The Great Gatsby: A Kaleidoscopic Mirror of Society. Francis Scott Fitzgerald lives and writes in an era of profound change for the world.

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1 Biondo 1 The Great Gatsby: A Kaleidoscopic Mirror of Society Francis Scott Fitzgerald lives and writes in an era of profound change for the world. The Roaring Twenties are a dynamic age of transition, marked by the birth of the film industry and the rise of Hollywood, the upsurge of mass production, and the unforeseen emergence of a new upper class. The steep economic growth of the Machine Era overthrows the established social order, reshaping the well-defined nineteenth-century hierarchical structure of society. Hence, the difference between the rich and the poor shifts to a discrepancy between the wealthy aristocrat of old lineage and the new, unsophisticated parvenu. Along with the creation of a new upper class, the industrial revolution gives birth to a working class, formed by the mass of people that manufacture those same commodities that the new and old rich alike carelessly purchase. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald renders such contrasts through the use of vivid imagery and color, depicting American society as a multi-layered system grounded on the contradictory relationship between the American dream and American reality. In The Great Gatsby, modernist imagism manifests itself in the visual sketching of physically separate parts of society. The color white is the most present in the novel, suggesting the predominance of the white race associated to precious metals; the parties at Gatsby s mansion are polychromatic, conveying a sense of chaos; and the monochromic dullness of the color grey is ascribed to the world of production. The novel develops on three main levels, outlined through the setting of the story in different parts of the New York area, described in rich, graphic details. The two sides of Long Island are similar to the inattentive observer because of their identical shape, but different in every other aspect. They resemble two eggs in shape, but they flatten out at the point of potential contact, pointing to their separateness. The West Egg is the province of the shimmering nouveau riche, people like Jay Gatsby that have accumulated huge amounts of money but lack the

2 Biondo 2 manners to consume it daintily that come with proper breeding. The East Egg is instead the land of old money, populated by aristocrats like the Buchanans, born and raised in affluent homes, and naturally reared for decorum. The valley of ashes is a middle-earth, inhabited by the invisible workers whose sweat and tears nourish the American dream of the wealthy, who prove forgetful of the human beings that lie behind the commodities they consume. The West Egg, the less fashionable of the two (Fitzgerald 9), is home to Gatsby s huge mansion. Fitzgerald describes Gatsby s house before introducing Gatsby himself, highlighting the value of commodities over the self for someone that has risen from nothing and built his entire identity on an abstract dream fueled by the amassing of physical goods. Gatsby s residence is a factual imitation (Fitzgerald 9) of a European castle, just as Gatsby s character is constructed on the imitation of true aristocracy. Again, the building is spanking new, covered only by a thin beard of green ivy (Fitzgerald 9), pointing out the absence of tradition behind Gatsby s persona and the things he owns. The surrounding gardens to the mansion are enormous and regularly crowded with all kinds of people that disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away (Fitzgerald 41). People go to Gatsby s lavish parties uninvited, because joining such flashy luxury does not require any rare entry ticket to the elite circle, nor exclusive birth certificates. Fitzgerald sketches a glowing picture of such parties, enlivened by yellow cocktail music (Fitzgerald 44), girls in yellow dresses, and laughter, and where the shiny air smells of money, squandered indiscriminately in extravagance. Gatsby and other newly moneyed Americans aim to stuff their lives with variety and diversion. They feel at ease in the midst of many-colored, many-keyed commotion (Fitzgerald 110), and they like to roam, to keep themselves busy with all kinds of occupations. They are not

3 Biondo 3 like Daisy and Jordan, who can spend their unperturbed days lying on enormous couches, and they are not like Tom Buchanan, a stable, stout man with the power to obtain all he desires. Gatsby, as Carraway notices, was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand (Fitzgerald 68). Gatsby spent his life pursuing a dream, which materializes in a woman, Daisy, but that ultimately consists of the achievement of wealth and success. In his essay on The Great Gatsby, English Professor A. E. Elmore recalls Carraway s description of Gatsby as a son of God (Fitzgerald 104), suggesting that he is merely a victim of his devotion to an ideal that he keeps following until it takes his life. However, what Elmore fails to recognize is that Gatsby s abstract ideal is established upon and driven by his material obsession with money, which concretizes in the pursuit of a woman that embodies wealth to the point that even her voice resounds with money (Fitzgerald 127). Gatsby worships an earthly God, falling short of any possible comparison to Jesus, and significantly renouncing to climb the ladder to the secret place above the trees (Fitzgerald 117) as he kisses Daisy and commits himself to a life of eternal restlessness majestically exemplified by his parties. The difference between Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan is that Gatsby is an abstract being, whose life develops within and toward a dream. Buchanan is instead a pragmatic man, described through his physical characteristics as a sturdy man with a rather hard mouth and a buff body of enormous power (Fitzgerald 11). Everything in the description of Tom s character expresses concreteness and materiality, while Gatsby is first referred to through the description of his house, then introduced by Carraway with references to his smile and elaborate formality of speech, restricting the physical description to the mention of an elegant young rough-neck (Fitzgerald 53). The reference to Gatsby as elegant seems inappropriate. He is a

4 Biondo 4 member of the brand new upper class, overwhelmed by the incredible amount of wealth that fell out of the sky with the unfolding of the industrial revolution. As Elmore notes, Gatsby is defined by his caramel-colored and pink outfits. The only occasion during which he wears the color white is his first encounter with Daisy after the many years they have spent apart (Elmore 429). Gatsby s attire in this crucial circumstance reflects the man s attempt at being enough for Daisy, yet his tie is only gold colored (Fitzgerald 89), not made of gold. Gatsby does not belong to Daisy s world, and the more he tries to conceal his modest origins, the more his inadequateness manifests itself in the unnaturalness of his behaviors. He will never be able to stand on Daisy s side in a cheerful square of light (Fitzgerald 24) as Tom does, because he is not the sun that radiates light, but rather one of many moons shining under the reflected light of sparkling coins. The element of color, and particularly the color white that makes more appearances in the novel than any other single color (Elmore 428), is crucial in the entire novel. Indeed, Fitzgerald s society is extremely color-conscious. Only a few years prior to the publication of The Great Gatsby, a man named Lothrop Stoddard had written a book, The Rising Tide of Color, where he blatantly condemned the colored race as a threat for the Whites. While he and his white friends are having dinner at his unsurprisingly white mansion, Tom Buchanan claims that civilization is going to pieces (Fitzgerald 17). Fitzgerald misspells the book title, emphasizing the ridiculousness of calling racism scientific stuff (Fitzgerald 17), and Carraway states that Tom sounds pathetic (Fitzgerald 18), calling attention to and criticizing his bigotry. The intervention of Daisy in the discussion is minimal, but her physical presence in the scene is fundamental. In fact, when Nick enters the living room, he finds Daisy lying on a couch, completely still as the wind blows in and out of the gleaming white French windows (Fitzgerald 12), riffling her dress. Fitzgerald portrays Daisy like a fair, bright goddess dressed in

5 Biondo 5 white and gleaming like silver (Fitzgerald 157), with a sharp allusion to the unquestioned perfection of the white race and to its indissoluble link with money. Not too far from the glistening white world of the East Egg lays the valley of ashes, located like the village of Fish at an immense distance under the sky (Fitzgerald, The Diamond 185). The valley of ashes, strategically placed at a lower level than the two eggs, indicating not only a geographical difference but also a distinction in tone and power, is home to the third component of society, the working class. The description of the village of Fish in The Diamond as Big as the Ritz parallels the characterization of the valley of ashes, in that both places are desolate crossing points that people necessarily need to go through to arrive at their destination, the Washingtons land in Fitzgerald s short story and Manhattan in The Great Gatsby. The valley of ashes, a grey land crossed by grey cars and inhabited by ash-grey men (Fitzgerald 29) lacks the characteristic polychromy of 1920s America, representing the automatism and tediousness of production through the monochromic use of the color gray. Metaphorically, the train stopping in the dim valley before reaching Manhattan, the land where the dream becomes reality, represents the need to acknowledge that the objects that can be so easily purchased by merely handing out some money have a history, which is the history of the human beings that produced them. Fitzgerald criticizes the commodity fetishism that causes people to attribute an intrinsic value to inanimate objects while ignoring their social component. Carraway narrates that crates of oranges and lemons arrived from the city every Friday to provide for the refreshment of Gatsby s guests, and a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler s thumb to extract their juice (Fitzgerald 43-44). In line with modernist imagism, the narrator addresses the abstract apathy of the butler by employing the passive to describe the task he performs.

6 Biondo 6 Fitzgerald shows the worker as alienated from his work and even his own body, pointing to the detachment between the person and his thumb. Ultimately, the form of writing employed aims at representing the working class as an active part of the American dream, in that the workers are those that make sure the wealthy can lead an easy life, finding their juice waiting for them when they drive to one more party. The valley of ashes is where George and Myrtle Wilson live. George Wilson is a lackluster character, pale and covered in dust, not only because of his job as a mechanic, but because of the world he inhabits. Many characters in the novel seem out of place. Gatsby is an unrefined countryman that tries to mimic aristocratic manners, Carraway is an often ambivalent narrator, and Myrtle is an unsophisticated woman looking to escape the stale air of the valley of ashes. Wilson instead belongs to the drab world he lives in to such an extent that he merges with the cement color of the walls (Fitzgerald 30). He is certainly not happy with his life, showing his wish to escape the valley by first trying to buy Tom s car and then planning to move west, but he does not have a concrete chance to improve his poor conditions. Myrtle is an exuberant being, looking for a way out of a life that is too tight for her surplus flesh (Fitzgerald 29). The imagery of the valley of ashes is dim, but Myrtle enlivens it with her spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine. However, every trace of color in such a deathly place is doomed to annihilation. In fact, Myrtle s life is taken by Gatsby s yellow Rolls-Royce, the bitter emblem of the golden American dream that she craves but that ultimately crushes her, as it will eventually smash Gatsby. In his discussion of the novel s characters, Dan Coleman argues that Myrtle s apartment is the most precisely described location in the novel rendered with a graphic specificity a set designer could accurately reproduce (Coleman 216). Just like the description of Gatsby s huge

7 Biondo 7 incoherent failure of a house (Fitzgerald 188) mirrors Gatsby s persona, and Carraway s portrayal of the Buchanans elaborate... white palaces (Fitzgerald 11-12) defines Tom and Daisy, the imagery employed to describe Myrtle s apartment serves as a visual definition of her personality. Carraway s anaphoric use of the adjectives small to define the rooms epitomizes the status disparity between Myrtle and both Gatsby and the Buchanans. However, the crowd of kitsch tapestries and the surreal atmosphere of complete foolishness relate Myrtle to Gatsby, in that both characters are lured into the tunnel of conspicuous consumption, aiming at accumulating as many symbols of wealth as possible in the form of material possessions. The great difference between the two characters lies in Gatsby s idealism, in contrast to Myrtle s pragmatism. As Coleman remarks, such contrast is evident in the depiction of the characters deaths, in that Myrtle leaves a physical body to mourn, while what is left of Gatsby is only a red circle drawn across troubled water (Coleman 229). Gatsby s entire existence, differently from Myrtle s, is grounded on a fantasy. In his reflection on The Great Gatsby, J. S. Westbrook suggests that the entirety of Carraway s accounts of the events implies that reality is hallucination (82). Remembering Myrtle s party, Carraway states to have been drunk only twice in his life, and the second time was that afternoon, so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it (Fitzgerlad 33). The sense of inebriation exemplifies the feeling of dizziness that the novel conveys, working as both mirror and result of the emergence of the moving picture industry. Along with the general economic advancement prompted by the industrial revolution, the rise of Hollywood heightens the development of a culture of appearance. Such a great value is placed on what people look like and on what they own that something as impersonal as a dress is endowed with the ability to reshape one s personality, as a change of costume does for Myrtle (Fitzgerald 35). Along

8 Biondo 8 similar lines, when Tom and Daisy attend one of Gatsby s parties together, their host is quick at remarking, you must see the faces of many people you ve heard about (Fitzgerald 111), a statement that gives Gatsby a chance to overtly highlight his prestige, but more importantly lets Fitzgerald subtly stress the weight of one s public image. To conclude, Westbrook s remark that the novel is scattered with optical references not only demonstrates that The Great Gatsby is a modernist work in Fitzgerald s skillful use of imagism, but it also links the novel to its historical context. Through this connection, Fitzgerald professes his disapproval of the overrated and deceptive American dream, ultimately earning the novel a long-awaited spot among American classics, as a masterpiece of style and social commitment.

9 Biondo 9 Works Cited Coleman, Dan. A World Complete in Itself : Gatsby's Elegiac Narration. The Journal of Narrative Technique 27.1 (1997): JSTOR. Web. 4 November Elmore, A. E., Color and Cosmos in The Great Gatsby. The Sewanee Review 78.3 (1970): JSTOR. Web. 30 October Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, Print. Westbrook, J. S., Nature and Optics in The Great Gatsby. American Literature 32.1 (1960): JSTOR. Web. 30 October 2014.