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Explore the historical, cultural, and social contexts of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to gain a deeper understanding of the novel and its themes. Examining the Jazz Age, American Midwest, and personal experiences of the author.
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ENGL1001 – American LiteratureF. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (1926) Dr. John Masterson John.masterson@wits.ac.za 2011
You can access these presentations through the ENGL1 blog • Go to – http://witsenglishi.wordpress.com
Objectives of these lectures • Where does ‘English’ literature stop and ‘American’ literature begin? • Author and text IN CONTEXT – historical, geographical, political, economic, biographical, cultural, ideological et al. • Gatsby – resonance and relevance – then (1926) and now (2011 – Baz Luhrmann, Leonardo DiCaprio and Toby Maguire). • Politics of Canonicity. • Central argument – close, sensitive reading of text will be pursued ALONGSIDE engaging with much broader contextual debates. • For my purposes, the relationship between the two is AND MUST REMAIN RECIPROCAL rather than mutually exclusive.
Herman Melville, ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ 1850 • “no American writer should write like an Englishman, or a Frenchman; let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American … Let us boldly condemn all imitation, though it comes to us graceful and fragrant as the morning, and foster all originality, though, at first, it be crabbed and ugly as our own pine knots.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Obituary (1896-1940) published in The New York Times • “The best of his books, the critics said, was The Great Gatsby. When it was published in 1926 this ironic tale of life on Long Island at a time when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession (according to the exponents of Mr. Fitzgerald’s school of writers), it received critical acclaim. In it Mr. Fitzgerald was at his best, which was, according to John Chamberlain, his “ability to catch the flavor of a period, the fragrance of a night, a snatch of old song, in a phrase.”
Taken from letter written by Fitzgerald to his daughter, cited in Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur – The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1981), p.123. • “If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it BLEND AS ONE MATTER – as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”
Some areas to consider when it comes to thinking about texts in relation to their contexts • History – time • Geography – space/place – spatial context – urban/rural? Questions of regionalism • Economic • Socio-political - ideological • Cultural • Intellectual – philosophical – the world of ideas • Autobiographical/personal
The American Mid-West Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1896. Our first person narrator in The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, is also from the Mid-West.
The American East Coast New York is indicated by the number 4 on this map
Richard Gray, A History of American Literature (2004), p.435 • “Of all American writers concerned with the inventions of Modernism, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the most autobiographical.” • Fitzgerald - “’Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m real or whether I’m a character in one of my own novels.’” • “the protagonists of his books … bear an extraordinary resemblance to their creator. In each case, there is the same commitment to flamboyant excess, combined with a very personal kind of idealism; in each case, too, there is a testing, a trying out taking place – of the dreams of power, possibility and wealth that have fuelled America and individual Americans and of how those dreams can be negotiated in a world dedicated to consumption, a surfeit of commodities.”
Fitzgerald’s definition of ‘The Jazz Age’ • “a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”
From Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur – The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1981), p.133. • “Their marriage coincided with the beginning of the Boom, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, the Roaring Twenties, what Fitzgerald named the Jazz Age and described as “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.” In point of fact, Fitzgerald knew almost nothing about jazz and did not write about it. His explication of the term in “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931) reveals that he used it to connote a mood or psychological condition: “The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has first meant sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war.” Fitzgerald began as a spokesman of the Jazz Age and became its symbol. With his capacity for becoming identified with his times, he came to represent the excesses of the Twenties – its Prince Charming and its fool.”
Richard Gray, A History of American Literature (2004), p.435 • “Easily as much as any American writer, and more than most, Fitzgerald demonstrates the paradox that to talk of oneself may also be to talk of one’s times, the character of a culture – and that self-revelation, ultimately, can be a revelation of humanity.”
From Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur – The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1981), p.187. • “The studies of literary alcoholism are inconclusive. Many of the best American writers of the twentieth century have had alcohol problems: Fitzgerald, Faulkner, O’Neill, O’Hara, Wolfe, Lardner, Hemingway, Lewis, Chandler, Hammett. There is evidently a connection between alcoholism and creative personality; but it remains unclear whether writers drink because they are writers. Writing and drinking are both forms of exhibitionism and escapism.”
The Oxford English Dictionary Definition of ‘Prohibition’ • “the prevention by law of the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the US from 1920 to 1933.”
An Image from the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby Robert Redford plays Gatsby while Mia Farrow plays Daisy
