Cars and Conversion: Accidents in Twentieth-Century Literature

F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-proclaimed “profound admiration” (Life in Letters 137) of T. S. Eliot shines an important light on Fitzgerald's composition of The Great Gatsby. In October of 1925, Fitzgerald sent a copy of his novel to Eliot with the following inscription: For T.S. EliotGreatest of Living Poetsfrom his enthusiastic worshipperF. Scott Fitzgerald (Life in Letters 128) The following February, he commented to Maxwell Perkins that “T.S. Eliot for whom you know my profound admiration—I think he's the greatest living poet in any language—wrote me he'd read Gatsby three times + thought it was the 1st step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James” (Life in Letters 137).Eliot's influence on Fitzgerald surpassed general awe and inspiration; in fact, there are many indications that The Great Gatsby is in part an emulation of The Waste Land (1922). Several critics have already elucidated this literary relationship, such as Jeffrey Hart, who points out in his article “Rediscovering Fitzgerald” that “Fitzgerald studied The Waste Land … while he was working on Gatsby” and that “[t]he book both salutes Eliot and answers him” (208, 209). Careful readings of each text indeed reveal numerous similarities between The Waste Land and The Great Gatsby. Perhaps the most notable parallel is the presence of the “valley of ashes … the waste land” in Gatsby, home of George and Myrtle Wilson and setting for Myrtle's death (Gatsby 23, 24). Other intriguing echoes of The Waste Land include the water imagery that pervades The Great Gatsby. The “small, foul river” in the valley of ashes seems to be a counterpart of the “dull canal” in The Waste Land (Gatsby 24; Eliot 189). Nick lamenting Gatsby's death by the waters of Long Island Sound evokes Eliot's narrator who weeps by the waters of Leman. Imagery of water and color even suggest a similarity between Fitzgerald's Daisy and Eliot's hyacinth girl. When Daisy meets Gatsby at Nick's house, she appears “under the dripping bare lilac trees…. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops” (Gatsby 85). Similarly, Eliot's hyacinth girl returns “from the Hyacinth garden,” her “arms full, and [her] hair wet” (37, 38).Just as The Great Gatsby is indebted to The Waste Land, so too is The Waste Land indebted—“deeply … indebted,” to use Eliot's own words—to Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920). In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot credits Weston's book for “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem” (21). Weston, a lifelong scholar of grail texts, wrote From Ritual to Romance as a culmination of her studies of pre-classical, classical, and medieval myth. From her enormous breadth and depth of research, she drew the conclusion that the grail legends are not rooted in Christianity or British folklore, but in the secret rituals of pre-Christian fertility cults. The symbolism that Eliot adopted from Weston's book includes not only that of the grail quest, but of these fertility rituals as well. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot says of From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890–1915) that “anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies” (21).Themes of fertility, regeneration, and the quest are similarly important in The Great Gatsby. The quest motif in particular has received much attention from critics. Owing heavily to Nick's claim that Gatsby “had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149), most critics have concluded that Gatsby becomes an anti-hero who symbolically capsizes all romantic and honorable notions of a quest by pursuing wealth as a means to win back Daisy. In F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Essay, Edwin Moseley analyzes the novel as an “initiation and quest for the grail,” arguing that The Great Gatsby is “the initiation story of Nick Carraway and the story of Jay Gatsby's misdirected quest” (22). Robert J. Emmitt, in “Love, Death, and Resurrection in The Great Gatsby,” argues that “Gatsby's romantic quest, with its search for a grail and its parodic connotations of the Christian sacrifice, is a parable of the fate of idolatry, and a commentary on its particular American manifestations” (283). In their article “Sangria in the Sangreal: The Great Gatsby as Grail Quest,” D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper characterize Gatsby as a quester and conclude that the grail is “personified by Daisy Buchanan” (203). Similarly, in The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature, Kim Moreland calls Gatsby's story a failed romantic quest and Daisy “a false grail” (143).Indeed, The Great Gatsby is rife with symbols of a quest; however, each of the aforementioned arguments presupposes that the novel's quest motif is ironic, even “parodic.” It seems that none of these critics has considered that perhaps the quest motif has a much more serious, profound, and primeval significance than an ironic comment on contemporary American values.A close reading of The Great Gatsby unveils numerous allusions not only to the grail quest as Weston explains it in From Ritual to Romance but also to the specific mythical elements in which she believes the grail quest is rooted. Considering Fitzgerald's affinity for The Waste Land, he was undoubtedly aware that in the notes to the poem, Eliot states that “Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble” (21). While Fitzgerald's letters do not explicitly mention Weston's work as they do Eliot's, myriad allusions in the novel—along with Eliot's reference to Weston—suggest that Fitzgerald was indeed inspired by From Ritual to Romance and that the grail quest motif in The Great Gatsby, like that in The Waste Land, was influenced by Weston's work. This likely source opens up a new realm of possibility for the significance of the quest in The Great Gatsby and allows us to view Gatsby and Nick not as, respectively, an amoral and a superficial anti-hero, but as archetypal characters in an ancient ritualistic drama.According to Weston, the purpose of the grail quest was not the possession of a material object but, as in the rites of ancient fertility cults, an apotheosis in which the quester gains true knowledge of physical and spiritual life. If we read The Great Gatsby from this perspective, the idea that Daisy is a personification of the grail and that Gatsby plays the role of the quester seems erroneous. As to Nick's assertion that “Gatsby had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149), it is likely that Fitzgerald intended to draw attention to the grail quest motif in the novel, but not in the way that most critics have interpreted it. While there is a dearth of evidence to support the idea that Gatsby mimics the quester and Daisy the grail, abundant evidence exists to suggest an alternative theory: The Great Gatsby is the story of a quest; but not, however, the romantic version of the grail quest associated with King Arthur and Lancelot and the search for a holy relic, nor the quest of Gatsby as he seeks material wealth in pursuit of Daisy. Instead, it is the story of a quest undertaken by Nick Carraway, who seeks gnosis of mortality and divinity, with Gatsby fulfilling the role of the maimed Fisher King who inadvertently leads Nick to his apotheosis. Throughout the novel, thorough evidence verifies that while Gatsby may have “committed himself to the following of a grail” (emphasis added), he is not in fact following the grail. Instead, it is Nick who seeks the grail, and his quest for initiation echoes the rituals of the mystic life cults in which the grail quest is rooted.Before exploring the ways in which The Great Gatsby mirrors the elements of the grail quest presented in From Ritual to Romance, it is necessary to highlight certain aspects of Weston's argument. During her thirty years of studying grail texts, Weston came to doubt the common belief that the myth emerged from either Christianity or British folklore, finding that both explanations of origin proved to be paradoxical, isolated, and disjointed. After studying Frazer's The Golden Bough, she began to formulate an explanation of the grail myth's origins that could reconcile these incongruities. Intriguing similarities between the grail stories and the descriptions of the nature cults in Frazer's book led her to believe that the grail legend may be a record of a life ritual commonly practiced in pre-Christian times and covertly observed in the centuries following the spread of Christianity.The true nature of the grail, Weston claims, can be illuminated by examining the task of the grail quester and its expected results. Scrutinizing the three cycles of the legend that feature Perceval, Gawain, and Galahad as quester/heroes, Weston found that in the majority of existing grail texts, the hero's task is to heal the Fisher King from a debilitating illness or injury, thereby regenerating the king's wasted lands as a result.In most versions of the legend, the exact affliction of the king is quite mysterious. However, Weston discovered in the Sone de Nansai (1250–75) an explanation that she claims applies to all versions in which the king suffers. In this romance, the Fisher King slays the Pagan King of Norway but subsequently falls in love with his daughter, the pagan princess. He baptizes her, though she is not a true believer, then marries her, provoking God's wrath. As punishment for his blasphemy, “His loins are stricken by this bane / From which he suffers lasting pain” (Weston 22). But that is not the only consequence; the Fisher King's infirmity not only emasculates him but renders his lands infertile as a result. As such, it is necessary for the hero to heal the king and in so doing, to restore his lands to vitality.This theme can be traced to earlier literature, most notably to the Rig Veda, or The Thousand and One Hymns (ca. 1500–1200 BC). Written in ancient India and sacred to Hindus, this collection of hymns and praises of the mainly agrarian Aryan population is dedicated to Indra, the god responsible for the rains. More significantly, Indra is praised in the Rig Veda for the “freeing of the waters” (Weston 26); when the evil giant Vritra imprisoned the seven rivers of India and thus imposed drought and starvation on the people, Indra slew him, freeing the rivers from their captivity and restoring the lands back to life and fertility. Weston notes that Indra's accomplishment is the same for which Perceval and Gawain are exalted in grail legend.Like the ancient Aryans who worshipped Indra, most nature cults personified the seasons, weather patterns, vegetation, and other natural elements as divine figures that resembled humans and their experiences. Since these deities symbolized the natural processes of the earth, they were believed to progress from birth to death in the course of a year. One of the primary examples that Weston cites is the Phoenician-Greek god Adonis, who represented the spirit of vegetation. Adonis's annual disappearance into the underworld brought death and sadness to the land; when he returned again in the spring, restoring his reproductive energies to earth, there was tremendous cause for celebration among the nature cults: vegetation bloomed, animals gave birth, and rivers flooded the plains (Weston 40, 43–44).A significant element in the story of Adonis is his cause of death: the vengeful Ares, jealous of Adonis's love affair with Aphrodite, sends a wild boar to wound Adonis mortally in the thigh. Interestingly, Weston points out, scholars generally agree that Adonis's thigh wound is euphemistic for an emasculating injury that symbolizes earth's infertility, with which his death is associated (Weston 43–44). The story of Adonis, a divine youth beloved by a goddess, whose loss of reproductive abilities came to represent the degeneration of earth in autumn and winter, bears a remarkable resemblance to the Fisher King's loss of fecundity, and that of his lands, as punishment for his love of a pagan princess.A final critical point in Weston's argument is her discussion of the “central rite” that explains the mystery of the grail. She tells us that nature cult rituals consisted of two separate rites: public celebrations, in which feasting and other physical pleasures were enjoyed by all members of the cult, and mystery rites observed by only a select few, in which the benefits were individual, spiritual, and often “aimed at … the attainment of a conscious, ecstatic union with the god” (140). These rituals, Weston claims, lie at the very heart of grail legend, for the secret of the grail is “a double initiation into the source of the lower and higher spheres of Life,” the lower sphere being knowledge of human life upon earth, the higher sphere being an understanding of the spiritual forces of life (159). Just as the ancient initiates sought a union with the gods of the nature cults, who transcended earthly existence by bringing the divine gifts of water and vegetation to an ailing land, so the grail quester seeks the ability to heal the king—who, like the fertility gods, embodies humanity and its struggles—thus achieving gnosis of human life.A critical reading of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of From Ritual to Romance reveals numerous striking parallels not only between Gatsby and the Fisher King, but between Gatsby and Adonis as well. Furthermore, extensive evidence links Nick to both the quester in grail legend and to his predecessor, the initiate of the mystic life cults. In many compelling ways, the roles of Daisy and Tom, as well as the novel's setting and plot, further support this theory.To Weston, the Fisher King is “the very essence” of the grail story; he “stand[s] between his people and the land, and the unseen forces which control their destiny”—namely the drought that wastes his lands as a consequence of his illness and the rains that result from his salvation (136). Like the Fisher King, Gatsby's life stages seem to function with the forces of nature. Several of the novel's important events, especially those pertaining directly to Gatsby, occur at a change of seasons. Nick arrives in Gatsby's domain of West Egg around the time of the summer solstice; “with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees,” he feels “that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer” (4), and indeed his life takes a new turn when he meets Gatsby. The day that Daisy and Gatsby choose to reveal their affair to Tom—also the day of Myrtle's death—is “almost the last, certainly the warmest, day of summer” (114). Most importantly, the day on which Gatsby is killed holds “an autumn flavor in the air.” Gatsby's death is sprinkled with images of autumn: it is a “cool, lovely day” when Gatsby walks to his pool against the backdrop of “yellowing trees,” and his gardener tells him that he intends to drain the pool since “leaves'll be falling pretty soon” (153). When Gatsby's body is later discovered, “a small gust of wind” blows the mattress on which he floats, and around it revolves “a cluster of leaves” (162). The autumnal setting of Gatsby's death evokes the death of Adonis, predecessor to the Fisher King; in Cyprus, Adonis's death falls “on the 23rd of September, his resurrection on the 1st of October,” and his feast is celebrated on the autumnal equinox (Weston 46). Given Nick's references to the weather, it is likely that Gatsby's death also falls on or around 23 September, the day after what Nick calls “almost the last … day of summer.”Not only the timing but also the imagery of Gatsby's death highlights a fascinating similarity between Gatsby, Adonis, and the Fisher King. Gatsby is discovered floating on a “laden mattress” that “moved irregularly down the pool” like a bier carrying him to a watery grave (162). This scene resembles Weston's description of the “ceremonies of mourning for the dead god” Adonis, in which mourners “commit[ed] his effigy to the waves”; in some variations of the ceremony an effigy or head was borne “by a current … to Byblos” (Weston 47). Furthermore, in grail legend, the quester often upon at the grail a dead on a bier … or a king on a (Weston The of Gatsby's death scene mirrors these images of Adonis's and the grail king's a point also by Jeffrey Hart, who argues that the Gatsby himself by dead leaves in his death by like the dead fertility god of the of the Fisher King in rains that his Adonis's annual death and resurrection the that life to the Gatsby's immediately the his to Adonis and the Fisher King, it that in Gatsby's death we of The setting of Gatsby's is in the and in a the a and by a of Gatsby's wet to the As the the of are the dead that the falls to which to with this the mythical of Gatsby's As as Gatsby is to the forces of the earth, it is natural that his resurrection to the lands on which the of Long Island only a Nick the of the that Gatsby's death: As my emerged from the into only the of the the at The of the on the of the to me for a while into her and as her her into with a and its are by this which is by Gatsby's death and the that the day of his as the of both the Fisher King and Adonis and life back to their own Gatsby's with the him to the Fisher so his with water the Weston tells us that “the Grail is in the close of either on or the or on the of an important and that “the presence of either or is an important feature in the Adonis As many critics have already out, water images The Great on the is by This of water symbolism can be with the notable presence of the grail motif by reading Gatsby as the Fisher King and not the the Fisher King whose is in the close of Gatsby's physical to Long Island Sound is in descriptions of his much like a Gatsby's home is to de in with a on … and a Gatsby's is from the across from which “the of Egg the we a double to the grail Gatsby's is not only the but also as a its on the Gatsby's is often by its as is Gatsby him, Nick says that have the that Gatsby from the of Nick Gatsby, in his mythical wealth and his on the Gatsby's was story that in a at but in a that like a and was up and down the Long Island Gatsby's in his and Nick explains that in the I his from the of his or the on the of his while his two the water of the over of In the of the is with out at a Gatsby's on the of and and and Nick himself and of as “a of at the “the had and floating in the Sound was a of a to the of the The imagery that Fitzgerald when Nick later Gatsby's who include who was last summer up in … the … … S. … the and the and says Weston, a of which explains the significance of the of Fisher King However, a more specific origin of the can be found in Robert de of (ca. the text to of the Weston explains that the of that holy and his in the certain of the into the of a with the a mystic of which the was as though in other versions of the story “the is as a This story of of the mystic between Gatsby and the Fisher King. If we read the descriptions of Gatsby's we a of any description of Gatsby too a mystic against of and and to a Gatsby's a and who and their “on the of Gatsby's are as of the for certainly they are among the the feast is Gatsby, like the of Gatsby's some of the most compelling evidence Gatsby to the Fisher King and Like Adonis, Gatsby becomes the of it is that rites of the Adonis cults, which Weston numerous versions of grail legend, are also practiced at Gatsby's belief that Adonis each autumn and came back to life each was cause for and celebration by rites of a very specific nature. to The of the the birth and death rites of the Adonis cults “the of and the of and (Weston 46). Weston some intriguing of these that “the most notable feature of the ritual was the to that is the who for and him to his all Furthermore, very these was that of the hair in of the an that also to the of the cults. in grail legend, we upon the grail king on a when the injury to that by Weston notes “the presence of a or in the grail as well as “the of a who has her hair as a result of the … of the Fisher of these bears a to at Gatsby's “the of and the of and Gatsby's feature “a of and and and and and and and The as the the earth from the … the of a and “by the had In the small of the there is as the later Nick the and of a in which “a … had for some and to the already of the Gatsby's house, when the has its we are of a from a in She had a of and the course of her she had that was very was not only she was there was a in the she it with and then up the again in a The down her The presence of this resembles the in the Adonis rituals and in grail Furthermore, of the who has her in grail legend and the who their hair in the nature cult rituals is the presence at Gatsby's of with in new In these may be as but a of the and the of the may to the at the however, when with the numerous other allusions presented in this these images cult ritual grail also in her explanation of the origin of the grail to a ritual of the as they worshipped their god Indra, of the in this of and … are as in the same These presented as and as Weston on to that “the of notably of what we may as a to natural is among we a parallel to feature of Gatsby's in who a in the of an was on the in the … a great of or the for a of the of the or the the people were all over the while bursts of the summer A of who out to be the in a in The similarity between the who to Indra, predecessor of Adonis and of the Fisher King, and the who in celebration of the that is a to Gatsby's be nor can it be is to read Gatsby as a can Gatsby's be as an of the of the a of and for Nick feels at point in the that “the scene had into and The significance that Nick evokes the of and of the nature the and of the may but they are on the of their god (Weston 46). Gatsby, whose energies are to “the of a and (Gatsby becomes the god of these who his his his him in their for were him from those who had found that it was necessary to in this secret that Gatsby is a a even a are in of and more than of Gatsby's to a being further Gatsby's role as counterpart to Adonis and the Fisher becomes even when we the love affair between Gatsby and Daisy and its his Gatsby the affliction of Adonis and the Fisher King, who emasculating as punishment for

F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-proclaimed “profound admiration” (Life in Letters 137) of T. S. Eliot shines an important light on Fitzgerald's composition of The Great Gatsby. In October of 1925, Fitzgerald sent a copy of his novel to Eliot with the following inscription: For T.S. EliotGreatest of Living Poetsfrom his enthusiastic worshipperF. Scott Fitzgerald (Life in Letters 128) The following February, he commented to Maxwell Perkins that “T.S. Eliot for whom you know my profound admiration—I think he's the greatest living poet in any language—wrote me he'd read Gatsby three times + thought it was the 1st step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James” (Life in Letters 137).Eliot's influence on Fitzgerald surpassed general awe and inspiration; in fact, there are many indications that The Great Gatsby is in part an emulation of The Waste Land (1922). Several critics have already elucidated this literary relationship, such as Jeffrey Hart, who points out in his article “Rediscovering Fitzgerald” that “Fitzgerald studied The Waste Land … while he was working on Gatsby” and that “[t]he book both salutes Eliot and answers him” (208, 209). Careful readings of each text indeed reveal numerous similarities between The Waste Land and The Great Gatsby. Perhaps the most notable parallel is the presence of the “valley of ashes … the waste land” in Gatsby, home of George and Myrtle Wilson and setting for Myrtle's death (Gatsby 23, 24). Other intriguing echoes of The Waste Land include the water imagery that pervades The Great Gatsby. The “small, foul river” in the valley of ashes seems to be a counterpart of the “dull canal” in The Waste Land (Gatsby 24; Eliot 189). Nick lamenting Gatsby's death by the waters of Long Island Sound evokes Eliot's narrator who weeps by the waters of Leman. Imagery of water and color even suggest a similarity between Fitzgerald's Daisy and Eliot's hyacinth girl. When Daisy meets Gatsby at Nick's house, she appears “under the dripping bare lilac trees…. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops” (Gatsby 85). Similarly, Eliot's hyacinth girl returns “from the Hyacinth garden,” her “arms full, and [her] hair wet” (37, 38).Just as The Great Gatsby is indebted to The Waste Land, so too is The Waste Land indebted—“deeply … indebted,” to use Eliot's own words—to Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920). In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot credits Weston's book for “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem” (21). Weston, a lifelong scholar of grail texts, wrote From Ritual to Romance as a culmination of her studies of pre-classical, classical, and medieval myth. From her enormous breadth and depth of research, she drew the conclusion that the grail legends are not rooted in Christianity or British folklore, but in the secret rituals of pre-Christian fertility cults. The symbolism that Eliot adopted from Weston's book includes not only that of the grail quest, but of these fertility rituals as well. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot says of From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890–1915) that “anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies” (21).Themes of fertility, regeneration, and the quest are similarly important in The Great Gatsby. The quest motif in particular has received much attention from critics. Owing heavily to Nick's claim that Gatsby “had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149), most critics have concluded that Gatsby becomes an anti-hero who symbolically capsizes all romantic and honorable notions of a quest by pursuing wealth as a means to win back Daisy. In F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Essay, Edwin Moseley analyzes the novel as an “initiation and quest for the grail,” arguing that The Great Gatsby is “the initiation story of Nick Carraway and the story of Jay Gatsby's misdirected quest” (22). Robert J. Emmitt, in “Love, Death, and Resurrection in The Great Gatsby,” argues that “Gatsby's romantic quest, with its search for a grail and its parodic connotations of the Christian sacrifice, is a parable of the fate of idolatry, and a commentary on its particular American manifestations” (283). In their article “Sangria in the Sangreal: The Great Gatsby as Grail Quest,” D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper characterize Gatsby as a quester and conclude that the grail is “personified by Daisy Buchanan” (203). Similarly, in The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature, Kim Moreland calls Gatsby's story a failed romantic quest and Daisy “a false grail” (143).Indeed, The Great Gatsby is rife with symbols of a quest; however, each of the aforementioned arguments presupposes that the novel's quest motif is ironic, even “parodic.” It seems that none of these critics has considered that perhaps the quest motif has a much more serious, profound, and primeval significance than an ironic comment on contemporary American values.A close reading of The Great Gatsby unveils numerous allusions not only to the grail quest as Weston explains it in From Ritual to Romance but also to the specific mythical elements in which she believes the grail quest is rooted. Considering Fitzgerald's affinity for The Waste Land, he was undoubtedly aware that in the notes to the poem, Eliot states that “Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble” (21). While Fitzgerald's letters do not explicitly mention Weston's work as they do Eliot's, myriad allusions in the novel—along with Eliot's reference to Weston—suggest that Fitzgerald was indeed inspired by From Ritual to Romance and that the grail quest motif in The Great Gatsby, like that in The Waste Land, was influenced by Weston's work. This likely source opens up a new realm of possibility for the significance of the quest in The Great Gatsby and allows us to view Gatsby and Nick not as, respectively, an amoral and a superficial anti-hero, but as archetypal characters in an ancient ritualistic drama.According to Weston, the purpose of the grail quest was not the possession of a material object but, as in the rites of ancient fertility cults, an apotheosis in which the quester gains true knowledge of physical and spiritual life. If we read The Great Gatsby from this perspective, the idea that Daisy is a personification of the grail and that Gatsby plays the role of the quester seems erroneous. As to Nick's assertion that “Gatsby had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149), it is likely that Fitzgerald intended to draw attention to the grail quest motif in the novel, but not in the way that most critics have interpreted it. While there is a dearth of evidence to support the idea that Gatsby mimics the quester and Daisy the grail, abundant evidence exists to suggest an alternative theory: The Great Gatsby is the story of a quest; but not, however, the romantic version of the grail quest associated with King Arthur and Lancelot and the search for a holy relic, nor the quest of Gatsby as he seeks material wealth in pursuit of Daisy. Instead, it is the story of a quest undertaken by Nick Carraway, who seeks gnosis of mortality and divinity, with Gatsby fulfilling the role of the maimed Fisher King who inadvertently leads Nick to his apotheosis. Throughout the novel, thorough evidence verifies that while Gatsby may have “committed himself to the following of a grail” (emphasis added), he is not in fact following the grail. Instead, it is Nick who seeks the grail, and his quest for initiation echoes the rituals of the mystic life cults in which the grail quest is rooted.Before exploring the ways in which The Great Gatsby mirrors the elements of the grail quest presented in From Ritual to Romance, it is necessary to highlight certain aspects of Weston's argument. During her thirty years of studying grail texts, Weston came to doubt the common belief that the myth emerged from either Christianity or British folklore, finding that both explanations of origin proved to be paradoxical, isolated, and disjointed. After studying Frazer's The Golden Bough, she began to formulate an explanation of the grail myth's origins that could reconcile these incongruities. Intriguing similarities between the grail stories and the descriptions of the nature cults in Frazer's book led her to believe that the grail legend may be a record of a life ritual commonly practiced in pre-Christian times and covertly observed in the centuries following the spread of Christianity.The true nature of the grail, Weston claims, can be illuminated by examining the task of the grail quester and its expected results. Scrutinizing the three cycles of the legend that feature Perceval, Gawain, and Galahad as quester/heroes, Weston found that in the majority of existing grail texts, the hero's task is to heal the Fisher King from a debilitating illness or injury, thereby regenerating the king's wasted lands as a result.In most versions of the legend, the exact affliction of the king is quite mysterious. However, Weston discovered in the Sone de Nansai (1250–75) an explanation that she claims applies to all versions in which the king suffers. In this romance, the Fisher King slays the Pagan King of Norway but subsequently falls in love with his daughter, the pagan princess. He baptizes her, though she is not a true believer, then marries her, provoking God's wrath. As punishment for his blasphemy, “His loins are stricken by this bane / From which he suffers lasting pain” (Weston 22). But that is not the only consequence; the Fisher King's infirmity not only emasculates him but renders his lands infertile as a result. As such, it is necessary for the hero to heal the king and in so doing, to restore his lands to vitality.This theme can be traced to earlier literature, most notably to the Rig Veda, or The Thousand and One Hymns (ca. 1500–1200 BC). Written in ancient India and sacred to Hindus, this collection of hymns and praises of the mainly agrarian Aryan population is dedicated to Indra, the god responsible for the rains. More significantly, Indra is praised in the Rig Veda for the “freeing of the waters” (Weston 26); when the evil giant Vritra imprisoned the seven rivers of India and thus imposed drought and starvation on the people, Indra slew him, freeing the rivers from their captivity and restoring the lands back to life and fertility. Weston notes that Indra's accomplishment is the same for which Perceval and Gawain are exalted in grail legend.Like the ancient Aryans who worshipped Indra, most nature cults personified the seasons, weather patterns, vegetation, and other natural elements as divine figures that resembled humans and their experiences. Since these deities symbolized the natural processes of the earth, they were believed to progress from birth to death in the course of a year. One of the primary examples that Weston cites is the Phoenician-Greek god Adonis, who represented the spirit of vegetation. Adonis's annual disappearance into the underworld brought death and sadness to the land; when he returned again in the spring, restoring his reproductive energies to earth, there was tremendous cause for celebration among the nature cults: vegetation bloomed, animals gave birth, and rivers flooded the plains (Weston 40, 43–44).A significant element in the story of Adonis is his cause of death: the vengeful Ares, jealous of Adonis's love affair with Aphrodite, sends a wild boar to wound Adonis mortally in the thigh. Interestingly, Weston points out, scholars generally agree that Adonis's thigh wound is euphemistic for an emasculating injury that symbolizes earth's infertility, with which his death is associated (Weston 43–44). The story of Adonis, a divine youth beloved by a goddess, whose loss of reproductive abilities came to represent the degeneration of earth in autumn and winter, bears a remarkable resemblance to the Fisher King's loss of fecundity, and that of his lands, as punishment for his love of a pagan princess.A final critical point in Weston's argument is her discussion of the “central rite” that explains the mystery of the grail. She tells us that nature cult rituals consisted of two separate rites: public celebrations, in which feasting and other physical pleasures were enjoyed by all members of the cult, and mystery rites observed by only a select few, in which the benefits were individual, spiritual, and often “aimed at … the attainment of a conscious, ecstatic union with the god” (140). These rituals, Weston claims, lie at the very heart of grail legend, for the secret of the grail is “a double initiation into the source of the lower and higher spheres of Life,” the lower sphere being knowledge of human life upon earth, the higher sphere being an understanding of the spiritual forces of life (159). Just as the ancient initiates sought a union with the gods of the nature cults, who transcended earthly existence by bringing the divine gifts of water and vegetation to an ailing land, so the grail quester seeks the ability to heal the king—who, like the fertility gods, embodies humanity and its struggles—thus achieving gnosis of human life.A critical reading of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of From Ritual to Romance reveals numerous striking parallels not only between Gatsby and the Fisher King, but between Gatsby and Adonis as well. Furthermore, extensive evidence links Nick to both the quester in grail legend and to his predecessor, the initiate of the mystic life cults. In many compelling ways, the roles of Daisy and Tom, as well as the novel's setting and plot, further support this theory.To Weston, the Fisher King is “the very essence” of the grail story; he “stand[s] between his people and the land, and the unseen forces which control their destiny”—namely the drought that wastes his lands as a consequence of his illness and the rains that result from his salvation (136). Like the Fisher King, Gatsby's life stages seem to function with the forces of nature. Several of the novel's important events, especially those pertaining directly to Gatsby, occur at a change of seasons. Nick arrives in Gatsby's domain of West Egg around the time of the summer solstice; “with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees,” he feels “that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer” (4), and indeed his life takes a new turn when he meets Gatsby. The day that Daisy and Gatsby choose to reveal their affair to Tom—also the day of Myrtle's death—is “almost the last, certainly the warmest, day of summer” (114). Most importantly, the day on which Gatsby is killed holds “an autumn flavor in the air.” Gatsby's death is sprinkled with images of autumn: it is a “cool, lovely day” when Gatsby walks to his pool against the backdrop of “yellowing trees,” and his gardener tells him that he intends to drain the pool since “leaves'll be falling pretty soon” (153). When Gatsby's body is later discovered, “a small gust of wind” blows the mattress on which he floats, and around it revolves “a cluster of leaves” (162). The autumnal setting of Gatsby's death evokes the death of Adonis, predecessor to the Fisher King; in Cyprus, Adonis's death falls “on the 23rd of September, his resurrection on the 1st of October,” and his feast is celebrated on the autumnal equinox (Weston 46). Given Nick's references to the weather, it is likely that Gatsby's death also falls on or around 23 September, the day after what Nick calls “almost the last … day of summer.”Not only the timing but also the imagery of Gatsby's death highlights a fascinating similarity between Gatsby, Adonis, and the Fisher King. Gatsby is discovered floating on a “laden mattress” that “moved irregularly down the pool” like a bier carrying him to a watery grave (162). This scene resembles Weston's description of the “ceremonies of mourning for the dead god” Adonis, in which mourners “commit[ed] his effigy to the waves”; in some variations of the ceremony an effigy or head was borne “by a current … to Byblos” (Weston 47). Furthermore, in grail legend, the quester often upon at the grail a dead on a bier … or a king on a (Weston The of Gatsby's death scene mirrors these images of Adonis's and the grail king's a point also by Jeffrey Hart, who argues that the Gatsby himself by dead leaves in his death by like the dead fertility god of the of the Fisher King in rains that his Adonis's annual death and resurrection the that life to the Gatsby's immediately the his to Adonis and the Fisher King, it that in Gatsby's death we of The setting of Gatsby's is in the and in a the a and by a of Gatsby's wet to the As the the of are the dead that the falls to which to with this the mythical of Gatsby's As as Gatsby is to the forces of the earth, it is natural that his resurrection to the lands on which the of Long Island only a Nick the of the that Gatsby's death: As my emerged from the into only the of the the at The of the on the of the to me for a while into her and as her her into with a and its are by this which is by Gatsby's death and the that the day of his as the of both the Fisher King and Adonis and life back to their own Gatsby's with the him to the Fisher so his with water the Weston tells us that “the Grail is in the close of either on or the or on the of an important and that “the presence of either or is an important feature in the Adonis As many critics have already out, water images The Great on the is by This of water symbolism can be with the notable presence of the grail motif by reading Gatsby as the Fisher King and not the the Fisher King whose is in the close of Gatsby's physical to Long Island Sound is in descriptions of his much like a Gatsby's home is to de in with a on … and a Gatsby's is from the across from which “the of Egg the we a double to the grail Gatsby's is not only the but also as a its on the Gatsby's is often by its as is Gatsby him, Nick says that have the that Gatsby from the of Nick Gatsby, in his mythical wealth and his on the Gatsby's was story that in a at but in a that like a and was up and down the Long Island Gatsby's in his and Nick explains that in the I his from the of his or the on the of his while his two the water of the over of In the of the is with out at a Gatsby's on the of and and and Nick himself and of as “a of at the “the had and floating in the Sound was a of a to the of the The imagery that Fitzgerald when Nick later Gatsby's who include who was last summer up in … the … … S. … the and the and says Weston, a of which explains the significance of the of Fisher King However, a more specific origin of the can be found in Robert de of (ca. the text to of the Weston explains that the of that holy and his in the certain of the into the of a with the a mystic of which the was as though in other versions of the story “the is as a This story of of the mystic between Gatsby and the Fisher King. If we read the descriptions of Gatsby's we a of any description of Gatsby too a mystic against of and and to a Gatsby's a and who and their “on the of Gatsby's are as of the for certainly they are among the the feast is Gatsby, like the of Gatsby's some of the most compelling evidence Gatsby to the Fisher King and Like Adonis, Gatsby becomes the of it is that rites of the Adonis cults, which Weston numerous versions of grail legend, are also practiced at Gatsby's belief that Adonis each autumn and came back to life each was cause for and celebration by rites of a very specific nature. to The of the the birth and death rites of the Adonis cults “the of and the of and (Weston 46). Weston some intriguing of these that “the most notable feature of the ritual was the to that is the who for and him to his all Furthermore, very these was that of the hair in of the an that also to the of the cults. in grail legend, we upon the grail king on a when the injury to that by Weston notes “the presence of a or in the grail as well as “the of a who has her hair as a result of the … of the Fisher of these bears a to at Gatsby's “the of and the of and Gatsby's feature “a of and and and and and and and The as the the earth from the … the of a and “by the had In the small of the there is as the later Nick the and of a in which “a … had for some and to the already of the Gatsby's house, when the has its we are of a from a in She had a of and the course of her she had that was very was not only she was there was a in the she it with and then up the again in a The down her The presence of this resembles the in the Adonis rituals and in grail Furthermore, of the who has her in grail legend and the who their hair in the nature cult rituals is the presence at Gatsby's of with in new In these may be as but a of the and the of the may to the at the however, when with the numerous other allusions presented in this these images cult ritual grail also in her explanation of the origin of the grail to a ritual of the as they worshipped their god Indra, of the in this of and … are as in the same These presented as and as Weston on to that “the of notably of what we may as a to natural is among we a parallel to feature of Gatsby's in who a in the of an was on the in the … a great of or the for a of the of the or the the people were all over the while bursts of the summer A of who out to be the in a in The similarity between the who to Indra, predecessor of Adonis and of the Fisher King, and the who in celebration of the that is a to Gatsby's be nor can it be is to read Gatsby as a can Gatsby's be as an of the of the a of and for Nick feels at point in the that “the scene had into and The significance that Nick evokes the of and of the nature the and of the may but they are on the of their god (Weston 46). Gatsby, whose energies are to “the of a and (Gatsby becomes the god of these who his his his him in their for were him from those who had found that it was necessary to in this secret that Gatsby is a a even a are in of and more than of Gatsby's to a being further Gatsby's role as counterpart to Adonis and the Fisher becomes even when we the love affair between Gatsby and Daisy and its his Gatsby the affliction of Adonis and the Fisher King, who emasculating as punishment for

The article analyzes the features of the journey of the main character of V. V. Nabokov's novel «King, Queen, Knave». The trivial situation of the hero moving from the province to the capital in search of success turns into a metaphysical journey in the book, the mythological and literary roots of which go back to the «Divine Comedy» by Dante Alighieri. In a collapsed, metaphorical form, this plot manifests itself at the very beginning of «King, Queen, Knave», when the hero moves on a train from a third-class carriage to a second-class carriage. At the same time, Nabokov ironically compares this transition with moving from hell to heaven. The novel «King, Queen, Knave» is full of mistakes that the characters make due to their physical (in Franz) and spiritual (in everyone) blindness, but the main mistake of the book is the aberration of perception of the inner reality of loved ones, which determines the distortion of the reception of the external world. Instead of ascending to heaven, Franz finds himself in a state of being in the lower circles, where adulterers and murderers are tormented. Nabokov simultaneously follows Dante's scheme and ironically rejects it: Franz in Nabokov's optics is a spiritually untenable and static hero, and the world is largely based on random event couplings. Nevertheless, the plot of the real and metaphysical movement of the hero in «King, Queen, Knave» demonstrates the situation of tragic self-deception of a person making a journey from hell to hell. The relevance of the article is determined by the continuing interest of Russian and foreign literary criticism in the semantic and poetic multilayeredness and density of Nabokov's texts, to the specifics of their plot, to the peculiarities of their character system, to the originality of their motivic system, etc.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire are exemplary works of art that continue to push the boundaries of aesthetic and ethical literary theory. Critics and theorists alike once strove to categorize these tenets so central to Nabokov’s work, but in current reviews many have chosen to defer a deterministic analysis of the novel’s themes and instead relegate the philosophical and artistic value of his texts to the realm of “potustoronnost” (“otherworld”). This paper argues that the artistic puzzle that motivates such a critical assessment is in fact more complexly related to Nabokov’s strong opinions about art, aesthetics, and ethics, and ignoring a finer analysis of these themes renders a general term such as “otherworld” unsatisfactory. My research explores two principle motifs—reality and imagination—in an attempt to join Nabokov’s artistic mechanisms with his well-established aesthetic and ethical axioms. Additionally, I invoke the preceding work of Gustauve Flaubert, Madame Bovary, in order to demonstrate how Nabokov has, almost a century later, complemented Flaubert’s negative representation of art’s integration into his characters’ average realities (via a literary critique of interested aesthetics) with a positive, humanistic perspective that invokes moral sentiment. This essay strives to show how beauty and morality connect reality and imagination to aesthetics and ethics; and ultimately, how these interrelationships provide a dimensionality to art that invites the thoughtful reader to an elevated state of “aesthetic bliss.” I offer a refreshing perspective on Nabokov’s artistic priority of attaining “aesthetic bliss” that synthesizes and expands upon the current dialogue.

High school and university students—and I've taught both—like to communicate with mystery, which likely accounts for the persistence of rituals even in this day of a post-lost, millennial generation, now nearly a hundred years removed from the one that Fitzgerald declared “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (Paradise 260). Students, I think, are excited when they discover that some mysteries do, in fact, remain—and that contact with them is possible through works of fiction, quite often through short stories, taught in high school or university classrooms. These mysteries seem often associated with a place, whether a room, or a building, or a patch of soil, or a city that has been touched, even if just for a moment, by enchantment. Among many examples, Faulkner transforms Oxford, Mississippi, into Jefferson, located in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in “A Rose for Emily” (1930), just one of his many works located in this setting; Sherwood Anderson immortalizes Clyde, Ohio, as Winesburg, Ohio, in the often-anthologized story “Hands” from Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Zora Neale Hurston mythologizes her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, as the home of Janie and Joe Starks in “Matt Bonner's Mule,” a section taken from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and frequently anthologized as a story. The list of literal places touched by a writer's magic and transformed into mythic settings that house mystery—that is, settings that create representations of reality that defy easy access through the senses—is long.Fitzgerald, of course, touched many actual places in this way, creating enchanted worlds sprung free of actual time and place and existing in a dimension filled with mystery. An actual Montana dude ranch that Fitzgerald once visited is now and forever also a diamond mountain as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Manhasset Neck and Great Neck, New York, will also never cease to be the mythical East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby, as Louisville, Kentucky, will remain the enchanted Louisville of Gatsby and Daisy's first love, which keeps its actual name in Gatsby, but which also in the non-fictional world honors its mythic status through ongoing disputes over which house in Louisville was actually the house that belonged to Daisy Fay's parents in the novel. A less-often discussed example of Fitzgerald's touching a specific place with enchantment and, in the process, mythologizing it, is that of Montgomery, Alabama, which becomes the fictional town of Tarleton, Georgia, a thinly disguised Montgomery of the 1920s. The three stories in the group set in Tarleton—“The Ice Palace” (1920), “The Jelly-Bean” (1920), and “The Last of the Belles” (1928), now known as the Tarleton Trilogy—are among Fitzgerald's best stories. Whether read and studied singly or as a group, these stories, in my experience, draw students in by inviting them to examine the ways by which Montgomery, the place where Scott and Zelda fell in love, becomes the mythic Tarleton, an enchanted place where the mystery that was and is romantic love, remained alive, though certainly not always entirely well, from the first story in the trilogy to the last.Early in the final story in the trilogy, “The Last of the Belles,” the narrator, Andy, reveals retrospectively that love and mystery are at the heart of all three stories. He informs the reader that he has been told that there are “only three girls” in Tarleton, a fact that interests him because “there was something magical about there being three girls” (Short Stories 450). Each girl is loved romantically by at least one man in each story, and each of the love stories provides the central focus of its narrative: Harry Bellamy loves Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace”; Jim Powell loves Nancy Lamar in “The Jelly-Bean”; Andy loves Ailie Calhoun in “The Last of the Belles.” In each case the reader is led to question, not each man's conviction that what he feels for each of the women is love, but rather whether the passion is for something that is less personal than the individual herself—a question familiar to readers of The Great Gatsby. In the case of Harry's love in “The Ice Palace,” is it Sally Carrol that he loves, or is it the exotic South that she so strongly identifies with and finally winds up choosing over the life Harry could offer her in the North? In Jim Powell's case, he says of Nancy Lamar, “I love her…. God!” (Short Stories 156); but the reader cannot ignore the subtext of Jim's feelings of social inadequacy that have perhaps led him to an idealization of this local doctor's daughter, a woman of privilege who has the luxury of declaring love for him in a moment of drunkenness and then proceeding on the same night to marry a man of higher social standing and more money than Jim. And in “The Last of the Belles,” Andy is fully convinced years after he had last seen Ailie Calhoun that he cares about her enough to return from his home in the North to Tarleton and marry her. When they are reunited he realizes that he had always been “deeply and incurably in love with her” (Short Stories 461). After he tells this to Ailie and asks her to marry him, she quickly turns him down because, as she says, she doesn't love him “that way” and, moreover, she could never “marry a Northern man” (Short Stories 461). The reader is left to question on what this love that Andy is convinced he feels for Ailie is founded. There is the hint that it is related to his wish to recapture a part of his youth and to his infatuation with the South. With Ailie gone, he realizes, “the South would be empty for [him] forever” (Short Stories 463).In all three Tarleton stories, Fitzgerald interrogates the subject of romantic love and its mysteries. However, in each story of the trilogy he complicates the love stories by closely connecting the passion that these men feel for the three women of Tarleton to other considerations—considerations of place (all of the women are associated with a magical city in the exotic South), of changing gender constructions (the three women exist in a time of dramatically increased freedom for women), and of social class (the personalities of all three women as well as their futures are, to some degree, tied to the privilege of their social position). The world of Tarleton is both of its time—that is, anchored in the rich cultural history of the Jazz Age—and beyond its time, sealed in the land of myth. In my experience of teaching all three of the Tarleton stories, I have found that they invite the reader both to enter contextually the world of 1920s Montgomery out of which the stories literally came and also to confront the world of mystery at the heart of three of Fitzgerald's most enchanted love stories.The roundtable discussion that follows addresses both of these worlds, and offers strategies for allowing students to view the Tarleton stories from many different perspectives.F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing is used in post-secondary classrooms around the world. While The Great Gatsby is his most widely recognized work, it is only one of his many texts taught in schools, from “Winter Dreams” (1922) to “Babylon Revisited” (1931). After all, there are approximately 175 short stories in his oeuvre, and over the years, critics have devoted more and more attention to his shorter works, offering educators a vast amount of secondary criticism to support their pedagogy.1 Three stories particularly useful in the classroom are “The Ice Palace,” “The Jelly-Bean,” and “The Last of the Belles.” Collectively known as the Tarleton Trilogy, these stories have received critical attention from academics since Arther Mizener discussed them in his 1951 biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise.2 In recent years, the Tarleton stories have been used in a number of university classrooms across North America.3What we lack, however, is pedagogy-oriented criticism that addresses the stories as educational tools. How exactly can the Tarleton Trilogy be used to foster learning experiences? As with many Fitzgerald stories, the trio offers a variety of possibilities. This roundtable will examine the Tarleton Trilogy from a pedagogical perspective, placing emphasis on deep learning.4 More specifically, it will describe the teaching philosophy and practices of Stella, a hypothetical professor, to illustrate how the trilogy might be used to foster critical inquiry by engaging dialogue and robust collaboration in a post-secondary setting.Varied classroom activities often lead students to take different approaches to their learning. A surface approach to learning “involves minimum engagement with the task, [and] typically a focus on memorization or applying procedures that do not involve reflection” (Smith and Colby 206). Conversely, in a deep learning approach, “the student focuses on relationships between various aspects of the content, formulates hypothesis or beliefs about the structure of the problem or concept, and relates more to obtaining an intrinsic interest in learning and understanding” (Smith and Colby 206). While surface learning and deep learning approaches are not defined as inherently good or bad processes, it is important to recognize that they are influenced by different approaches to teaching and assessment and may lead to very different sorts of learning experiences. In the following situations, Stella uses several teaching practices likely to inspire students to take deep learning approaches to their educational experience.Stella teaches in the English Department of her university. Her core research interests include social justice, self-identity, and modern American literature. She believes that for students to become invested in their learning they need to encounter planted opportunities to solve problems. She also holds that classrooms should be spaces where teachers and students engage in thoughtful dialogue on a variety of matters, including social issues.5 When teaching, Stella strives to foster an atmosphere that is conductive to collaboration and critical inquiry.To foster engaging learning experiences, Stella believes that teachers need to respond to the learning context. When reflecting on her own context, she asks herself a number of critical questions before preparing for a course, including the following: Who are the students? What do they know and what are they able to do? What are the skills they need to develop through taking this course, and why are these skills important? Stella believes that formulating these questions helps her to devise and facilitate learner-centered experiences. Moreover, she believes that deep learning experiences should present students with opportunities to solve problems creatively, collaborate, and critically inquire. She believes that students should have a voice, and she encourages students to articulate how they strategize their own work. Stella believes that student-centered deep learning shifts students from the more passive dynamic of information consumption to the more active interplay of dialogue and meta-cognitive awareness. Ultimately, she feels that learning is an intersection of context, active learning, and student engagement.One summer, Stella was given a copy of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Matthew J. Bruccoli's extensive 1981 biography of Scott Fitzgerald, revised in 1993 and 2002. With interest, she noted that Bruccoli described “The Last of the Belles” as a story that “examines the Yankee narrator's response to the South as expressed through his feelings for Ailie Calhoun” (267). Reading this passage prompted Stella to revisit the Tarleton Trilogy, and what follows is a description of three different contexts within which she used the stories in her teaching.Before choosing stories for her courses, Stella asks herself this question: What is the desired learning I intend to foster? Which stories could be used to support this learning? To address these questions, she reflects on the learning context within which she is teaching. Stella concludes that her twentieth-century literature class would benefit from further developing their critical literary skills. After all, critical literacy helps readers analyze thoughtfully the texts they encounter in their everyday lives. Struck by the retrospective nature and socio-cultural dimensions of the “The Last of the Belles,” Stella decides to use the story as an object and tool of study.Drawing from the socio-cultural dimensions of the story, she sets the following two learning outcomes: (1) identify key aspects of the socio-cultural context within which a story was written and published, and (2) draw conclusions from fictional social contexts regarding wider social issues. While both learning outcomes have benefits, the second can help to open critical conversations about social issues of the past and then compare and contrast them to issues of the present. “The Last of the Belles” struck Stella. From the perspective of the narrator's present time, the late 1920s, Andy gazes back to his past. He recalls a summer he was stationed in Tarleton, Georgia, Fitzgerald's fictionalized version of his wife Zelda's hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.In Stella's view, while critics have given limited attention to the socio-cultural dimensions of “The Last of the Belles,” the story presents a number of pedagogical possibilities in this regard.6 Consequently, she decides that a key question for her students to explore would be what “The Last of the Belles” can tell us about gender, class, and ethno-racial identity in 1920s America. Stella opens this unit by exploring the concept of socio-cultural context with her class. At the start of her first lesson she poses the following questions: What is socio-cultural context and what is a social issue?What do we need to know better to understand these things?During this discussion Stella invites students to list different dimensions of socio-cultural context on the board. Some key ideas the class identifies include ethno-racial identity, class, and gender. Stella makes a point of highlighting these three dimensions, informing students that as the unit continued they would reexamine the story in relation to these important dimensions of Fitzgerald's context. She also informs the class that learning about Fitzgerald's context will lead students to draw conclusions about his society, and make connections to their own.Stella then asks the class this question: How can we, as readers, learn about the context within which a writer writes and publishes? As the class brainstorms a number of ideas Stella invites some students to write their ideas on the board. She then focuses students on Fitzgerald himself by asking: How can we learn about the personal context within which Fitzgerald wrote and published “The Last of the Belles”? As the class discusses this question, students identify a variety of ways they might learn about Fitzgerald's context, including reading his correspondence and examining the ledger in which he recorded not only biographical events but also his earnings and sales figures.Stella then asks students to form groups and collaboratively identify ways readers might gather information about Fitzgerald's social context, specifically relating to ethno-racial identity, class, and gender. She instructs students to make a list and provide a rationalization for each of their choices, explaining that some groups will be called on to share their results with the class. During the subsequent class discussion, students identify a variety of ways of learning about 1920s America, such as examining laws, newspaper headlines, and advertisements. Stella tells students that the Saturday Evening Post itself could be a useful artifact to use to this end, and she also informs them that they will engage in this process later in the unit. Toward the end of the lesson, Stella asks students to reread the story and identify places where Fitzgerald portrays aspects of ethno-racial identity, class, or gender. After monitoring this process, she informs students that they will complete this task for homework and bring these context notes to the next lesson.Stella opens the second lesson by briefly sharing some background information regarding Fitzgerald and “The Last of the Belles.” She indicates that Fitzgerald wrote the story in late 1928 while struggling with his follow-up novel to The Great Gatsby. She also tells the class that Fitzgerald wrote “The Last of the Belles” with the intent of earning money, and the Post paid him $3,150 for the story. The Post itself, Stella explains, was widely distributed in Fitzgerald's era and had a circulation of nearly three million in the 1920s (Bruccoli Some Sort 534, 103). Stella explains that in the 1920s, editor George Horace Lorimer packaged the Post “for men, particularly the upwardly mobile, middle-class businessman of the Northeast, where America's financial life was based” (Potts 14). As with any magazine, the Post had certain boundaries regarding content (i.e., sexual content) and language (i.e., profanity) in the stories it published. As Fitzgerald had eighteen stories published in the Post from 1927 to 1929 alone, Stella explains that it would be reasonable to expect that he was familiar with these expectations.7 She asks the class to keep the final two points in mind when rereading the story, because the way Fitzgerald represents identity, class, and gender connects to the of the which itself to the social of next instructs students to take out their homework and share their context notes with the in their She asks students to their context notes from the ideas of the in their After students complete this process, Stella asks groups to three of their key ideas questions and she of group one draw attention to the way Andy, the narrator, the of a in the story it is to Andy and his for from with the that she is not The group makes of the fact that the is an in a and uses in his of information about she just she I tell her that when she Ailie she to that other about She in if (Short Stories The group connects this to a that struck them in the notes in her that (Short Stories second group is to the of who is seen by both Ailie and Andy through the of social class and take of the way Andy first in of and of as a as I have He was with high and He very and he was he was a and and with that of that well on the (Short Stories The students question the of the connecting it to an in the same how to from a have in and seem to background at (Short Stories The students then to explore the to which Andy is because of his and how the makes to that readers to share the also after is from the and has a to Andy and when his of had about with him that could be was with a his was and in a that and the have an end he had been to his for his on his as though he had been and but the background of and out at rather out at she had never quite the in these even the of that had (Short Stories their to the in the story, exploring how the their for points out that through the of Andy, Fitzgerald uses a as an to describe to Ailie from other Tarleton by I that she was and different from these other who and in the (Short Stories The group decides that in its reading it is what Fitzgerald actually by student if Andy to as or if he some other of such as The group notes that Andy uses this not in a moment of or but as an that his is The point is by a later use of the as Andy and years after the end of the Great revisit the of the the of a where there was the of and and over a that to into the the the of the (Short Stories of the group that the was by the and by its and they explore its on their for Andy and in the group on the way that gender Ailie in the story, her for her as a students what it to be a that women in the era not free them from The students why Ailie would be to at all and what her with a man of her social class could both and her in of the group discusses through their to his of his feelings whether his for her from a to her from her in gender or whether it her in The ideas and questions by different groups to engaging dialogue regarding the world in “The Last of the Belles.” In this second lesson, Stella asks students to two questions for should we use the Post to learn about socio-cultural can the Post be used to learn about Fitzgerald's social opens the lesson by the two homework questions with the class. offer a number of different for the Post to learn about Fitzgerald's context, and they also have a variety of ideas regarding how to this Stella one in the of as She then informs the class that they will use a copy of the Post to learn about Fitzgerald's world. During the of this lesson, Stella uses a to from a 1929 of the at three attention to the and students are to while examining each of the What is being is the this ethno-racial identity, social class, has led the class to these examining each students have a to take notes and on the way they what they each Stella the class in a discussion regarding the itself as well as her After the content and of the Stella asks groups to develop a list of conclusions they could draw about the way ethno-racial identity, class, and gender are in the story as well as in the in the She also asks groups to identify wider social issues relating to these three dimensions, as in the story the advertisements. groups are not able to complete this task in class, Stella asks students to their of conclusions as homework for the following She also informs students that each group will one social to focus on as the unit In subsequent Stella to use “The Last of the Belles” to focus students on developing their at key aspects of the socio-cultural context within which the stories that they read written and published. She also how conclusions them to aspects to social issues to their own social Ice Palace” is the first in Scott Fitzgerald's trilogy of stories set in fictional Tarleton, Georgia, in the 1920s. As a love story, it provides an tool for students to the of gender in romantic As a out of story, it is useful for exploring that to the particularly the North and the South. because the story as it Sally Carrol Happer her on the of an open on a day as provides an structure for exploring how experience is in the process of the of her Sally Carrol to out from home to marry a to the she feels as a woman in To her the South is a place where never and she to experience the North where on a big (Short Stories the of her Harry Sally Carrol is first by the land (Short Stories she becomes by several cultural by the of her to make her feel at home (Short Stories by Harry's that she only to about by Harry's about (Short Stories by the and by Harry's on her of her When Sally Carrol becomes from Harry in the that is the of his hometown she up in its for two and becomes and finally she was to the and of Tarleton (Short Stories In this way, the story questions about the of out from for women who have that at least to hypothetical Stella, is by Fitzgerald's rich use of to socio-cultural between the North and the South in “The Ice Palace,” and she decides to present a on the story at an literature in She to with her and while at the is now a of who teachers for high school English classrooms. She also teaches a on research in an of While Stella will one in past conversations with Stella that inquiry is a form of research that to learn more about life experiences by the stories that tell about experiences. that makes of their through had of the best ways to learn more about experience is by examining the stories that tell about their that typically or conversations with the who have to in their and to the stories that these share then in their own or the stories that they have been the stories for key and then the stories to provide to them so that they can be further or with The story may be around the of events that it it might be around such as and

Teaching Tarleton

The Challenges of Retranslating <i>The Great Gatsby</i> into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

The Great Gatsby is filled with potential tort claims, from drunken or reckless driving to assault and battery. In a pivotal passage Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, judges Daisy and Tom as “careless people,” who “destroy creatures and leave others to clean up the mess.” The carelessness, negligence, and recklessness portrayed by Fitzgerald’s characters shows an absence of due care, long regarded as the foundation for tort law. Although there are torts, tortfeasors, and tortious behavior aplenty in The Great Gatsby, the novel is void of even a mention of tort law. Why?The first part of this piece discusses tort law during Gatsby’s decade -- the beginning of the “era of automobility” -- and explains tort law’s absence from the novel: Tort law is absent from The Great Gatsby, in part, because tort law itself was dysfunctional and could not provide meaningful access to the legal system. Tort victims of automobile accidents were largely unable to access legal avenues, and recovery was hindered by a host of rules, prominently the contributory negligence system. The piece then briefly describes a reform movement, led by progressive legal realists, to replace tort recovery for automobile accidents with a no-fault compensation scheme. One consequence of that movement, I suggest, was the loss of tort law’s traditional “moral center,” the idea of the law of torts as a “law of wrongs.” The second part of the piece then discusses the costs of this change, politically and conceptually, and briefly defends traditional “wrongs” and “justice-based” tort law against compensation-minded reforms. I conclude that while the moralistic tort law of Gatsby’s era expressed plenty of blame for tortfeasors, it failed to hold them accountable, thus contributing to the death of our understanding of the law of tort as a law of wrongs -- and only partly and fitfully replaced by compensation schemes.

“He's not dead—I know he isn't”

The American writer, Vladimir Nabokov, immersed himself in Art for all his life. He insisted that Art was the way to a better realm of life. He also insisted that Art could bring him a thrill from the vertebra. This kind of thrill was the Aesthetic Bliss he named. Aesthetic Bliss was the way for Nabokov to freedom. Because of this way to freedom, Nabokov had really effaced the ambit between imagination and reality, and depicted lots of characters as free as Pnin. Key Wards: Nabokov; Aesthetic Bliss; Freedom

A N O T H E R R E A D I N G O F T H E G R E A T G A T S B Y K E A T H FR A SE R University of Calgary Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created — nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an “average, honest, open fellow,” I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal — and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision. Narrator in “The Rich Boy” 1 Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. Narrator in The Great Gatsby2 \JTonnegtions” are of course important in The Great Gatsby, for without them Gatsby’s rumoured association with crime, and its particular dialect, would not ring as true. The presence of Wolfsheim serves to connect Gatsby with the underworld from which his riches are hatched and his plans to marry Daisy made possible. “Gonnegtions” are Gatsby’s dream, and also Nick’s. What Gatsby of West Egg is seeking, by means of the lucrative business afforded by the underworld portrayed in Wolfsheim, is a coneggtion with Daisy Fay of East Egg. In this light, Gatsby’s “Platonic conception of himself” is enriched by what I take to be Fitzgerald’s allusion to Plato’s parable in The Symposium about the origin of love. In The Symposium Aristophanes is made to tell how Zeus, angered at the behaviour of the three circular shapes constituting the original sexes, decides to cut each in half: like eggs, says Plato, sliced in half by a hair. Yearning ever since to be reunited with himself, man has sought to couple with his other half. According to Plato, the resultant halves of the original hermaphrodite became heterosexual men and women; halves of the original female, lesbian, women; while fragments of the first E n g l ish Stu d ies in C anada, v, 3, Autumn 1979 male turned into men who have devoted their lives (honourably in Plato’s eyes) to the intimacy of boys and other men (“it requires,” says Plato, “the compulsion of convention to overcome their natural disinclination to mar­ riage and procreation” ) .3 If The Great Gatsby is a love story, and it is, it is one aware of this complex sexuality of antiquity. As we shall see, it is not only to The Symposium that we must turn for confirmation of the novel’s peculiar and hitherto unnoticed sexuality — the theme of what follows — but also to The Satyricon of Petronius. II Here and there in Fitzgerald’s novel inklings of depravity turn reader into voyeur. One never quite knows, for example, how to read the last page of Chapter 2, a scene which follows the dissolute party in Myrtle Wilson’s apartment, when Nick Carraway follows Mr. McKee out to the elevator. Descending, McKee suggests Nick have lunch with him some day — any­ where— and the elevator boy snaps: “Keep your hands off the lever” (G, 38). Apologetic, McKee says he was unaware he was touching it. The nar­ rator says he would be glad to go. Where they go is to McKee’s bedroom: “ . . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.” Then some more of the narrator’s ellipses between what we presume are titles of photographs taken by McKee are followed by Nick’s abrupt removal to “the cold lower level” of Pennsylvania Station where he lies waiting for the morning train. It is an odd scene because Nick never goes to lunch with McKee and McKee never reappears. Odder still is the...

Dick Humbird and the Devil Wagon of Doom Cars, Carnivores, and Feminine Carnality in<i>This Side of Paradise</i>

Reviewed by: Iron Curtain: A Love Story by Vesna Goldsworthy Damjana Mraović-O'Hare VESNA GOLDSWORTHY Iron Curtain: A Love Story New York. W. W. Norton. 2023. 336 pages. MILENA URBANSKA, the main character of Vesna Goldsworthy's Iron Curtain: A Love Story, is a child of privilege. An offspring of one of the two founders of a politically restrictive Soviet satellite state, Milena's life in the 1980s is marked by indulging in foreign pop culture, designer clothes, and trips abroad. Despite having a "dismal" attendance record and average performance, she is recognized as the top college student. She and her boyfriend, a child of another high-ranking state politician, are considered the Diana and Charles of her country. Milena claims that she is a rebel, both against the system and, consequently, her father, but her trespasses amount to decadent parties, sullen moods, and verbal outbursts to her parents. Milena is misunderstood and unhappy—she claims—and yet her discomfort is rather generational than political. When Milena complains about the constant lack of toilet paper in public bathrooms, she laments that she had to "waste another handkerchief. I like the touch of silk, but it was a pity always to have to throw these things away." Milena, though, changes when Misha, her Charles, kills himself playing drunk Russian roulette after serving only a few weeks of mandatory army service. Milena did not stop the game in which she also participated, and the guilt transforms her into a dedicated student and, later, a successful translator. The second change is instigated by Jason, a visiting British poet for whom she translates at a literary conference: an intense and brief love affair is followed by plans to continue their life in London. Expectedly, when Milena finally reaches the West, nothing lives up to its promise, while Jason's ultimate betrayal can be avenged only by asking for help from those against whom Milena supposedly initially revolted: her motherland and her father. The decision to acknowledge the political power of an eastern country, however, is ironic: the novel opens in December 1990, with the fall of the Iron Curtain. Milena's happiness is unattainable, regardless of politics. In her third novel, the well-established Goldsworthy revisits some of the themes she has previously discussed in her fiction and academic work, notably the ways in which the West and the East perceive each other, as well as questions of identity and freedom. Her Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998) is an essential contribution to Balkan studies; Gorsky (2015) follows a Russian oligarch living in contemporary London but is inspired by The Great Gatsby; Monsieur Ka (2018) is about Anna Karenina's son in post-World War II Britain. Iron Curtain, although "just" a love story, is Goldsworthy's finest novel so far: it is nuanced, funny, and relevant in a world that seems to be actively working on a new Iron Curtain. Damjana Mraović-O'Hare Carson-Newman University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Understand All, Forgive Nothing:The Self-Indictment of Humbert Humbert Yuval Eylon For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. —Vladimir Nabokov, "On a Book Entitled Lolita" Pride is the tendency to overestimate oneself, or underestimate others. In either case, a proud person overestimates his own qualities. Since such a person is inclined to view others as inferior and his own actions as admirable, a proud person is disposed to underestimate the suffering he inflicts on others, or worse—to try and justify it. Curiosity about others, tenderness, and kindness, rarely accompanies pride. Thus, it often conflicts with a charitable view of others, and begets cruelty and callousness. Pride is often accompanied by the desire to be admired by others. This desire gives rise to vanity, or vainglory: a vice that seems destined to give rise to further vices. Aquinas clearly expresses this view in the Summa Theologia:1 . . . the vices which by their very nature are such as to be directed to the end of a certain capital vice, are called its daughters. Now the end of vainglory is the manifestation of one's own excellence, as stated above (A1, 4). To this end a man may tend in two ways. On one way directly, [End Page 158] either by words, and this is boasting, or by deeds, and then if they be true and call for astonishment, it is love of novelties which men are wont to wonder at most; but if they be false, it is hypocrisy. On another way a man strives to make known his excellence by showing that he is not inferior to another, and this in four ways. First, as regards the intellect, and thus we have "obstinacy," by which a man is too much attached to his own opinion, being unwilling to believe one that is better. Secondly, as regards the will, and then we have "discord," whereby a man is unwilling to give up his own will, and agree with others. Thirdly, as regards "speech," and then we have "contention," whereby a man quarrels noisily with another. Fourthly as regards deeds, and this is "disobedience," whereby a man refuses to carry out the command of his superiors. However, whereas pride is an attitude that a person has towards himself, vanity involves a relation with others which pride does not: it emanates from the need to manifest one's excellence to others and gain their approval. Thus, since the proud person does not engage with the opinions of others, his view of himself remains secure. Vanity, on the hand, can prove to be a blessing in disguise: the attempt to gain approval could lead to self-awareness. The pride of Humbert Humbert, the main character and narrator in Nabokov's Lolita, is the pride of an aesthete: intellectually superior, and determined to pursue his appetites. But Humbert is not only proud.2 He is also vain. Vanity leads him to seek the approval of others, and underlines his artistic aspirations. He undertakes the writing of a manuscript, designed to be a masterpiece that vindicates his actions. In his manuscript, Humbert tries to elicit the reader's sympathy, in the conviction that sympathetic identification would lead to acceptance. However, while he successfully challenges and threatens the reader's moral outlook, writing the manuscript has an unintended effect: it shatters Humbert's own convictions and leads to moral transformation. The reason for this transformation is that he recognizes the aesthetic faults of his work, and traces these faults to his own moral faults. The claim that aesthetic considerations can play an important role in moral thinking cannot be taken for granted. First, the threat of an empty aestheticism must be addressed, because it seems that aesthetic considerations and the pursuit of aesthetic ideals compete with moral considerations, rather than complete them. As Humbert illustrates, aesthetic pursuit motivates acts of cruelty and callousness, and aesthetic ideals are often devoid of any moral significance. Second, if aesthetic [End Page 159] considerations...

Daisy Buchanan is one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. Many first-time readers of The Great Gatsby are frustrated by Nick's account of Daisy and wonder why Gatsby would risk so much for such a woman. However, they miss the point. Daisy represents something indefinable—an idealized love. As Roger Lewis says in “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” “the love becomes more important than the object of it” (49). Daisy herself is not his goal. Gatsby's goal is to keep hold of the love that she once inspired, the memory of her, which is colored by his idealization of her. This nostalgic longing for a feeling rooted in the past is sentimentality at a profound level. In fact, at the end of chapter 6, Nick listens to Gatsby recount his first kiss with Daisy and describes Gatsby's words as “appalling sentimentality” (Gatsby 111). Daisy's effect on Gatsby is perhaps the biggest paradox of the novel. Based on her actions, it is difficult to gauge how she exerts a hold on Gatsby. Nick comes closest when describing her voice, which, Gatsby later notes, is “full of money” (120): “When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air” (108). Daisy's “magic” is hard to define, and Nick seems to catch glimmers of it; but he is always at the periphery, unable to tell exactly what Gatsby sees in her. Especially after the car accident, Nick is amazed that Gatsby endangers himself by staying when he is, in Nick's words, “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (154).Film producers are uncomfortable with ambiguity, however. In general, all the film versions of Fitzgerald's novel have followed a predictable route. Their marketing campaigns claim that they have tried to evoke the spirit of the novel, yet they boost the sentimentality of the story with great deliberation, pushing the use of pathos far beyond what Fitzgerald would have sanctioned. Most egregiously, producers and filmmakers try to make Daisy a more sympathetic character by changing her storyline. For Fitzgerald readers, this change in Daisy's character is a continual disappointment. There have been five big-budget, filmed adaptations of The Great Gatsby: 1926, 1949, 1974, a 2000 television production, and 2013. All five films made significant changes to the story of the novel. Many of these changes elevated the sentimental, making Daisy a more domestic character and eliminating some of the ambiguity from Fitzgerald's story.The label “sentimental writing” is commonly used today to disparage a writer's work, but this was not always the case. Nor was domesticity always associated with this type of writing. It is true that sentimental writing has commonly been associated with mass or commercial appeal. This alone is enough to condemn it in the eyes of some reviewers. However, such a blanket condemnation of “sentimental writing” is not helpful when trying to understand the development of American fiction and its traditions. A more careful study of the history of sentimental writing helps to reveal why Daisy's character was, and continues to be, targeted by filmmakers for a sentimental makeover.Sentimental writing made its appearance in eighteenth century France. Manon Lescaut (1731) by Abbé Prévost was one of the earliest and most popular of these early novels, and followed the sad story of a young noble who gives up a promising future to run away with a young lady with an “inclination to pleasure” (Prévost 29). Sentimental writing seeks to build a sympathetic emotional connection between the writer's characters and the reading audience. To use Aristotle's terms, sentimentalism emphasizes Pathos over Ethos or Logos, in order to impart a moral lesson or to build sympathy for characters whose apparent actions might not necessarily elicit sympathy from readers. The young noble and his lady love in Manon Lescaut would have been scorned and abused had their real life counterparts been encountered in 1731, but Prévost's use of the sentimental brought an emotional currency to the plot that engaged readers and made them care for these characters despite their actions.The nineteenth century saw this sentimental style appropriated by American women writers who created advice manuals, evangelical writings, magazines, and other publications. Because of the popularity of these writings, novels written in the sentimental style fell under heavy criticism by male critics as they increasingly came to be associated with women and the domestic sphere. Despite this, women's sentimental writing was the most commercially successful fiction of this time and such novels as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), and Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854) amassed record profits. However, the negative connotation associated with being a “sentimental writer” has persisted for generations—so long now that the term has been studiously avoided even when sentimental strains appear within some of the most respected fiction.In recent years, scholars such as Jane Tompkins have championed sentimental fiction and urged a reconsideration of these texts that many formalist critics had rejected. In Sensational Designs, she argues that if given the proper context to understand these texts, we can then understand their true importance: The power of a sentimental novel to move its audience depends upon the audience's being in possession of the conceptual categories that constitute character and event. That storehouse of assumptions includes attitudes toward the family and toward social institutions; a definition of power and its relation to individual human feeling; notions of political and social equality; and above all, a set of religious beliefs that organizes and sustains the rest. (126–27)The film adaptations of The Great Gatsby are often judged by their faithfulness to the original story, but by focusing on how they differ from the written text, especially through their use of the sentimental, we can better understand the “storehouse of assumptions” that influence audience interpretation. Looking at the film versions of Gatsby, we observe many different sentimental devices. If we dismiss them as simply bad form, we miss an opportunity to discuss this “storehouse of assumptions” and to delve deeper into how each new generation interacts with Fitzgerald's novel.The first of these adaptations, the 1926 silent film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, directed by Herbert Brenon, is a lost film. There are no surviving film reels, and it was never fully transferred onto a more modern media format. All that remains of the film is a trailer that was first released in 2004 as part of a DVD collection, More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894–1931, produced by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Baz Luhrmann's DVD for his adaptation of The Great Gatsby also features the 1926 trailer in its special features. This trailer runs a full minute and includes several shots from the missing film. While this brief minute of footage is not enough to develop a thorough analysis, the University of California Los Angeles Theater Arts Special Collections does hold the original copy of the treatment outline for the film. Elizabeth Meehan wrote an extremely thorough forty-nine page treatment (double the length of most treatments written in Hollywood today) dated 26 May 1926. Although the screenwriting credit for the film is attributed to Becky Gardiner, Meehan is listed with an “adapted by” credit. Since the screenplay is no longer in existence, it is difficult to gauge what changes were made from treatment outline to script. However, there is a noticeable effort in Meehan's treatment to emphasize the sentimental and domestic elements surrounding Daisy.In the first act of her treatment, Meehan portrays Daisy as living in fear that Gatsby will return to break up her family. After a series of flashbacks designed to show Daisy's romance with Gatsby and her later decision to marry Tom, Meehan brings us back to the present and writes a scene where Daisy clings to her four-year-old daughter, staring out the window while begging her daughter to protect her from Gatsby's return. This ominous portrayal of Gatsby's effect on Daisy is combined with a tender mother/daughter moment that never existed in Fitzgerald's original. The softening of Daisy's character offers a striking contrast to Fitzgerald's portrayal. In the novel, Daisy enjoys cocktails while her daughter is off with a nurse, only spending time with her little girl to show her off to guests, then letting the nurse take her away before “Tom came back, preceding four gin rickeys that clinked full of ice” (Gatsby 118).Meehan goes further, softening the presentation of Tom to make him seem a gentler, family man. This enables a more easily accepted domestic resolution to the Buchanan family at the end of her treatment. The most striking example of softening Tom's character takes place in the middle of Meehan's treatment, when she presents an episode based on a scene from chapter 2 of the novel that takes place at Myrtle's apartment. Tom slaps Myrtle and breaks her nose after arguing over whether or not she has any right to say Daisy's name (37). Nick also describes in the novel that he is unable to hear the beginning of the conversation. Meehan is not bound by Nick's narration, however, and presents her version of the first half of this conversation by showing Myrtle antagonizing Tom. Myrtle hands him a lawyer's card and tells him to get a divorce. Tom tells her not to say Daisy's name again, and when she does, he covers her mouth with his hand, but she springs away and loudly proclaims that he struck her. This planned scene not only paints Tom in a better light, it portrays Myrtle as a hysteric.The last seven pages of Meehan's treatment are a succession of radical changes in Fitzgerald's plot. Meehan writes, in an aside, about how it is important that Daisy not realize what happened to Myrtle at the time of the accident, although Gatsby does and keeps it to himself. In the book, however, Gatsby tells Daisy he thinks Myrtle is dead almost immediately following the accident, or so he reports to Nick (143). Then, Meehan writes that Tom pleads with Daisy after the accident that they need to begin again, but at the end of Fitzgerald's chapter 7, the conversation between Tom and Daisy goes observed—though unheard—by Nick. After Gatsby's murder, when Nick tries to call Daisy, Meehan writes that she and her daughter are getting into a car while Tom instructs a servant to say they have left. In the novel, Nick only hears from a servant that Daisy and her family are gone. Nick assumes they are on the road already (Gatsby 164). The visual of the family's flight ties in well to Meehan's ending, which veers away from Fitzgerald's book yet again. Instead of Nick's attendance at Gatsby's funeral or Fitzgerald's rumination about the green light, we end with a note of domestic triumph and the happy Buchanan family in their new home. Meehan writes about Daisy showing pangs of remorse for letting Gatsby take the blame for Myrtle's death, implying that she and her husband have no idea that Gatsby has been murdered. By all accounts, the 1926 adaptation did not do well at the box office and soon disappeared after a few weeks. It would be more than twenty years before there was a second attempt to film Fitzgerald's novel.The 1949 version took quite some time to develop, due in large part to the Motion Picture Production Code (or the Hays Code as it was commonly called, after Will H. Hays). This code was put in place in 1930 and lasted until 1968. As a result of the Code, producers and writers were forced to re-envision the tale of Gatsby as a morality tale where adultery, bootlegging, and manslaughter were eventually punished, and the remaining characters were reconciled to the idea that crime does not pay. Many people were brought in to work on the project, including hardboiled writer James M. Cain, best known at the time for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1943). Hardboiled film noir crime dramas were doing well at the time, and the producers of the film probably saw a way to create some market synchronicity by using Cain's style and casting Alan Ladd as Gatsby. Ladd was well known from such noir films as This Gun for Hire (1942) and The Blue Dahlia (1946). In fact, the plot of The Blue Dahlia (only three years before the 1949 Gatsby adaptation) has similar plot elements—featuring an innocent protagonist (a returning war veteran like Gatsby) who is pursued for a woman's murder he did not commit. However, it was one thing for the moralistic censors to approve an innocent man being redeemed and quite another for them to consider letting a bootlegger like Gatsby escape death like Cain suggested. Although the producers of the 1949 Gatsby adaptation wanted a happy domestic ending, neither they nor the censors could bring themselves to let Cain write his version. The 1926 adaptation by Meehan and its ending with the Buchanans obviously did not play well with audiences, so the 1949 Gatsby adapters shied away from repeating past mistakes. In the end, they finally decided to give the happy ending to Nick and Jordan.Both Nick and Jordan greet us at the beginning of the 1949 adaptation. Their presence is part of a bookended narrative that brings this (now married) couple to Gatsby's graveside twenty years later to reflect on his death and the profound influence he had on their lives. Nick says, “I like him for what he might have been,” which seems an honest enough sentiment, but then he continues with rather heavy-handed moralizing by quoting from Gatsby's tombstone which bears an inscription from Proverbs 14:12: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” The idea that anyone would inscribe this on a stone seems preposterous; however this quote is a convenient transition that leads us into a flashback montage of dancing, speakeasies, drinking, and bootlegging from Gatsby's life.Gatsby's gangster ways are all explained in a lengthy flashback that expands upon the backstory between Gatsby and Dan Cody given in Fitzgerald's novel (98–101). Poisoned by Cody's assertions that personal wealth is the key to all happiness, Gatsby first amasses and then uses his wealth indiscriminately to get everything he wants. Instead of building a friendly relationship with Nick and trying to persuade him to set up a meeting with Daisy, as in the novel, Gatsby attempts to bribe him with money outright and when this fails, he succeeds with Jordan by giving her a Dusenberg car that matches his own. Jordan flatly admits her own corruption, which is only hinted at in the book with rumors of a golf scandal, and seems unrepentant in the face of Nick's dour stare. When the meeting between Gatsby and Daisy does take place, she is easily bought as well. After the parade through Gatsby's mansion and the scene with his display of shirts, Gatsby tells Daisy he wants to be with her and she agrees, saying that she will let Tom know of her decision soon. Perhaps the expansion of the Dan Cody storyline in the first act necessitated some cuts to stay within a feature-length running time and, perhaps, these easy submissions to Gatsby's wealth work well with the gangster story genre, but all the dramatic pacing of Gatsby's story is lost in this adaptation. There is no tension as the audience wonders when Gatsby and Daisy will meet and if they will rekindle their romance. It is bought and paid for almost immediately.This fast tracking of the seduction of Daisy plays awkwardly against the required moralizing by the Motion Picture Production as the filmmakers that the seduction a moral the series of is all about Daisy a long and to Nick at one of Gatsby's that she is and she does not blame him for not to kiss her. she says and he all As a to this Gatsby and Daisy have a similar conversation in his where she some over up her family. Daisy have made a but her domestic ties for are more in this film adaptation. with Myrtle is and Daisy's young daughter, by her and is being by of much different from the of the novel who let their the with the more of the of the 1949 the of Tom and Daisy's and the of their domestic is after Tom and Gatsby's Daisy to Tom tells her, a If with not a in the that would the to This gives Daisy but it is not until after the death of Myrtle that Daisy changes her that Gatsby take the blame of her and her daughter from her. Daisy does not appear as sympathetic in this version as in the 1926 the domestic her actions is much more important change that the 1949 adaptation made is the way that to Myrtle's accident Instead of Daisy's being by Gatsby to Daisy her to Tom, and Jordan immediately after Gatsby her off at her home. Daisy tells that Gatsby has to be the she rather goes on to plot with Tom exactly how they can use him the manslaughter that she to stay with her all the while she is not that Gatsby is the to her conversation. This the dramatic tension of Fitzgerald's novel, in which Gatsby at his mansion and gives up his to escape he that Daisy to her family and away with However, the sentimentality of the scene is Gatsby's on for Daisy, after her in the to she only his sentimental to their first love from years the film this sentimentality so that Gatsby is to to himself in to the on Daisy's although his are when This moralistic version to do much better at the box office than its but it was by critics for its and was eventually to in the after it its However, three years after the of the Motion Picture Production Code, a new adaptation was put in was the first writer by producers at to write the new film adaptation. novel In was and it was that he could bring a more modern to the is an easy however, and even the most respected writers themselves This was no Although the decided to in another To this rumors that the for the was that a had Nick's character as A reading of the that this is not the case. version has a film noir moralistic than the 1949 and is more but not as as some would have us an early when about Gatsby's voices with a of other that he might be after one of Gatsby's later he and Nick in the However, Nick and Jordan are also in an early scene and, in the there is a scene between Daisy and Gatsby where Daisy tells “I love although he made some it that did not have a of most when into is a to the with Gatsby and Daisy in act Gatsby has Daisy try on several of and is to everything for her, to about but Daisy tells him the will be Gatsby in In some this scene the scene from chapter of Fitzgerald's novel where Gatsby Daisy in the is a of Gatsby's that Daisy away with her when she that a sentimental domestic immediately after the Daisy takes off her new and it into her as she home. she is by the of her is with her into the in of After about her and Tom Daisy for been by one of his in Gatsby's and the family off one another quite well to Daisy's Tom's as a family man is is to be a if only and a husband who for Although they would only have to four or five of time, these out as most attempt to the sentimentality of the of is that the continues up until the end of these with the of the act remaining This the of these last as the act (or a that the end of act and up the remaining for the It is that when the producers the of the first and on he did not to type up the that came out with its version of The Great Gatsby, the Film and took from the audience about his on the Gatsby script. “I did a that was to Fitzgerald and There were three producers on the and finally one of them is is The Great Gatsby. that in that they get to do did so and know what This might seem but at the end of his rather than that his version was not In with which took place between and he was not the one finally There were only in the whole book that were is when they to the and get of the other is when the goes to the to it has a narrative everything is a flashback or in but not in the the film in 1974, with a new by and As was the with film attempts to change Daisy's character and Gatsby's as well. Daisy and that Gatsby was, more than in Fitzgerald's original of Although the attempts to make Daisy more sympathetic and Gatsby more he also a great of sentimentality that is not in the original sentimental of the film are apparent from the with a through Gatsby's the on his of Daisy with its Gatsby is as in the past and the with voices of and a This of Gatsby's death is only a of to however. the about the emotional of the other their emotional in a sentimental and changing what Fitzgerald had are a of the sentimental, especially the sentimental domestic novel. break into significant and in neither does Fitzgerald the women as The first of these is with Daisy (Gatsby Daisy describes her at that she had given to a tells Nick how she In the however, Daisy while the The second scene is the at Myrtle's when she her first meeting with Tom. In the novel, Myrtle describes the scene to Nick (Gatsby In the however, Myrtle describes the scene to several people and Nick listens as she becomes up with and the begin to to domestic not in the novel to make the of domestic life between Daisy and Gatsby more In one montage Daisy Gatsby's mansion and at the and in his In this, the she a change and Gatsby to put on his from their This sentimentality for their past is an of women's in scene at Gatsby's mansion is when to the scene in the Buchanan between Daisy and Tom in chapter of the novel. are in showing Daisy's between the she to love. That they take place in a helps to the of domesticity and family the of Gatsby's However, Daisy's takes place in the and although Nick is not to their from his it is apparent that Daisy has reconciled with Tom. All of Gatsby's wealth might if his bootlegging and other with are Daisy the Tom offers to her and her Daisy and Tom were each other at the with a of between and of was the at her, and in his his had upon and her own. in a while she up at him and in and neither of them had the or the yet they There was an of about the and would have that they were Fitzgerald's of Gatsby as a that Tom might Daisy is sad and However, Gatsby's is by Tom's toward he broke Myrtle's nose at the end of chapter although there is no way for Daisy to know that Gatsby is out readers a between her of love to him and her return to Tom. Fitzgerald was of In a to H. he “There is a in the of an emotional of Daisy's toward Gatsby after their the of or in her him This has been a of and perhaps the ambiguity of Daisy's has made the book all the more to readers, an of and them to their own film attempts to the in Daisy through In the novel, the scene between Gatsby and Daisy at Nick's us to Daisy as Gatsby does, through the use of Nick's In the film however, this is Instead of staying true to a of the couple through the eyes of at this to a series of to the Daisy and Gatsby storyline in order to the between their and the between Tom and Gatsby. are not something that Nick could have