently illustrate the disillusionment and the negative side effects of the ever changing American Dream and the characters’ hopes of living a richer and better life.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgement 2
Abstract 3
Introduction 5-11
Chapter One. The History of the American Dream and 1920s America 12-22
Chapter Two. The Decline of American Dreams in The Great Gatsby 23-39
Chapter Three. The City as an American Nightmare in Manhattan Transfer 40-54
Conclusion 55-56
Introduction
Retrospectively, 1920s America is classified as the decade of the Roaring Twenties. The decade saw an enormous change throughout all areas of society as the United States moved rapidly and progressively forward in terms of money, wealth and capitalism, the rise of materialism through advertising and consumerism, mechanical and technological innovations including the newspaper, the emergence and power of science and the development of cityscape urbanization through the skyscraper, the train and the automobile most notoriously. These changes happened rapidly and caused many successive problems in American society in the 1920s. The turbulent and yet innovative decade of the Roaring Twenties saw a surge of prosperity under President Coolidge but the nation ultimately emerged into a crisis, infamously labeled the Great Depression, which started at the end of the 1920s and lasted well into the 1930s.
The year of 1925 saw the publication of two novels, Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, whose receptions are both curious to say the least. The Great Gatsby’s reception in 1925 was lukewarm at best and although Fitzgerald believed that he had written a better novel than his previous ones, the reading public did not concur. Later works were not sold well either. After having died from a heart attack in 1940 at age 44, Fitzgerald left his work unfinished and his public image mainly consisted of his ‘unsuccessful’ career and his ‘failed’ marriage to Zelda. During his lifetime, Fitzgerald had become the representative of the Jazz age, a term which he had coined himself in the title of his short stories collection named Tales of the Jazz Age that chronicled 1920s America. Fitzgerald’s image was reflected by those images of rich parties, glitter and glamour, failure and success: his own work set the tone of his public persona’s perception
and therefore his afterlife. During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, scholarship on Fitzgerald mainly focused on the connection between Fitzgerald’s public persona and the reflection of the Jazz age in his works. Fitzgerald did not enjoy the status and critical acclaim that he has in the 21st century but a group of scholars including Alfred Kazin and Marius Bewley started
successfully the “Fitzgerald revival” in the 1950s. As a primary goal, the focus was to shift Fitzgerald’s work into the limelight again. By doing so they did not want to contextualize the text back to the 1920s but wanted to look beyond the text for other and new connections. Another goal was, as they approached Fitzgerald in their renewed scholarship, to find Fitzgerald a new audience and especially a new recognition and critical acclaim. Since the 1950s, Fitzgerald’s status has incredibly improved and his works have been added to high schools and universities’ curriculums with The Great Gatsby as it is considered as one of the contenders for the great American novel. The other novel which concerns me is John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, whose reception was better. Critics such as Linda W. Wagner laud the novel for its new take on modernity, urbanization and technology, for its
fragmentation and new style of narrative, for its cinematic and cubist influences that Dos Passos, as a fervent traveler, all had found its way into his chronicles of New York (47). For the public, it was a new reading experience, as the reader had to draw the connections between the fragments by himself. The narrative voice seemed realistic at eye sight but the act of rereading proved to be necessary to make sense of the text as a coherent piece of art. While Dos Passos was popular with the critics in the 1920s and the 1930s, he fell out of the spotlight from a reading public point of view as his literary reputation started to decline after his prime in the 1930s. Manhattan Transfer is seen more nowadays as an experimental novel of the 1920s and it is seen as the basis and as practice in terms of style, content and message for Dos Passos’ later critical trilogy U.S.A.. As Dos Passos was personally much less of a
celebrity than Fitzgerald was, his political views and relation to his father John Dos Passos Senior were subjects of much interest in academic circles. In biographies and scholarly works such as Melvin Landsberg’s book Dos Passos’ Path to the U.S.A. A Political Biography 1912-1936, it always noted that Dos Passos Senior was an infamous capitalist and this is an ironic fact considering his son’s interest in Marxism. Many academics such as Robert C. Rosen’s John Dos Passos Politics and the Writer have tried to illustrate Dos Passos Junior’s interest in the strand of Marxism and how Marxist views can be depicted in his works. Other scholars have tried to define Dos Passos Junior’s political development throughout his life and how his political interest was mixed with his writings.
From a 21st century perspective, The Great Gatsby and Manhattan Transfer are
generally considered candidates for a phenomenon known as ‘the Great American novel’. Both novels are considered as great depictions of American society and its declining values, a remarkable achievement of either The Great Gatsby and the experimental modernist novel that is Manhattan Transfer. These novels have proven what a great year 1925 was for the history of American literature.
What is similar in Fitzgerald’s and Dos Passos’ works are the writers’ sensibilities for presenting and depicting the great social issues of their time. In particular The Great Gatsby and Manhattan Transfer show, in my opinion, an underlying message of social criticism regarding contemporary culture of 1920s American society and more specifically to the idea of the American Dream. Although the notion and concept of the American Dream did not exist in the 1920s as the term was only coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America, the belief of the American spirit and the promise and aspiration of progress of the nation did exist and has continued for many centuries. The belief in the
American spirit led America to an enormous wealth and progress as a civilization in the 1920s after World War I. It seemed that the American reflection and vision of life was different and that the values had changed. The pursuit of happiness had become an
obsessive pursuit of wealth. The fundamental values of America are nowadays to be thought of as the notion of freedom, individualism, and the act of self-reliance. The original values were to be a good man, someone who was in search of the American spirit by working hard, found happiness and living a good spiritual life. This ideal had changed to the notion of becoming rich and obtaining and maintaining wealth. The original idea of the American Dream which was related to pure idealism and values such as hard work transformed itself into the oppositional corruptive Dream wealth variant which ultimately became dominant in 1920s America. The belief in progress, the thin line between failure and success, and the promise in the pursuit of the American Dream have always been present in the way how Americans envisage the conception of their nation’s history and it has proven to be a strong and ever present motif in Americas rich literary tradition.
It is the aim of my thesis to illustrate that both Francis Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos discuss and incorporate the rapid changes of American society in their novels The Great Gatsby and Manhattan Transfer and that they use the American Dream as a means to depict and illustrate a form of social criticism in their novels. While the term of the American Dream did not exist yet in the 1920s, the authors were well known as chroniclers to sense and depict the important social and moralistic issues in their time. Both novels differently illustrate the underlying message and mechanisms of the American Dream in their own worlds by envisaging the changes in American life and its values. The authors illustrate their concern about the changes in America and emphasize that the corruptive version of the Dream has negative effects in their portrayal of the characters’ lives. The thesis tries to trace
the Dreams and trail the lives of the characters and follow their quests for finding a better life in America which can be defined as their obsession with wealth, their failure or success, in search of jobs or love, the concept of marriage and others.
Although a tremendous amount of scholarly work has been published in regard to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the American Dream, Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer has received far less scholarly attention in connection to the American Dream. My thesis aims to fill in the gap of how Manhattan Transfer can be related to the American Dream and in the ways it can be connected to The Great Gatsby as both have similar but different contexts of the Dream, the changed ideals and attenuated values from the pursuit of happiness to the power of wealth, the power of money and class status, the rise of materialism, advertising and consumerism. The characters in The Great Gatsby believe they create their identity through the sense of self-conception and self-determinism by becoming obsessed with materialism and being active consumers. Thinking in a constant mode of possession this consumerism leads to the gradual dehumanization of women in The Great Gatsby as objects and commodities to be possessed and used. Manhattan Transfer has a overall sense of dehumanization in the novel as it is the city, as the main protagonist, that negatively affects the characters’ lives in the microcosm of New York. Manhattan Transfer also sees a process of dehumanization and objectification as human beings, man or woman, are treated as things, as commodities and described in a mechanical way as if they were objects.
The argument of my thesis therefore is that both novels use the American Dream as a means of social criticism by depicting the shift of the Dream from a pursuit of happiness to a pursuit of wealth which reflected a transformation and clash in American values. There remains a tension between the pursuit of happiness and property as values in 1920s
America. This obsessive pursuit of materialism, which is further illustrated through the means of consumerism and the rise of leisure culture has contributed to the objectification of humans being treated as if they were mere symbols, object, things and through the mode of possession seen as commodities.
The thesis is divided as follows. Chapter One will serve as a conceptual framework where the origins of the American Dream will be discussed and how it transformed from the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of wealth. The values and ideals have changed from an idealistic form towards an obsessive pursuit of wealth version of the Dream. The chapter forms the basic groundwork for chapter two and three to work from as it uses the concept of Karl Marx’s The Power of Money in which money is able to appropriate anything. Marx shows why money has become like a God through “universality” as the most central thing of the world of humans. Marx depicts money as it has a double role in power and is therefore seen as superior and as the source of all evil, perhaps all culture. Chapter One will also devote a major part of it to an extensive detailed rereading of James Truslow Adams’ The Epic of America as he was almost contemporary with the 1920s period. He coined the term American Dream for the first time in 1931 and discusses the Dream in relation to America before and after the First World War, the Great Depression and the rise of business culture. The 1920s saw a rise of materialism, consumerism, leisure class which ultimately lead to objectification and the issue of commodity, topics which will also be examined and
contextualized in this conceptual framework chapter. Chapter two and three serve as case study chapters that will give an explicit analysis of how the American Dream, the power of money and wealth, and the attenuating values of 1920 America affect the texts of The Great Gatsby and Manhattan Transfer. Chapter Two sees The Great Gatsby as a text in which the Protestant ethic value of hard work is challenged through the ideas of self-determination and
self-conception through the rise of consumerism and the idea of humans seen and treated as objects which are afterwards seen as commodities. Chapter two also depicts the characters’ drive to realize their dreams and examines their success or failure in life. Chapter Three examines Manhattan Transfer as a city novel in which Dos Passos chronicles many
characters’ fragmented lives in their disillusioned quest and mostly unsuccessful search for wealth and happiness. The American Dream seems to have taken its toll in Manhattan Transfer as it portrays New York as a microcosm depicted as an American nightmare in which the pursuit and possession of wealth and its effects of materialism and consumerism have led to the objectification of human beings. Humans are treated as things and they are seen as commodities themselves as property to be obtained and to be used. Chapter Two and Three examine how the texts differently illustrate the disillusionment and the negative effects of the pursuit of the American Dream and the characters’ hope of a better life.
Chapter One
The History of the American Dream and 1920s America
This chapter aims to provide a theoretical framework for the whole thesis. Foremost the chapter will give a historical analysis of the American Dream by examining how the origin of the Dream has changed from its idealistic roots toward a material version of the dream and how the pursuit of happiness is connected to the Declaration of Independence (US 1776). The coinage of the term of the American Dream did not occur until 1931 and the book The Epic of America of historian James Truslow Adams will be used to explore the first concept of the Dream. Callahan will be used to explain how the creation of the American vision has evolved and developed into a myth and how the idea of the American Dream has shaped the nation’s national identity. Through Karl Marx’s The Power of Money I want to emphasize the shift of money and wealth as the center of perception of the human world. The chapter ends with how American literature of the 1920s can be seen in the light of the excessive pursuit of materialism, the rise of consumerism and leisure culture. It will mention how humans are treated through the concepts of objectification and commodity through Ronald Berman’s and Kirk Curnutt’s scholarly works which are illustrated in Chapter Two and Three. Chapter One ends with the argument that a critical reflection of the American Dream is illustrated in 1920s American literature as a form of social criticism and it is depicted through the rise of materialism, consumerism and leisure culture which in turn led to negative effects caused by the Dream. As a consequence it reflects the objectification of human beings which are consequently seen and treated as commodities.
The American Dream is an often quoted term that reflects the vision of America and Americans in the United States. The American Dream is a common phrase which is
understood all over the world and it seems to contain a mythic power that has caused the rise of immigration to the United States. As it is such a heavily used term, its meaning has diminished to the background as it is assumed that everyone knows what the American Dream stands for. The American Dream is seen as an idea that is a crucial part of the national ethos and therefore national identity of the United States. American national identity is still known to the public as a set of collective values which consist of the notion of equal
opportunity and more infamously the pursuit of happiness. The values that are related to the American Dream reflect the sprit and experience of the American nation. The Dream’s popularity and its vitality –still present to this very day— spurs from the promise of the Dream that everyone is able to pursue their own dream and live their lives in freedom and on their own terms. The mythic power of Dream is related to the original set of values which can be traced back to an infamous section of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. (US 1776)
This infamous part of the Declaration of Independence shows a belief that success should be attainable through hard work, perseverance and that this success was meant to be available through equal opportunities for anyone.
A major part of this chapter will devote itself to an extensive and detailed rereading of the American Dream as coined and defined by James Truslow Adams. It is helpful to reread Adams in relation to the American Dream as I will use the concept of the American Dream in relation to the The Great Gatsby and Manhattan Transfer. As Adams coins the term ‘the American Dream’ in 1931, he is almost contemporary with the period he is talking about
as Adams explains the Dream in the context of before and after the First World War and in relation to the Great Depression and the rise of business culture during the 1920s.
The American spirit and the belief in the American Dream have always been present since the nation’s founding, but the term of the American Dream was not earlier recorded than in 1931 by historian James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America. Adams wrote The Epic of America from the point of view in how America and the ordinary American have become what they are “today [till 1931] in outlook, character, and opinion” (vii). Adams defines the concept of the dream in his preface:
[The Epic of America] has endeavored in particular to trace the beginnings at their several points of entry of such American concepts as “bigger and better,” of our attitude towards business, of many characteristics which are generally considered as being “typically American,” and, in especial, of that American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank which is the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world. That dream or hope has been present from the start. Ever since we became an
independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of the ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces which appeared to be overwhelming and
dispelling it. (vii-viii)
As The Epic of America was written during the end of the 1920s and early 1930s, the book was published during the Great Depression. Adams’ conceptions of America, the dream and its vision must be taken in the context of the struggles that the United States were having in the turbulent 1920s. It is clear that Adams was fully aware of the thorough economic and
moral trials that the nation was going through. In that sense, the dream is seen to uphold old values and ideals which needs to be hold on to as wished by James Truslow Adams.
Adams traces the establishment of America as a nation back to the 18th century
where he focuses in chapter two of The Epic of America on the development of America as a nation in relation to Europe and the origin of the dream among ordinary Americans:
If a distinction had developed between rich and poor, nevertheless even the poor were better off, freer and more independent than they had been in Europe. Above all, they had glimpsed the American dream. English, Irish, Scotch, Germans, all who had come to our shores, had come to find security and self-expression. They had come with a new dynamic hope of rising and growing, of hewing out for themselves a life in which they would not only succeed as men but be recognized as men, a life not only of economic prosperity but of social and self-esteem. . . . It was arising from the depths of the common mass of men, and beginning to spread like a contagion among the depressed in the Old World. It was already beginning to meet with opposition from the “upper classes” in the New, but it was steadily and irresistibly taking possession of the hearts and minds of the ordinary American. (68-69)
Adams connects the development of America as a nation and the dream as he analyzes the importance of the Declaration of Independence (1776) as an “instrument” that needed to be “[submitted] . . . directly to the people for ratification, and in every State conventions were elected to consider it” (109). Adams argues that Americans should be proud of “the accomplishment” of the ratification of those values that the Declaration of Independence holds:
We Americans may well take a legitimate pride in the extraordinary accomplishment of those dozen years, for no other nation has ever given . . . such an impetus to political thought through practical statesmanship. . . . America had proclaimed them as gospel for all mankind and as a working political program for a nation. In the Declaration of Independence, made good by war, the gospel of equality, of natural rights, and of government by consent of the governed, had attained an influence and an authenticity that no mere philosopher could secure for it. (110)
I will now move to consider the relation between America and the dream in early 20th
century. According to Adams, the election of 1912 made Woodrow Wilson president and it was classified as “the end of an era” as it illustrated the end of the nation’s history of “that long process of expansion and State making” (361). Adams states that Wilson recalled its citizens to consider the vision of what America should be in his 1912 inaugural speech:
We have . . . been refreshed by a new insight into our own life. We see that in many things that life is very great. It is incomparably great in its material aspects. . . . But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been corroded. . . . We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped
thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of
energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. (qtd. in Adams 362)
It is clear that in Wilson’s inaugural address that we see how the concepts of materialism and industrial accomplishment have become important aspects in the foundation of the nation’s identity. Adams perceives Wilson’s speech with enthusiasm as he states:
Here once more was the authentic voice of the great American democracy; here once more was the prophet speaking of the American dream, of that hope of a better and richer life for all the masses of humble and ordinary folk who made the American nation. (Adams 363)
Adams concludes in The Epic of America that the country “got tired of idealism” and that the nation was urged to “place our destinies in the hand of the safe realists, hard-headed business men” (400). As Mr. Ford proclaimed in a book of 1930 that “we now know that anything which is economically right is also morally right” and that “there can be no conflict between good economics and good morals” (qtd. in Adams 400). Adams strongly reacts in his 1931 vision as he states that “[after] having surrendered idealism for the sake of prosperity, the “practical men” [business men] bankrupted us on both of them” (400). He further demonstrates that “the people perish . . . without a vision” and that “the waste of war is always spiritual as well as material” (400). Adams sadly concludes that “by the 1930s our post-war decade and our past-war prosperity were over”, in addition he hopes that “our post-war materialism [will] also pass” (400).
In his epilogue, Adams continues about the concept of the American dream as he further denotes the uniqueness and the sense of the dream:
. . . It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. (Adams 404)
Adams does not believe in the business men to lead the nation in the right direction. In fact, he alerts and warns to the danger of what was known in the 1920s as the “popular theory of the high-wage scale”:
The danger lies in the fact that the theory is advanced not for the purpose of creating a better type of man by increasing his leisure and the opportunity for making wise use of it, but for the sole and avowed purpose of increasing his powers as a “consumer.” [One] . . . [must] spend his wages in consuming goods. (Adams 408)
Adams illustrates an early critique of the new economic order in which consumerism and the production of mass goods have become the norm. Adams shares his concern about wealth as he thinks that “there is no reason why wealth, which is a social product, should not be more equitably controlled and distributed in the interests of society” (410).
In the early years of the 1930s, Adams’ The Epic of America had led to a nationwide discussion about the promise of America as the country who cherishes the true worth of the worker and did not limit their efforts nor their freedom to pursue their desires and dreams. The conceptual phrase of the American dream coined by Adams, however, described the failure of the dream and not its promise. The dream is seen as a broken promise as the dream was frequently stumbling beneath the rampant monopoly of capitalism in the 1920s.
Frederik Lewis Allen sees 1920s America as a booming business and dubbed the decade as the “Coolidge Prosperity” (159). The automobile has become the symbol of money, prosperity and wealth as there were 6,771,000 passenger cars in 1919 as opposed to 23,121,000 of them in 1929 (Allen 163). Allen raises the question of why the United had become so prosperous in the early 20th century:
The war [WWI] had impoverished Europe and hardly damaged the United States at all; when peace came the Americans found themselves the economic masters of the world. Their young country, with enormous resources in materials and in human energy and with a wide domestic market . . . It had developed mass production to a new point of mechanical and managerial efficiency. (Allen 167)
1920s America also saw the rise of science and its prestige was enormous as it was enough to preface a statement with “science teaches us” or by saying it was scientific was sufficient to silence an argument (Allen 199). Allen describes the 1920s as a time where people believed that “science could accomplish almost anything” (197). Allen demonstrates that the people were bombarded with scientific information as the latest Einstein discovery was published on the front page of the newspaper while nobody could understand it (197).
In the 1920s, the American state saw the need to instate prohibition. Allen states that if one were to inform the average American citizen in 1919 that “prohibition . . . [would be] the most violently explosive public issue of the 1920s” then this person would have thought you were crazy (245). As the Eighteenth Amendment had been ratified and went into effect on January 16 1920, people believed that the prohibition issue was settled (Allen 245). The sale and production of alcohol were banned under the new law. The law proved to be a failure as prohibition “. . . caused the crime wave, the increase of immorality and of the divorce rate, and a disrespect for all law which imperiled the very foundations of free government” (Allen 255). The law led to an underground movement which was designed to satisfy the massive demand for alcohol among all classes in America. This illegal business led to the emergence and the rise of bootlegging gangsters who drove the prices of alcohol up.
The modern idea of the American dream finds its roots in the 1920s as there was a tension between the individual and the American identity which was mashed into one singular American dream. The goals of early 20th century American politics was to tame the
beast of capitalism that had created the mess of the urban environment and poor people. The 1910s saw a movement in Washington which tried to challenge political corruption and took steps to create a substantial system to manage the struggles of the urban environment. The 1910s led to the birth of the 1920s, as capitalism was in full swing again and the decade has become known for its overindulgence of commodities as being a good consumer had become reflective of the American spirit. The American dream has been experienced by all in the 1920s as prosperity helped to close the gap between individual and national identity. The accessibility to a luxurious lifestyle for everyone created a mutual identity that represented the true spirit of the American dream.
Yet the American Dream has been generally assessed as a failure. It is John F. Callahan who argues in The Illusions of a Nation that personality, women, and America itself “become spoil to be plundered” (12). Callahan sees that the dream has turned into a commodity and in order to fulfill the dream personality has become mechanism (13). He argues that even “love [has become] a commodity” as “[the] dream’s version [orders it to become] something material” and Callahan remarks cynically that fortunately “in America everything of value can be bought” (21).
The American Dream then represents the values of money and wealth in 1920s America which are clearly reflected in early 20th century American literature including
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925) and Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922). The culture in The Great Gatsby was defined by consumerism and the
depiction of excessive wealth. Callahan uses the phrase of money as “the root of all evil” to transform it into “the root of all culture” when you read The Great Gatsby in the context of money and the pursuit of wealth. It was Karl Marx who wrote in The Power of Money (1844) that he perceived money as a God-like figure in the universe of the common man:
By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as an omnipotent being. (1)
Marx believes that money gives man power and superiority over another human. Through “universality” money becomes like a God, as the most central thing of our world. Marx explains the deterrent power of money as it reflects the idea that money can do or
appropriate anything in life. Money is also seen as a power that is regarded as endless. Marx classifies the coin as “ really separates” us and money is seen as “the real binding agent”, money therefore has a double role as that it binds everything together and that it is able to separate us as “the universal agent of separation” (3). While money has the capacity to extend man’s agency and is seen as “the [true] creative power”, as man can choose to do good in life with and through money (4). Marx says money is the ultimate factor that intercedes with human relations whether good or bad. It was Callahan who thought that Fitzgerald was good in reflecting and depicting “the life cycle of American culture and the symptoms of its disease” (61). Callahan suggests that we read the novels of Fitzgerald as “a paradigm of the struggle between property and the pursuit of happiness in American history and consciousness” (214). Furthermore, Callahan examines the values of the pursuit of happiness historically:
The values belonging to [the] pursuit of happiness were so oriented around wealth and property, money and capital, that men found even their desires for love and beauty expressed in a mode of possession (214)
It is on the basis of this quote by Callahan that I want to focus my case study chapters as it reflects the mode of possession that characterized 1920s America. Callahan also sees that “in reality the pursuit of happiness and property referred to the same vision” as it happens that “in America power has been the establishment of wealth, and success the measure of one’s contributions to an imperial system” (214).
In relation to Callahan, the remaining chapters will focus on the changed ideals and attenuated values of 1920s New York, from the pursuit of happiness to the power of wealth, the power of money and the importance of class status. The movements of the rise of materialism, advertising and consumerism will be considered as they led to the characters’ idea of self-conception and self-determinism through the rise of leisure culture and
consumption which as a result led to the gradual dehumanization and objectification of human beings treated as things, as commodities.
Thus this chapter ends with the argument that a critical reflection of the American Dream can be noted in 1920s American literature as a form of social criticism and that it is depicted through the rise of materialism, consumerism and leisure class culture which have led to the negative side effects of the American Dream.
Chapter Two
The Decline of American Dreams in The Great Gatsby
This chapter aims to identify the ways in which the pursuit and Fitzgerald’s commentary of the American Dream is manifested in the novel by examining the case studies of Jay Gatsby’s illusionary quest, Tom Buchanan’s hopes of protecting his class and civilization, the power of money and wealth in relation to the conflict between illusion and reality of pursuing the Dream and the objectification of female characters such as Daisy Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson. Marius Bewley’s take is that The Great Gatsby offers an exploration of the American Dream through the clash between the “boundary that divides the reality from the illusions” (224). Furthermore the conflict between Tom and Gatsby can be defined through a
distinction between old and new money but Bewley suggests that Tom and Gatsby can be seen as antagonistic poles. The chapter also seeks to illustrate the characters’ concept of self-determination in creating and exposing their identity by means of pursuing money, wealth and materialism through the rise of consumerism illustrated by Kirk Curnutt. The Great Gatsby will also be analyzed through Ronald Berman’s research into how the novel is seen in context of the contemporary world of the 1920s as it will be explored how the new
expansive economy, the depiction of the cityscape and how the perception of objects
influenced the perception of relationships. Cultural aspects of 1920s America are reflected in The Great Gatsby which illustrates the failure of the American Dream. This chapter further exemplifies how Fitzgerald illustrated his vision of America and commentary of the American Dream as a form of social criticism in The Great Gatsby by examining the characters of Gatsby, Tom, Nick, Daisy and Myrtle in which ways they reflect the Dream. The Great Gatsby is a classic tale of its time as it illustrates the shift of the Dream from a pursuit of happiness
to a pursuit of wealth which reflected a transformation and clash in American values. There remains a tension between the pursuit of happiness and property as values in 1920s
America. This obsessive pursuit of materialism is further illustrated through the means of consumerism and the rise of leisure culture. These movements have contributed to the objectification of humans being treated as if they were mere objects and through the mode of possession seen as commodities. This chapter tries to illustrate the underlying message and mechanisms of the American Dream offered by Fitzgerald by examining the depiction of the changes in American life and its values.
The research on the American Dream in relation to The Great Gatsby have been vast and endless, it was Marius Bewley, however, who distinguished The Great Gatsby as a text that “offers some of the severest and closest criticism of the American dream” as the novel deals thematically with “the withering of the American dream” (223). Bewley states that: “The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American dream as it exists in a corrupt period, and it is an attempt to determine that concealed boundary that divides the reality from the illusions. The illusions seem more real than reality itself”. (225) Bewley sees The Great Gatsby as a novel in which illusion and reality clash and he describes the American dream as “stretched between a golden past and a golden future, [which] is always betrayed by a desolate present” (239). Bewley argues that Gatsby is “imprisoned in his present, [as] Gatsby belongs even more to the past than to the future . . . his aspirations have been rehearsed, and his tragedy suffered, by all the generations of Americans who have gone before.” (239).
It is the greatest achievement of The Great Gatsby, according to Bewley that it manages “[to evoke] a sense of the goodness of that early dream” and “to offer the most damaging criticism of it in American literature” (245). Bewley argues that the criticism has
become part of the tribute as “Gatsby [has become] the “mythic” embodiment of the American dream [and] is shown to us in all his immature romanticism” (245).
The American dream must be seen in light of Fitzgerald’s created contemporary world. According to Ronald Berman in The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, Fitzgerald introduces “. . . a remarkable amount of things manufactured, marketed, advertised, and consumed. They are signs of a new, expansive economy. But they are in many cases also metonymical, reminding us of a new mental landscape” (1). Berman notes that “the perception and description of cityscape is part of the literary work of the twenties.” (2).
In America in Fitzgerald, Berman states that The Great Gatsby represents a foregone dream (43). American history, is according to Berman, an ambiguous subject in Fitzgerald as “the history of the East is both the end of The Great Gatsby and of the Puritan interpretation of the settlement of the New World.” (43).
As the values of the 1920s attenuated, the American dream is seen in decline as the pursuit of happiness changed to a pursuit of wealth. It is Kirk Curnutt who explores 1920s contemporary culture by noting “the emergence of a leisure culture that challenged the Protestant work ethic by insisting that entertainment, not productive labor, was life’s main aim” (36). Furthermore, Curnutt states that “recreational activities promoted an ethos of pure fun rather than self-improvement, encouraging indulgence instead of rectitude” (36). Curnutt states that the rise of leisure culture saw another controversial pastime in the form of drinking as the Eighteenth Amendment did not refrain people from abusing alcohol (37).
The 1920s also saw the need of people to express their identities more. According to Curnutt, the public “cultivated a sense of personal style that enabled them to package their
personality” and consumerism promised a sense of self-making (34). Commodities such as clothes, money, house and the automobile altered the public’s self-conception (35).
The characters in The Great Gatsby all represent the change in values of the American dream and they can be seen as hollow, empty and shallow figures. Instead of becoming a good person and building a life, all they can think of are the ways to pursue money and become wealthy. As the obsessive pursuit for money and wealth form the basis of the corrupted Dream, it characterizes itself through materialism and consumerism. According to Curnutt, one of the values that Fitzgerald’s characters lose and must accept is that of self-perfection, which is more known “as self-determinism in America for its insistence that identity is plastic and that success is limited only back lack of initiative” (57). Fitzgerald’s main concern, according to Curnutt, is “his concern with the self: what allows some people to triumph, what causes others to fail” as “individuals interested [Fitzgerald] much more than communities [as] he was a character-oriented author” (69).
These individuals of The Great Gatsby will be discussed in their relation to the American dream and their relationships to one another in the contemporary world of 1920s America. The contemporary world of The Great Gatsby takes place in New York and Long Island. Nick describes where he lives and where most of the plot takes place:
It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York – and where there are . . . two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, . . . I lived at West Egg, the – well, the less fashionable of the two . . . (Fitzgerald 10-11)
Although Nick lives in a small house in West Egg, it houses the newly rich people as opposed to the old money people who live in East Egg. Nick further explains this distinction by
depicting his neighbor’s house and the Buchanan’s house in East Egg:
The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard – it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. . . . Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. (Fitzgerald 11)
The reader learns how Nick knows the Buchanans in different ways. As Nick referred earlier to New York, the city proves itself as a microcosm of the nation and American society. Nick speaks of New York in a positive way:
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue . . . At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others . . . (Fitzgerald 57)
As Nick embraces city life, he speaks of the fast-paced rhythm of the city and the anonymity that it offers. Yet he notices the loneliness that the city might bring. Broadway is another part of New York city life that is described in the novel as the “theatre district”: “again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district” (Fitzgerald 57).
The characters in The Great Gatsby are mostly known for their pursuit of the American dream. Gatsby’s illusionary pursuit of the American dream is the most infamous example of this pursuit in the novel. Alfred Kazin argues that “his [Gatsby’s] own dream of wealth meant nothing in itself; he merely wanted to buy back the happiness that he had lost . . . when he had gone to war” (322). While Daisy lives in East Egg, Gatsby moves from rural North Dakota to West Egg. As Gatsby had lost Daisy before, he takes on the pursuit to become wealthy and convince her to come back to him. Gatsby is aware of the fact that having a full bank account is more likely to pull Daisy over than staying poor in life.
In the case of Gatsby’s illusionary quest, Kirk Curnutt argues that “Fitzgerald [insisted] that desire inevitably invites disappointment, for the gap between possibility and actuality is rarely bridged in his world” (53). Gatsby’s commitment to pursue his dream is a reflection of the American spirit. Jay Gatsby proves to be a dreamer as he believes that he is able to fix the past, turn back the clock and win Daisy back by becoming rich in a dialogue with Nick:
‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ . . . ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ . . . ‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,’ he said, nodding determinedly. ‘She’ll see.’ He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. (Fitzgerald 106)
It seems then that Daisy has become a true obsession for Gatsby and it forces him to be out of touch with reality. Gatsby’s desire to obtain Daisy is caused by the perfect image that he has for her in his mind. Daisy has been an illusion though to attain since the very beginning of his quest which had been “almost five years” now (Fitzgerald 92). Nick realizes that Gatsby’s perception of Daisy has only slightly altered since he has her back in his life again:
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. . . . No amount of fire of freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart. (Fitzgerald 92-93)
At this point, Gatsby still sees Daisy as what he has made of her in his mind. Later Gatsby will wake up from his illusionary dream and see Daisy more for who she is and what she actually does for him which is exactly nothing.
Gatsby’s self-conception and creation is an important thematic part of the novel as Nick and his environment wonder who this mysterious man is as he earns his reputation by giving large and festive parties. Chapter six shows that Jay Gatsby’s way into wealth is questioned and his true identity is exposed in the chapter as well. Gatsby’s reputation is depicted by Nick:
Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities upon his past . . . Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to say. James Gatz – that was really , or at least legally, his name. . . . His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them . . . The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. . . . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. (Fitzgerald 95)
Gatsby later tells Nick that he inherited his money from Cody: “a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars” (Fitzgerald 97). Nick tells the reader about when Gatsby told him the truth about his real self and the way he had become the notorious ‘Jay Gatsby’:
He told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his antecedents, which weren’t even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a time of confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and nothing about him. (Fitzgerald 97)
Jay Gatsby became wealthy through unlawful activities and earned his money through bootlegging. Gatsby is able to pursue a mansion in West Egg as his wealth is obtained through prohibition. It is in chapter six though that Tom Buchanan tries to expose Jay Gatsby as a bootlegger. After a Gatsby party that Nick, Tom and Daisy have attended, Tom asks Nick:
‘Who is this Gatsby anyhow?’ . . . ‘Some big bootlegger?’ ‘Where’d you hear that?’ . . . ‘I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.’ ‘Not Gatsby,’ [Nick] said shortly . . . ‘I’d like to know who he is and what he does,’ insisted Tom. ‘And I think I’ll make a point of finding out.’ (Fitzgerald 104)
It is in chapter seven where Tom presents the result of his “small investigation” to Jordan and Nick as the three of them are in the same car on their way to New York while Daisy and Gatsby drive in a different car: “I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow, [Tom] continued. . . . I said I’d been making a small investigation of his past. And you found he was an Oxford man, said Jordan helpfully”(Fitzgerald 116). In chapter seven, Tom addresses Gatsby directly:
‘By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.’ ‘Not exactly.’ ‘Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.’ ‘Yes – I went there.’ A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting: ‘You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven.’ . . . ‘I told you I went there,’ said Gatsby. ‘I heard you, but I’d like to know
when.’ ‘It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.’ Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. (Fitzgerald 123)
Tom’s disbelief at Gatsby’s answers leads to an altercation between Tom and Daisy where she is accusing Tom of “causing a row” and having a lack of “self-control” (Fitzgerald 123). Tom replies and brands Gatsby as “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (Fitzgerald 123). Tom makes himself even more despised by saying that: “’I know I’m not very popular. I don’t give big parties. I suppose you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends – in the modern world” (Fitzgerald 124).
Eventually the truth is revealed about Gatsby’s illegal activities as Tom confronts Gatsby directly about his affairs with Meyer Wolfshiem:
‘I found out what your “drug-stores” were. He turned to us and spoke rapidly. ‘He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a
bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong. (Fitzgerald 127)
Gatsby replies calmly to Tom by saying: “What about it?” (Fitzgerald 127). This way he does not deny Tom’s story. In fact, Gatsby proves he is willing to do anything, including breaking the law to become rich in order to achieve his dream.
Tom and Daisy Buchanan have their own dreams. According to Alberto Lena, Tom Buchanan represents “the type of millionaire that is anchored in a solid tradition of socially acceptable (because inherited) wealth, and of the power derived from it” (20). Lena argues
that Tom and Daisy Buchanan “embody the decadence of the upper classes” (20). Nick describes Tom Buchanan, his family, and his marriage to Daisy as follows:
. . . His family were enormously wealthy . . . but now that he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion . . . [as] he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that. (Fitzgerald 11)
Slightly later, Nick describes their house as a “cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay” (Fitzgerald 12). In chapter four, Jordan tells Nick how she knows Daisy and gives insight into the couple’s history. Jordan depicts their wedding as a materialistic affair:
In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. (Fitzgerald 74)
As Jordan describes Daisy as a girl “[who was] so mad about her husband” at the time when they got married, Jordan notices that there is something in Daisy’s voice when she heard Gatsby’s name for the first time in years (Fitzgerald 75). Through Jordan Nick knows that Gatsby bought the house just to be near Daisy (Fitzgerald 76).
It is Marius Bewley who sees “Tom Buchanan and Gatsby [as representing]
antagonistic but historically related aspects of America” (242). Bewley views Tom as “virtually Gatsby’s murderer in the end, [and] the crime that he commits by proxy is only a symbol of
his deeper spiritual crime against Gatsby’s inner vision.” (243). He analyzes “Gatsby’s guilt” as a “radical failure”, “a failure of the critical faculty that seems to be an inherent part of the American dream – to understand that Daisy is as fully immersed in the destructive element of the American world as Tom himself.” (243).
Tom Buchanan can be best understood argues Lena through the conception of hereditary wealth as “his social heritage places him in the position of a member of the leisure class, that is, mainly as a consumer rather than a creator of wealth for society” (35). It is Tom’s “inefficiency [that] explains his conservative position, for he is afraid of both the power of the newly rich, such as Gatsby, and of the political transformations which may emerge from the proliferation of new races in society” (35). Lena argues that The Great Gatsby represents “a criticism of individual attitudes towards wealth rather than of the system itself” (38). Fitzgerald upholds, according to Lena, “the power of money and the idea of amorality and imperialism as the bases of civilization and progress” (37).
Milton R. Stern has stated that the “American dream and American wealth are
inseparably related” (163). According to Stern, Fitzgerald was “acutely aware that the idea of the self had been relocated, from the 1880’s on, in the shining wealth of the growing,
magnetic cities in the East” which was Chicago for Dreiser and it was New York for Fitzgerald (167). Fitzgerald knew, states Stern, that “the stuff of American wealth was the city sign of the American promise” (167).
In relation to Curnutt’s idea of self-conception through the motif of money, Stern introduces “the idea of money as identity to all the alluring promise of identity” (233). This is illustrated in the novel when Nick comments about Daisy’s “indiscreet voice” and hesitates by saying “it’s full of –” but does not dare to finish his sentence, Gatsby replies to him by
saying that “[Daisy’s] voice is full of money” (Fitzgerald 115). Scott Donaldson describes Daisy’s voice as “[a] now totally commodified voice” and that for Karl Marx, as I discussed in chapter one, money was “the most magical commodity of all” (192).
I discussed in chapter one that it was John F. Callahan who argued that in America “everything can be bought through money” and that even love is turned into a commodity as the Dream expects it to be something material (21). Callahan states that men even saw their love for women through a mode of possession (214). Women are then objectified and dehumanized as the men need to have them and consume them like commodities. Scott Donaldson says that Myrtle is for Tom “a possession to be played with, fondled, and in due course ignored” (189). Donaldson states that “Tom was not unusual . . . in regarding women as objects to be possessed – either temporarily, as in the case of Myrtle, or permanently, if like Daisy they warrant such maintenance through their beauty and background” (189).
The female characters in The Great Gatsby are also linked to the American dream in their desire for materialism. Susan Resneck Parr argues that Myrtle believes just like Daisy “that success is measured in material possessions and a certain social role, . . . that role will be found in a relationship with a man who will be a provider, a caretaker, and, . . . ‘a
gentleman’” (69). Women and their self-conception of their identity is linked to commodities in terms of fashion. Women are depicted in The Great Gatsby as they cry about clothes. Ronald Berman notes that Myrtle cries over her husband’s suit and that Daisy cries about Gatsby’s shirts (65). It is of no surprise that Daisy is quite the materialist herself and that she is in awe of Gatsby’s luxury:
‘I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall. He took out a pile of shirts . . . Daisy
bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ . . . ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’ (Fitzgerald 89).
Daisy’s relationship to Gatsby is not only defined by her tears but she is impressed by the parties that Gatsby gives as she and Tom are impressed by the crowd and Daisy exclaims that “[she has] never met so many celebrities” (Fitzgerald 101). However, according to Nick, she was not “having a good time” (Fitzgerald 102). Nick explains why:
But the rest offended [Daisy] – and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village – appalled by its raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. (Fitzgerald 103)
Regarding Tom and Daisy’s marriage, Daisy knows about Tom having a mistress, Tom believes that she does not mind these circumstances by saying: “Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time” (Fitzgerald 125). Tom is careful to choose women that are not of his and Daisy’s class (Resneck Parr 70). It seems that Daisy accepts Tom’s ways of infidelity and has always decided to stay with him. This way marriage loses its religious and spiritual values. Daisy’s American Dream is all that Tom has provided for: his wealth, their lifestyle and daughter.
Myrtle Wilson is a character that longs for upward mobility as she wants to move from labor to capital. She pursues her American dream by becoming Tom’s mistress. As she thinks they are going to get married, he does not think highly of her as Tom only talks to
Myrtle when they are in New York. George Wilson knows that his wife is seeing someone else, but not that it is Tom. George has plans in going West with Myrtle, starting a better life. In chapter seven, as Tom visits George’s garage he learns about George’s need for money and the desire of them to go West:
. . . ‘But I need money pretty bad, and I was wondering what you were going to do with your old car.’ ‘How do you like this one?’ inquired Tom. ‘I bought it last week.’ . . . ‘Like to buy it?’ . . . No, but I could make some money on the other.’ ‘ What do you want money for, all of a sudden? ‘I’ve been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to go West.’ ‘Your wife does,’ exclaimed Tom, startled. ‘She’s been talking about it for ten years.’ . . . ‘And now she’s going whether she wants to or not. I’m going to get her away.’ (Fitzgerald 117-118)
The Great Gatsby’s plot then moves forward quickly as it happens that Daisy is driving the car and runs over Myrtle Wilson. Tom assumes it was Gatsby who drove the car and told George Wilson that Gatsby killed his wife. George Wilson murders Gatsby in front of his house and commits suicide. After a few months Nick sees Tom:
One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. . . . Suddenly he saw me and walked back, holding out his hand. ‘What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?’ ‘Yes. You know what I think of you.’ ‘You’re crazy, Nick,’ . . . ‘Tom,’ I inquired, ‘what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?’ He stared at me without a word, and I knew I had guessed right about those missing hours. . . . ‘I told him the truth,’ he said. . . . He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn’t told him who owned the car. . . . That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did
in Daisy’s, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.’ (Fitzgerald 169)
Nick condemns the Buchanans as “careless people”:
I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. (Fitzgerald 170)
Gatsby’s death revealed more details about the creation of Jay Gatsby as Nick meets Mr. Gatz in the hall. He gives Nick insight to the self-determination of his son as he pulls “a ragged old copy of a book called Hopalong Cassisdy [from his pocket]” (Fitzgerald 164). As Mr. Gatz opened it up for Nick to look at the back cover, it shows a page with a schedule of
September 12, 1906 that Gatsby followed to improve himself. According to his father, Jimmy was “bound to get ahead” (Fitzgerald 164).
After Mr. Gatz and Nick’s conversation, Gatsby’s funeral is about to start. Although Nick asks the Lutheran minister to wait for half an hour, it was of no use as no one attended Gatsby’s funeral except for Nick, Mr. Gatz, the man with the owl-eyed glasses and a few servants and the postman from West Egg (Fitzgerald 165). Without resentment, Nick thought of Daisy, who had not sent a message or a flower (Fitzgerald 165). The owl-eyed man
remarks to Nick that he could not enter Gatsby’s house and remembers that people “used to go there by the hundreds” and calls Gatsby a “poor-son-of-a-bitch” (Fitzgerald 166).
At the end of the novel Nick speaks about the green light which symbolizes Gatsby’s American dream:
. . . I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him . . . Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further . . . (Fitzgerald 171-172)
The green light is the symbol for Jay Gatsby’s inspiration and aspiration for his unattainable dream. It symbolizes wealth and money. Gatsby tried to create himself from nothing but he is unable to transform himself completely. His wealth is gained through prohibition and illegal means which enables him to buy his material possessions. Gatsby loses sight of reality as he wants to achieve the American dream so much that it has led him to his death. As it was Daisy who drove the car and she stayed in the dark, which led to Gatsby’s fate.
As the novel comes to an end, Nick realizes that it has been the story of the West for him and the other characters: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – [we] were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly inadaptable to Eastern life” (Fitzgerald 167). Nick continues about his experiences in the East and the decision to go back home:
. . . West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco . . . In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the
men turn in at a house – the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares. After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home. (Fitzgerald 167)
New York can then be seen as the symbol for Eastern life and its moral emptiness. Nick has mixed feelings about the city as Gatsby’s death shows him that he does not want to live in New York anymore. At the end Nick has decided to sell his car to a grocer and moves by train back to the Midwest (Fitzgerald 171). It is by selling his car, the most expensive item he bought in New York , that Nick rejects the city of New York and its grotesque lifestyle.
The characters do not achieve their dreams as it proves to be illusionary to most of them. Gatsby and the Wilsons’ pursuit of the dream lead to their deaths. The 1920s saw the emergence of leisure culture and the rise of consumerism, this is depicted in all the
characters’ desire for materialism and consumption. Women are objectified and therefore dehumanized as they are treated as things, as commodities needed to be consumed. The women just like the men express their interest in materialism and their need to experience consumer items is widely illustrated in their reactions to clothes. The setting of The Great Gatsby illustrates New York as the city of the East where people go to in fulfilling their American dreams in wanting to become rich and wealthy. The East reflects a fast-paced modern life that was new at the time and it set the tone in 1920s America. The next chapter also trails the pursuit of the American dream in the city of New York as Manhattan Transfer shows the dehumanizing effects of the city on the characters in metropolitan society as their quests in life are doomed to fail.
Chapter Three
The City as an American Nightmare in Manhattan Transfer
This chapter will explore how John Dos Passos envisages American life in the Metropolis in the 1920s. Manhattan Transfer is an early work of Dos Passos’ career in which he quite pessimistically chronicles the lives of many characters in the city of New York. The chapter aims to illustrate the city as a nightmare version of the American Dream. The pursuit of happiness seems impossible to achieve in Dos Passos’ created microcosm. Critics such as John W. Aldridge have argued that the characters are portrayed as “lifeless puppets” who are unable to change their lives for the better. Dos Passos’ microcosm reflects American society and the nation as it illustrates New York in its full colors and how the characters experience the life of the city and the rise of urbanization. As Dos Passos uses a fragmentary narrative technique, the reader has to keep up with the text in order to trail the characters’ dreams in terms of their failure or success and individual growth. The chapter will illustrate the
disillusionment of the great American city as it promises the hope of a new and better life. The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of wealth are interchanged in Manhattan Transfer, the chapter will depict the characters of Jimmy, Elaine, Congo, Dutch and Francie in order to explain their quests in life. The chapter will discuss the gradual dehumanization of society in the way how the pursuit of the American dream affects the characters in the form of broken marriages, suicides, and the objectification of characters including Elaine and George. The chapter tries to capture how Dos Passos envisages America as there are quite some references to the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence which in their turn reflect the construction of America in Manhattan Transfer.
According to John W. Aldridge, it was John Dos Passos’ “means of ordering and making presentable in art the great social issues of his time, . . ., [that he was] more
sensitively aware than any other writer of his generation” (81). Manhattan Transfer has been known since its publication for its style and narration of the novel which Mason Wade contributes to Dos Passos for being “a natural reporter” and enormously “aware of the great forces of social change at work” in American society (350). Wade characterizes Manhattan Transfer as a “kaleidoscopic panorama of twenty-five years of New York city life on all levels of society” (355). According to Wade, the central theme of the novel is “the corrupting effect of the city upon the individuals” of the city of New York and explaining further
by implication it is a sermon on the Biblical text that money is the root of all evil, for the universal corruption of personality evident in the book is laid at the door of money and money-getting, the evil spirit that dominates the commercial center the world has ever known. (Wade 355)
As Manhattan Transfer is written in fragments, the reader needs to connect the dots given by Dos Passos as the novel shifts between first and third person narration. While the city is portrayed as the metropolis, the city is the chief protagonist of Manhattan Transfer and New York is described as the city of excess as it is the financial center of America and the world.
It is Cecelia Tichi who says that Dos Passos needed to “create a narrative form reflective of fast-paced metropolitan rhythms” (198). According to Tichi, the title of Manhattan Transfer suggests the rapid-transfer life of New York as the novel is filled with rapid transit forms including the L train, the subway, the railroad, the elevator and the automobile (Tichi 198). Through the technology of rapid transit the narration moves from one character to another. According to Tichi, in Dos Passos’ fiction, this “reformulation of
