Great stories often embed many different perspectives of reality, and contain stories within stories. The Great Gatsby embeds layer upon layer of alternative tales and alternative methodologies of interpreting the work. In a truly modern sense, the author creates a series of alternatives, inception-like[1], that can be peeled away to provide different concepts of how to interpret the story. In one, the characters can merely be pointlessly going through life. Some, the idle rich, simply flow through what occurs. Alternatively, there is a deeper interpretation, where even the characters become avatars for ideas.
Daisy can be seen to represent money. She is fickle. She flutters and comes and goes. She makes promises to some and forgets them with others. With Tom, we see money holding on to all power and wealth. Yet, when it comes to Gatsby, Daisy is the dream he chases. He can have money, but only by giving all he has. For those with new money, it is like:
Modern literature… a gay Coquette, fluttering, fickle, vain … is impatient for applause; pants for the breath of popularity; renounces eternal fame for a newspaper puff…glitters, flutters, buzzes, spawns, dies…[2]
Unfortunately for Gatsby, Tom and Daisy leave without even passing his funeral, and he “is forgotten!”[3] Daisy “was the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known”[4]. Gatsby “didn’t realise just how extraordinary a ‘nice’ girl could be”[5]. Yet, this is how it always is. Money remains “gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor”.[6] But, this is always how modern society works, “the rich get richer and the poor get - children”.[7]
The American dream glitters, and from time to time, “old money and new money engage in righteous revelry together”.[8] Unfortunately, the unrestrained greed and desire for money and fortune buried the nobler aspirations of each character. Despite Gatsby’s dream of loving and living with Daisy, it is not enough that he has finally gained wealth. He needs something more to bridge the social status. While Daisy comes and goes flirtatiously, “he had no real right to touch her hand”.[9]
When he was penniless, Gatsby “took what he could get”. When he sought a means to make money, he did it at any cost, which led to him working “ravenously and unscrupulously”.[10] And as he took Daisy, he took his place in the world. He didn’t ask. And they did not allow him, but, like books that had been opened, his life opened before him as “gold like new money from the mint, promised to unfold the shining secrets that only minus and Morgan and Maecenas knew”.[11]
Wealth can be hard to hold. It can vanish and stay aligned to old money and old social ties. New money needs to work hard to maintain wealth which will often vanish into “her rich house, into her rich, full life”, and finally, the result is “living Gatsby - nothing”.[12] The old aristocracy has money but is heartless. Gatsby may be a criminal, but he has an honesty and integrity that the likes of Tom cannot understand. It is even loyalty that leads to Gatsby’s death.
The Buchanan’s of the worst of money and wealth. They represent the selfish greed and fickleness that allows them to keep all they have at the expense of all around them. They parade as “superior couples holding each other cautiously, fashionably, and keeping the corners”[13]. The damage and the desolation don’t matter because they can “let other people clean up the mess they had made”.[14] Money can retreat into money and remain uncaring and cold.
The Great Gatsby is also a story of limits and the struggle to gain mobility between class groups at the start of the twentieth century. There is a certain type of equivalence in Gatsby that captures the contemporary world of the time.[15] In Scott's writing, we see many recognisable things. Jay Gatsby was a 1920s racketeer. While this no longer seems modern, at the time, it created a system that captured and, as Ezra Pound noted, “establishes a continuity”.[16]
Vanity Fair
Modern advertising displayed in high-end magazines such as Vanity Fair created a promise of identity that could change and deliver something that the people reading the magazine could aspire to. These advertisements show an untroubled post-Freudian self.[17] The narratives presented by Joyce in demonstrating not that status can be achieved but that the change of identity forms a loss of continuity between the self are at odds with the promised acquired identity from Madison Avenue advertising firms.
The problem is these leave an empty shell that doesn’t match reality. In professing her love to Gatsby, we see that Daisy loves the image. “You always look so cool… You resemble the advertisement of the man… You know the advertisement of the man”[18] It is the similarity expressed in Gatsby’s ploys to the Lafayette advertisement that displays the patina of the idealised man that Daisy wants.
We also see the juxtaposition between literature and advertising. The division is derived from the intersection between proletariat and aristocrat, culture and commodity. It was the role of the aristocrats to protect high culture. High art forms the purpose and goal of the idle rich in the premodern.[19] As Skidelsky and Skidelsky note, “money is essentially a means to the good; to treat its accumulation as an ultimate goal is to fall victim to delusion”[20]. Yet, sometimes, in chasing money, Gatsby’s other goals of a life with Daisy become a “colossal vitality of his illusion”.[21] Empty as the advertising image.
There is a paradox in the characters. While Daisy tries to role-play the poor little rich girl and downplay her family ties, Myrtle entails and embodies the negative aspects of the social-climbing working girl. The poor, ambitious woman holds a job and seeks to marry a wealthy man and rise through society. Yet, it is equally this attitude that individuals despise within Daisy’s circle. Here, “life is much more successfully looked at from a single window”[22] and not lived.
Gatsby’s death demonstrates the hollowness of the wealthy is acquired. Whilst he believes that if he accumulates sufficient money and possessions, he will move beyond his lower-class status and become equal to Tom and able to win Daisy. Yet, none of this can occur, and he is never accepted. Despite the promise gifted through the American dream, Gatsby seeks an unattainable dream despite his love and warmth. Many in the story believe they can have more.
Myrtle believes the lie. “Daisy was not a Catholic”[23], but Tom telling her was enough for her to embrace hope and dream of a future with him. But hope is not a gift. In the box, Pandora opened that all the world's ills escaped, leaving humanity with hope. But hope was in a box of ill and malignant depths.[24] Like Gatsby, Myrtle created an impression that could offer a future but “precisely at that point … vanished”.[25] Not from their actions but rather through the lack of understanding and the realisation of what old money thought. Gatsby and Myrtle were both victims of hope, enthralled by money.
“poor But TerFLY”[26]
Daisy is fickle; she is the “flutter of a dress” against the “crunch of leather boots” [27]. With Gatsby, “men and girls came and went like moths”[28], and like butterflies, they are fluttering ephemeral beings drawn to the light. Daisy flutters from man-to-man. She alights, and she lives a life of beauty and pleasure. But while she flits carelessly, together, she interacts, bringing down Tom’s boot. Because of this, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness”.[29]
Cummings similarly depicts Elaine to how Fitzgerald depicts Daisy. In “poor But TerFLY”, Cummings represents a modern woman who is scarcely to be pitied[30]. Importantly, Cummings has this “butterfly become(s) a ‘motH’”[31]. As with Cummings’ Butterfly, Daisy is fickle and indecisive; she is merciless. What she feels is fleeting and forgotten as she moves from flower to flower. In this, Daisy also embraces not only money but modernity.
Money has even twisted the desire held by Gatsby for Daisy. In seeking to win her, he has done anything he can. He has become a gangster. He has become “some big bootlegger”.[32] Gatsby’s passion for Daisy becomes all-consuming. Rather than seeking love, he learns to seek to possess. He wants to have the one thing he cannot obtain. To this end, he embraces the past and a memory that may never have occurred outside his own recollection.
The drive for material goods, social class, and more attain more leaves everybody empty. Tom and Daisy Buchanan want possessions and the world that old money brings. Myrtle and George married for a position. Myrtle married George “because [she] thought he was a gentleman” but then came to understand in her mind that George “wasn’t fit to lick [her] shoe”.[33] The best that can be delivered is lukewarm. Nick “felt a sort of tender curiosity” for Jordan Baker.
The modern conception of love, especially “of reciprocated love being generally unattainable, and even undesirable,”[34] can be seen throughout the book. For example, Gatsby has a great passion and devotion to Daisy, yet this smouldering desire is a wish to be seen as something more than a person of low social status. Throughout the process of rising to where Gatsby believes he has enough to satisfy Daisy, he exhibits a dominance over as world that precludes anything in the present.
Singer asserts that “male dominance makes it virtually impossible for men to love women in the present.”[35] So instead, as with Ulysses,[36] the modern person wanders through life in the story. But, unlike Odysseus, the modern couple and modern love end by wandering aimlessly through empty scenes and into adultery. Tom cheats, but old money fixes everything. Myrtle cheats, and it spells doom. Daisy cheats, and as with Myrtle, there is a disaster; the man touches her mouth and drinks the serpent’s venom.[37]
In each case, empty wandering and adulterous lust and the desire for more destroy those from below, leaving those from the higher classes to wander aimlessly into an empty life. As Kimball notes, there is a “word known to all men as love”[38], but for those from the lower classes, this word to the modern person means “‘perhaps’ death”.[39] Despite his passion, Gatsby was embraced by a “Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, [which] fretted his heart.”[40]
References
Berman, Ronald S., and Ronald Berman, The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, An Illini Book, Illini Books ed (Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996)
Butler, Samuel (trans.), and Homer, The Iliad of Homer and The Odyssey: Britannica Great Books Encyclopedic Edtion (University of Chicago, 1952)
Cummings, E. E., Complete Poems, 1904-1962, ed. by George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1991)
Cummings, Edward Estlin, ViVa (WW Norton & Company, 1997)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, James L. W. West, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Scribner trade paperback edition (New York: Scribner, 2018)
Harrison, Jane E., ‘Pandora’s Box’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 20 (1900), 99–114 <https://doi.org/10.2307/623745>
Hazlett, William, ‘Georgia Messenger. (Ft. Hawkins, Ga.) 1823-1847, November 12, 1823, Image 4 « Georgia Historic Newspapers’, 1823 <https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82014212/1823-11-12/ed-1/seq-4/> [accessed 17 April 2022]
Holm, Lorens, ‘Reading through the Mirror: Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: The Invention of Perspective and the Post-Freudian Eye/I’, Assemblage, 18, 1992, 21–39 <https://doi.org/10.2307/3171204>
Johnson, David Kyle, Inception and Philosophy: Because It’s Never Just a Dream (John Wiley & Sons, 2011)
Joyce, James, and Danis Rose, Ulysses (London: Picador, 1997)
Kimball, Jean, ‘Love and Death in “Ulysses”: “Work Known to All Men”’, James Joyce Quarterly, 24.2 (1987), 143–60
Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
Shiner, Larry, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
Singer, Irving, The Nature of Love, Volume 3: The Modern World (MIT Press, 2009)
Skidelsky, Edward, and Robert Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life (Penguin UK, 2012)
[1] David Kyle Johnson, Inception and Philosophy: Because It’s Never Just a Dream (John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
[2] William Hazlett, ‘Georgia Messenger. (Ft. Hawkins, Ga.) 1823-1847, November 12, 1823, Image 4 « Georgia Historic Newspapers’, 1823 <https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82014212/1823-11-12/ed-1/seq-4/> [accessed 17 April 2022].
[3] Hazlett.
[4] F. Scott Fitzgerald, James L. W. West, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Scribner trade paperback edition (New York: Scribner, 2018), p. 158.
[5] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 159.
[6] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 159.
[7] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 105.
[8] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 4.
[9] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 159.
[10] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 159.
[11] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 14.
[12] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 159.
[13] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 56.
[14] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 189.
[15] Ronald S. Berman and Ronald Berman, The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, An Illini Book, Illini Books ed (Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996), p. 1.
[16] Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 179.
[17] Lorens Holm, ‘Reading through the Mirror: Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: The Invention of Perspective and the Post-Freudian Eye/I’, Assemblage, 18, 1992, 21–39 <https://doi.org/10.2307/3171204>.
[18] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 119.
[19] Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 103.
[20] Edward Skidelsky and Robert Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life (Penguin UK, 2012).
[21] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 105.
[22] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 14.
[23] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 43.
[24] Jane E. Harrison, ‘Pandora’s Box’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 20 (1900), 99–114 <https://doi.org/10.2307/623745>.
[25] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 58.
[26] Edward Estlin Cummings, ViVa (WW Norton & Company, 1997).
[27] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 15.
[28] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 49.
[29] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 189.
[30] E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1904-1962, ed. by George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1991).
[31] E. E. Cummings; E. E. Cummings, p. 322.
[32] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 117.
[33] Fitzgerald, West, and Fitzgerald, p. 44.
[34] Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, Volume 3: The Modern World (MIT Press, 2009), p. 26.
[35] Singer, p. 423.
[36] James Joyce and Danis Rose, Ulysses (London: Picador, 1997).
[37] Samuel (trans.) Butler and Homer, The Iliad of Homer and The Odyssey: Britannica Great Books Encyclopedic Edtion (University of Chicago, 1952). Book II.
[38] Jean Kimball, ‘Love and Death in “Ulysses”: “Work Known to All Men”’, James Joyce Quarterly, 24.2 (1987), 143–60.
[39] Kimball, p. 143.
[40] Joyce and Rose.
[Image source: Beacon Towers, rear (beach side) elevation, in Sands Point, New York., Spur Magazine, 1920, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons]