Setting

1. Setting The Great Gatsby

2. Where is it set? • Early 1920s. • New York – Manhattan (Tom and Myrtle's apartment uptown in Harlem, and a suite in the very posh Plaza Hotel next to Central Park.), Long Island, and an industrial part of Queens that the novel calls either the Valley of Ashes or just the ashheaps (George Wilson's garage and the road that runs next to it, connecting Long Island and Manhattan.) • Between ‘East Egg’ and ‘West Egg’. • Long Island’s beach communities were – and are - home to the rich and fabulous of the New York City area, and Fitzgerald actually lived in a small house in West Egg! • People = rich and have a lot of leisure time to spend worrying about how they're perceived socially • Nobody seems particularly interested in politics, or religion, or even education (you need the degree, but you don't need to have learned anything) • Instead, they spend their time conforming to certain standards, like not wearing pink suits

3. The Roaring 20s • The decadently extravagant post-WWI era • We open in the early 1920s: just after World War I, and right in the middle of Prohibition, when alcohol was effectively illegal. • Despite this, plenty of people still manufactured, sold, and drank alcohol anyway—like all the characters in the book, who seem to be constantly drunk, and Gatsby, who made his money selling illegal alcohol (bootlegging) • However, Myrtle and George Wilson inhabit a totally different setting: the grey valley of ashes that joins the fabulous worlds of the Eggs and Manhattan. • Fitzgerald didn't know at the time, but the excesses of the 1920s collapsed with the stock market in 1929--leading to a much grayer, grimmer life all over the country. • Did Fitzgerald suspect that the fabulous lifestyles of Tom and Daisy's crowd were doomed from the start? And is this suspicion demonstrated by the setting?

4. Women’s Rights • Women got the right to vote in 1919, and the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1923. • In The Great Gatsby, the power and agency of women come up often. • The three women in the novel make choices about their independence; Daisy and Myrtle find it hard to escape dysfunctional marriages, though they try through affairs; Jordan is able to lead a more independent life.

5. The Eggs • Nick tells us right away that East Egg is the wealthier, more elite of the two Eggs  creates contrast. • Despite all his money, Gatsby lives in West Egg, suggesting that he has not been able to complete his transformation into a member of the social elite. • The distance that separates him from Daisy isn't just the water of the bay; it's also class. • 2nd contrast = between the city scenes and the suburban ones. • Like Carraway, Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby commute into the city for their respective lines of work, while the women are left behind. • Geographical divide ends up being a gender distinction, too. • City is important in other ways, too – Tom only interacts with his mistress in the city, and Gatsby only sees Meyer Wolfsheim there. They both use the city to hide their goings-on from the people they value on Long Island. • City = a place of mystery, concealment and unscrupulous behaviour.

6. Manhattan vs Long Island • Overall, Manhattan is the place where characters go to show off their disregard for society’s rules and lawful behavior. It's the easiest place to accommodate sexual indiscretions and shady business dealings: • In Chapter 2, Tom takes Nick there to meet his mistress, Myrtle, and go to a party at their apartment, where Tom has sex with her while Nick waits, and where Tom ends the evening by punching Myrtle in the face.  • Gatsby takes Nick to Manhattan in Chapter 4 to have lunch with Meyer Wolfshiem, the gangster who fixed the World Series and who is Gatsby’s business partner. • Finally, Gatsby, Nick, Daisy, Jordan, and Tom to go Manhattan in the explosive Chapter 7 showdown where Daisy chooses Tom over Gatsby. • Partly this is because Manhattan is portrayed as a melting pot where a diversity of social classes, races, and backgrounds is par for the course, and where unusual people don't really stand out. • On the other hand, Long Island is a much smaller, more insular community. • Instead of shrugging off anonymous misbehavior, the people on Long Island care deeply about who their neighbors are and what they are doing. It's harder to conduct affairs, shady business, or whatever else there without incurring the moral opprobrium of everyone else.  • While Gatsby is unremarkable in Manhattan, in West Egg he becomes the focal point of unending rumors. • People say he is related to Kaiser Willhelm (the ruler of Germany during WWI, and thus America's main enemy), that he is a German spy, and any number of other things.

7. Similarly, Tom's affair with Myrtle benefits from its city setting, as Tom feels free to cheat on his wife in public: "he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew" (2.4). • Meanwhile, when Daisy and Gatsby start their affair, Gatsby has to fire his entire household staff because he is worried that his servants will tell everyone what they've seen. • You can see how rumor immediately spreads and is uncontainable in the close circles of Long Island. Even despite all of Gatsby's precautions, Nick has already "heard" from someone else that Gatsby has fired all his servants.

8. Nick describes the Midwest as the center of all things moral and wholesome. It's a place where everyone is friendly, happy, innocent, and so much "in it together," that when he is describing his memories of the Midwest, Nick doesn't use the pronoun "I," but instead starts writing in the first floors person plural. • In contrast, the East Coast is a place where everyone is so out for themselves, that after Gatsby dies none of the people whom he spent an entire summer entertaining can even be bothered enough to come to his funeral. • In the beginning, this Midwestern quality of goodness strikes Nick as boring, which is why he decides to go East to New York. But after his experiences during the summer, Nick comes to see the East as a kind of nightmare of debauchery, violence, and a disregard for human life:

9. Summer • The Great Gatsby pointedly takes place during the summer, as opposed to any other season – the novel goes out of its way to assign meaning to summertime and to contrast it with the rest of the year - and often even with itself. • For example, summer is somehow both healthfully airy and horribly suffocating. Nick initially relishes the Long Island summer, shirking his work because there is "so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air“.  • But in the tense confrontation in the Plaza Hotel, where Tom, Gatsby, and Daisy have a life-changing fight, the oppressive and unbearable summer heat means the room has basically no breathable air at all. • Similarly, it's up for debate whether the summer brings with it life - the way we typically associate new foliage with a sense of rebirth - or not. On the one hand, Nick starts out with a traditional view of the summertime. • Jordan compares summer unfavorably to the potentially positive change that fall brings when she says, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” (7.75) • Desire to have life start over again is crucial, since this novel is so interested in how the wish for forward momentum fights against the way the past anchors us and pulls us back. • Despite his initial positive feelings about the summer on the East Coast, Nick eventually reverts to his roots in the Midwest. • He contrasts the disappointing summer he spends on Long Island with the season he associates with Midwestern wholesomeness and goodness - winter

10. Gatsby’s Mansion vs. Daisy and Tom’s Mansion • The differences between old money and new money are reflected primarily by differences in style, aesthetics, and taste. • Gatsby typifies the ostentatious, over-the-top conspicuous consumption of those whose wealth is new and so must be always on display. • His house is a reproduction of French chateau. This is ridiculous both because this French design is out of place in America, and also because it is a visibly brand new building trying to replicate something that would be centuries old. It’s completely ludicrous, and it is telling that the only person who has the desired response to this mansion is Gatsby’s father: 

11. Meanwhile, Daisy and Tom live in a house that is also extravagant, but one that has its luxury somewhat concealed. • house is much more fit for its location - Georgian Colonial is an architectural style that is appropriate to America (as its name suggests, it came from England during the colonial period). • The description also confirms the permanence of the Buchanans' mansion. Gatsby’s house is fighting with its surroundings (it’s off both in time period, and it seems to be having a problem with the “raw” ivy). In contrast, Daisy and Tom’s house is so much a part of the environment that the grass “seemed to grow a little way into the house,” blurring outside and inside just like the open windows that let the breeze blow through. • It may not be too much to read some foreshadowing into these contrasting descriptions: Gatsby’s house is too new and not rooted enough. Meanwhile, the place where Daisy and Tom live is deeply embedded and seems unbreakable.

12. Does it Matter? • This setting matters, because it means that a lot takes place through innuendo and suggestion. • There's very little violence or even outright arguing—people snap at each other and make snide comments, but these aren't the type of people to settle things with violence, at least not with each other. • That's why the violent acts—Tom breaking Myrtle's nose; Wilson shooting Gatsby—take place between classes. • It's not rich people beating up other rich people; it's violent conflict between the rich and the poor  a difference exemplified by citizens being pigeon-holed into their subsequent areas.

13. … • So, setting symbolises the social strata (hierarchy). • Provides cover for Daisy and Gatsby’s affair  Daisy can travel to the less fashionable West Egg. • Creates a vision of America  wealthy v poor + exemplifies wealth, excess etc. • Enables lies + deceit

14. Colour

15. Yellow/Gold • Gold represents authentic, traditional, "old money" + wealth. • Gatsby's party, where the turkeys are "bewitched to dark gold," and Jordan's "slender golden arm[s]“, and Daisy the "golden girl“, and Gatsby wearing a gold tie to see Daisy at Nick's house. • But yellow is different. Yellow is fake gold; it's veneer and show rather than substance. • We see that with the "yellow cocktail music" at Gatsby's party (1) and the "two girls in twin yellow dresses" who aren't as alluring as the golden Jordan. • Gatsby's car = symbol of his desire—and failure—to enter New York's high society. • T. J. Eckleburg's glasses, looking over the wasteland of America, are yellow.

16. White • Could represent innocence/femininity. • Daisy's car (back before she was married) was white. So are her clothes, the rooms of her house, and about half the adjectives used to describe her (her "white neck," "white girlhood," the king's daughter "high in a white palace"). • However, Daisy is hardly the picture of girlish innocence. • At the end of the novel, she's described as selfish, careless, and destructive. • Perhaps makes the point that even the purest characters in Gatsby have been corrupted? • Did Daisy start off all innocent and fall along the way, or was there no such purity to begin with? • Or, in some way, does Daisy's decision to remain with Tom allow her to keep her innocence?

17. Blue • Could represent Gatsby's illusions -- his deeply romantic dreams of unreality. • This colour is present around Gatsby more than any other character. His gardens are blue, his chauffeur wears blue, the water separating him from Daisy is his "blue lawn“, mingled with the "blue smoke of brittle leaves" in his yard. • His transformation into Jay Gatsby is sparked by Cody, who buys him, among other things, a "blue coat"—and he sends a woman who comes to his house a "gas blue" dress. • Before you tie this up under one simple label, keep in mind that the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg are also blue, and so is Tom's car. If blue represents illusions and alternatives to reality, maybe that makes the eyes of God into a non-existent dream.

18. Grey + Lack of Colour • If the ash heaps are associated with lifelessness and barrenness, and grey is associated with the ash heaps, anyone described as grey is going to be connected to barren lifelessness. • Main contender is Wilson: "When anyone spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable colorless way“. Wilson's face is "ashen," and a "white ashen dust" covers his suit, and his eyes are described as "pale" and "glazed." • Because of this, not surprising that shows up with a gun at the end of the novel.

19. Green • Represents life + vitality. • Most noticeable image is the green light we see over and over of the "orgastic future" that we stretch our hands towards. • Right before these famous last lines, Nick also describes the "fresh, green breast of the new world," the new world being this land as Nick imagines it existed hundreds of years before. • Green also shows up as the "long green tickets" that the rich kids of Chicago use as entry to their fabulous parties, the kind of parties where Daisy and Tom meet, and where Gatsby falls in love. • So green does represent a kind of hope, but not always a good one. • When Nick imagines Gatsby's future without Daisy, he sees "a new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees." Nick struggles to define what the future really means, especially as he faces the new decade before him (the dreaded thirties). • Is he driving on toward grey, ashen death through the twilight, or reaching out for a bright, fresh green future across the water?

20. Characters

21. Nick Carroway • Nick changes profoundly over the course of the novel. • Grew up in family of "prominent, well-to-do people" in Chicago, and his family has a fun little tradition of calling themselves the descendants of the "Dukes of Buccleuch," even though they actually made their money two generations ago in the "wholesale hardware business“. • He went Yale; he likes literature and considers himself one of those "limited" specialists known as a "well-rounded man"; he fought in World War I, which he found kind of exciting; and now he's moved East to work in the bond business (that is, finance) in New York City. • Connected to wealthy, important people (cousin Daisy + Tom) – but he isn’t one of them  his house is a "small eyesore," even though it offers him the "consoling proximity of millionaires“. • However this perch on the outside of these lofty social circles gives him a good view of what goes on inside; he has a particularly sharp and sometimes quite judgmental eye for character, and isn't afraid to use it.

22. Jay Gatsby • Started as Jimmy Gatz Grew up in North Dakota without connections, money, or education, Jimmy Gatz had a plan: he was going to escape his circumstances and make a name for himself. • However planned a personality overhaul  "Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something. Do you notice what he's got about improving his mind? He was always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat him for it“ • Believed in the American Dream  you really could work your way up through hard work, resolve, and self-control. However, he learns, is that it doesn't actually work that way. The American Dream is just that—a dream. All that hard work and discipline only earned him ill-gotten gains, and it set him on the path to untimely death. • Jimmy Gatz died the moment he rowed up to Dan Cody's boat, where he becomes Jay Gatsby. • He is first introduced as a man with a lot of money, a lot of acquaintances, and very few friends; the rumors that circulate around him make him out to be some kind of mysterious superhero or supervillain  makes reader skeptical/suspicious of him. ("Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.“)

23. However,  no matter how carefully he's disguised his origins, Gatsby can't escape his past: “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. • Childlike quality: restlessness. Nick describes it: “He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American—that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness.He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.” • Here, Gatsby becomes a representation of America itself: restless, resourceful, and active. It's those qualities, along with his determination, that are given to American heroes, like Ben Franklin and George Washington.

24. Retains a kind of innocent quality  he might seem to be worldly and dishonest, but in fact he's never cynical or corrupt. When he and Daisy begin their affair, he "was consumed with wonder at her presence" (5.113). He can't believe that she would choose Tom over him; and he actually doesn't understand that Tom wouldn't bother seeking revenge. Gatsby's world is still the simple world of North Dakota, adventure stories, and the belief that people, and the world, work in predictable ways. It's this trace of innocence that perhaps makes his story so tragic. • What makes Gatsby "great" to Nick is not just the extravagance of his lifestyle and the fascinating enigma of his wealth, but that, in his heart of hearts, he doesn't care about wealth, or social status, or any of the other petty things that plague everyone else in his shallow world. • Instead, Gatsby is motivated by the finest and most foolish of emotions—love. • From this point of view, Gatsby's love for Daisy is what drives him to reinvent himself, rather than greed or true ambition. • Despite the fact that he attempted to fulfill his "incorruptible dream" dishonestly, we can't help feeling sorry for him: he may have been a fool at times, but he's a fool for love. • In the end, even though he's a self-created millionaire built out of nothing but lies, Nick singles him out as the only real person in a crowd of fakes: "better than the whole damn bunch put together" (8.45). 

25. Daisy Buchanan • Experiences a lot of change, and is symbolic of a number of things throughout! • Has an impressive voice  there's a "singing compulsion," an "arrangement of notes" that makes men wild. It's full of promises, hints that wonderful things are on the horizon.“I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.” • Allusion to siren songs  mythical island dwellers whose singing was so seductive that sailors would throw themselves into the sea and drown trying to reach them. To Gatsby, Daisy's seductive voice speaks of wealth, social status, glamour, family, and of course Daisy herself—everything that Gatsby wants. • Daisy's voice makes her sound untouchable. • Nick thinks of it as "full of money," and that it sounds like it belongs to someone who lives "high in a white palace, the king's daughter, the golden girl […]“  the kind of girl that neither Gatsby nor Nick would ever have a chance with.

26. But Tom does. And Daisy may marry him at first because she feels like she has to, but she does end up falling in love with him. (Or at least lust.) Jordan mentions: “If he left the room for a minute she'd look around uneasily, and say: "Where's Tom gone?" and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. ” • This doesn't sound to us like a girl living "high in a white palace." It sounds like a pretty normal girl in love with her husband. What we learn from this is that Daisy isn't just a frivolous rich girl—or, she wasn't always. She has a deep capacity for love, and she wants be loved. • However  suggestion that she has married the wrong man! • One of the things Gatsby and Daisy share is an idealised image of their relationship  a rose-colored view makes everything in the present seem dull and flat in comparison. • She longs for the innocent period of her "white girlhood," before she was forced/forced herself into her marriage to Tom. Though the Daisy of the present has come to realize that more often than not, dreams don't come true, she still clings to the hope that they sometimes can. • And to Daisy, most of this trouble comes down to one fact: she's a girl. In her mind, women need to be foolish. They need to be as careless as Nick ends up thinking that she is, because the world is cruel to women. • When her child is born, she tells Nick, she weeps: "'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool – that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool”  If Daisy had been a fool, she would have accepted her fate. She would have married Tom—her right, as the beautiful Southern belle that she was; she would have had kids and ignored them; and she would have turned a blind eye to Tom's philandering with the housemaids. But she didn't.

27. Daisy may be a married woman with a child, but she doesn't seem like she's managed to grow up very much. • She can't live with the consequences of her actions, trying to (drunkenly) change her mind on the night before her wedding (4.120), and then being unable to make up her mind between Tom and Gatsby: "I did love him once," she says, "but I loved you too“. • Pure-hearted Gatsby can't understand this kind of indecision. But to Daisy, it's just part of the girlhood: she's never learned how to be a woman, and we get the feeling from this novel that she's never going to. There's no one to teach her. She's expected to be a "beautiful little fool," just like every other girl of her social class. • And ultimately, like a kid, she lets Tom make the decisions for her. She's used to her life being a certain way – she follows certain rules, she expects certain rewards – and when Gatsby challenges her to break free of these restraints, she can't deal. • Ultimately, Daisy returns to Tom because facing a life without a $300,000 pearl necklace is even worse, apparently, than facing life with her "hulking" brute of a husband. • Do we blame her? Is she responsible for her poor choices? Or is she just living her life in the best way she knows how to live it?

28. Theme

29. Love • Nick loves the idea of the eggs and living within the wealthy elite, however when he sees how toxic an environment it is, his perception changes. • With love, comes violence and danger (almost every time) within the novel  so can link in with these themes. • Obviously: Gatsby and Daisy are the easiest characters to talk about in relation to this theme. • Gatsby does everything for Daisy because he loves her, however we are left wondering if it is really her he longs for, or if it’s the dream of her instead. She represents everything Gatsby wants: wealth, social status, glamour, family  so perhaps he is more interested in what she alludes to or symbolises, than he is her actual presence. • Similarly, it sometimes appears that Daisy is more in love with the idea of loving someone and being wanted, than she is with the people in her life. This is implied by her changeability/indecisiveness  "I did love him once," she says, "but I loved you too“. • Due to this idealized version of love (remember – we talked about looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses? This is no different), it is unsurprising that their relationship ends in destruction. If their ‘love’ is nothing more than illusion, it is a fake – an imitation which has no real substance. As a result, this relationship is unstable and volatile – and with instability comes an eventual end.

30. Some Quotes • “he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.” ‘ Here, Gatsby is reaching towards the eggs towards Daisy. However, remember what the colour green symbolises? Wealth, materialism, the hope of a new life  implication that love of what Daisy can provide rather than of Daisy herself. Similarly, reference to “seaward” perhaps refers back to the idea of Daisy as a siren, foreshadowing the inevitable demise of the relationship as she lures him to his death.? • "Here, deares'." She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. "Take 'em down-stairs and give 'em back to whoever they belong to. Tell 'em all Daisy's change' her mind. Say: 'Daisy's change' her mine!’” This quote suggests her indecisiveness: and epitomises the war between materialism and real life experience that tears apart a number of characters in the novel. She has realised that the string of pearls can become a chain, tethering her to Tom, and she recoils from this, searching for a man she truly loves  quote = rejection of love? However, she does return to Tom. Pearls = stereotypical gift of jewellery used as an expression of admiration/love  instead of a chain, they can instead be seen as a statement of love.

31. “He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.” He is so infatuated with her – or the idea of her – that everything else is almost in darkness. Nothing else matters but her – she is the centre of his world (for now).

32. Greed/Wealth • Greed = a desire to have more than is necessary. This encapsulates the mind-set of the roaring 20s – a time when excess and frivolity were a way of life. • Money certainly made the world go round – specifically old money though! New money was looked down on by those inheriting their wealth  encapsulates the attitude of the period: all play and no work! • Did Gatsby become greedy, in thinking he could attain his American Dream as well as Daisy? • Can talk about Gatsby’s growing wealth, and the connection between his enhanced social status, as the two themes are interconnected. • Connection between wealth and lack of consequence? The more wealthier you are, the less the rules apply? Or so it seems…

33. Loss/death/mortality • Loss of love • Loss of life • Loss of American Dream • Loss of hope (Nick?? Gatsby??) • Loss of respect (for self – Daisy? In returning to husband?)

34. Class Divide • We have kind of talked about this already! • Divide between the eggs, consequences of this divide etc!

35. Violence • Myrtle’s accident – “"It ripped her open-“ and the “death car”. Both have violent and gruesome connotations, emphasising the violent nature of her death – it didn’t stop because of Daisy’s emotional state! • Violent nature of Gatsby’s death.

36. Hate