CRITICAL QUOTES - American Comparative

Elizabeth Ammons - “social codes”

“There is a suffocating grip of New York’s elite, where appearance, lineage and social codes are valued above personal happiness or moral integrity”

Sarah Churchwell - “rich guard”

“Fitzgerald presents a world in which the rich guard their social position through exclusion, illusion and inherited privilege”

Claire Sprague - “tragic conflict”

“Wharton exposes the tragic conflict between the individual’s authentic self and the rigid demands of New York High Society”

Lois Tyson - “projections of the male desire”

“The women exist chiefly as projections of male desire, confined by a patriarchal culture that grants them little agency or intensity”

Emsley - “angels or outcasts”

“Wharton critiques a society that forces women to be ‘angels’ or ‘outcasts’, denying them the full complexity of humanity”

Elaine Showalter (feminist) - “hearth and home”

“May is the goddess of hearth and home, an emblem of the ideology that imprisons women in innocence & dependence”

Dan Seiters - “White”

“White is the colour of Gatsby’s dreams”

Trilling - “denied freedom”

“What he discovers is not that he has been denied freedom by society, but that he has never really wanted it”

Roger L. Pearson - “bastard of a hedonistic age”

“Gatsby was the bastard of a hedonistic age, spawned by it and killed by it”

Roger L. Pearson - “Temple of philistinism”

“Gatsby’s house was the temple of his philistinism”

Trilling - “The fantasy of Daisy”

“The fantasy of Daisy becomes a form of self-imposed loneliness”

Thomas Samuels - “Intensity of will”

“Intensity of will makes Gatsby a great man”

Pamela Knight - “May’s power”

“May’s power lies in her ability to manipulate the very ideals of femininity that oppress her”

Lois Tyson - Daisy

‘Daisy’s choices are shaped by the economic realities of gender’

Fetterley - Daisy

‘Daisy is both victim and agent of the social order’

Berman - Myrtle

‘she seeks liberation through material display’

Thomas Parke d’Invilliers epigraph

Fitzgerald’s own creation, Gatsby becomes the gold hatted man. Just as Fitzgerald fabricates this great poet, Gatsby fabricates his own identity.

Trilling - Wilsons

‘the tragedy of desire’

Bewley - Wilsons

‘the Wilsons exist in the ash grey world of Gatsby’s failure’