Gatsby AO5

Gray

‘A story about the reinvention of the self.’

‘(The green light is) both the necessity and impossibility of idealism.’

‘Success is measured against failure, power and wealth are defined by their opposites, there is no victory in a competitive ethos without a victim.’•

‘The East, and in particular its cities, have become for them a new frontier, a neutral space in which their dreams of wealth, measureless power, and mobility may perhaps be realised.’

‘Gatsby’s dream is, in effect, the American Dream…Fitzgerald is ultimately exploring a nation and a national consciousness here, as well as a single and singular man.’

Bradbury

‘He (Fitzgerald) wishes to write of ‘the nature of darkness that surrounded the flowing light.’

‘The dream fails…it is counteracted by the underlying sterility of twentieth century American life and the destruction inherent in the system.’

‘Fitzgerald’s was the ‘half-poor boy among the rich’.’

‘[The Great Gatsby] is a story of a careless, materially privileged society build upon a sterile world.’

Stern

‘How hard it is to be an American, enticed by your nation, only to have to grow up at last and settle for the cold limitations of history.’

Tanner

‘There is a yearning mixed up with Nick’s desire to believe in some form or figure of gorgeousness to offset the dismalness with which he is all too familiar.’

‘’Wonder’ - the instinct, the need, the capacity for it - it as important for Nick as it has been for so many American writers.’

‘Fitzgerald wants to show America desecrated, mutilated, violated…of what might have been a wonderland…we have made a wasteland.’

‘The book was always going to be en elegy, pervaded with a sense of something muffled, something lost - a chance missed, a dream doomed.’

Cowley

‘(Fitzgerald focused on) locating happiness in the search for sensation rather than its realisation.’

Churchwell

‘Daisy is playing at love - she offers gestures, not emotions. She was raised among the same aristocracy that Edith Wharton described as a world in which people with emotions were not visited.’

‘dramatise the lie at the heart of the AD’

Fetterley

‘Daisy’s failure of Gatsby is symbolic of the failure of America to live up to the expectations of the men who ‘discovered’ it. America is female; to be American is male; and the quintessential American experience is betrayal by women.’

Settle

‘Fitzgerald’s artful handling of the quality of her voice allow a reading of Daisy as a classical siren.’

Sandipan Deb

‘Gatsby is a man who made money because he cared madly and never understood the world where money makes everyone careless’

Extract from Fitzgerald’s ‘The Rich Boy’

(the very rich) ‘they are different from you and me. They possess & enjoy early & it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard & cynical where we are trustful…They think deep in their hearts that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations & refuges of life for ourselves.

Churchill

‘vision is distorted, obscured; appearance comes to substitute for the truth’

Person

‘an ornate stage set for Gatsby’s performance of legitimacy’

Jameson

‘novel explores the dream space of capitalism’

Williams

‘a symbol of capitalist ruin’

Trilling

‘a tragic hero of the AD’

Fitzgerald

Called it a ‘man’s book’ that ‘contained no important woman character’

‘American women are leeches. They’re an utterly useless fourth generation…they simply dominate the American men’

The female characters as a response to anxieties around gender at time

Shown by Fitzgerald’s attitude, many grew annoyed at contemporary men and women as women became more dominant and men more effeminate. The women in his novel can either symbolise the American Dream or the decline of a nation and the novel can therefore be read as a response to anxieties at the time over changing gender roles.

Feminist view: Daisy as a false idol

She is worshipped by Gatsby mistakenly and tragically - ‘he had committed himself to the following of a grail’ - suggests how he holds her to the standard of a perfect mythical object for him to pursue. She is shown to be a ‘princess’ trapped in the ‘tower’ of her marriage - ‘high in a white palace, the king’s daughter, the golden girl’ - but it turns out that when her ‘prince’ Gatsby comes to ‘free’ her he no more wants her to be independent than Tom does - he wants her to be his perfect golden grail. Daisy’s quote about the beautiful shirts can be interpreted as her sadness over the realisation that Gatsby has turned himself into Tom by now being defined by possessions & shattered her romantic dream.

Feminist view: the false nature of the women

Nick’s perspective on women is shown through his initial description of Daisy and Jordan which highlights them as suspicious/not real demonstrating how he struggles work women out like Fitzgerald, and struggles to imagine their lives without framing them this way. This links to the idea that despite the difference in the lifestyles they’re associated with, Daisy and Myrtle are connected as neither one are real women (both fake & only value material success) - one is simply more successful than the other. This is because it is impossible to catch a glimpse of a real woman in the text in between Nick’s subjective narrative view & Gatsby’s idealised one.

Reynolds

For Daisy, a man is the shirt he wears and Daisy and Gatsby’s doomed romance is largely founded on appearances and the consumerist self - she likes him because he looks rich and successful.

‘Fitzgerald showed a sexual ecosystem in the novel in the form of infidelity, love triangles, promiscuity and, under the eye of a few scholars, homosexuality’