F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

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

The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America

In the summer and early autumn of 2008, as the global ‘credit crunch’ intensified, resulting in the collapse, part-nationalization, or forced merger of numerous venerable financial institutions, a ...

Last Kiss The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript

Irwin on Fitzgerald James L. W. West III (bio) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction: “An Almost Theatrical Innocence” by John T. Irwin ( Johns Hopkins University Press , 2014 . xiv + 234 pages. $39.95 ) This new book by John Irwin brings to completion a trilogy in which he examines the work of four writers—Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges; Hart Crane; and now F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the writings of each, Irwin recognizes a deep engagement with Platonic idealism. Certainly this is correct for Fitzgerald, a romantic whose fiction is marked throughout by a fondness for Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne—and by an obsession with the “golden moment” of fulfillment that most of his protagonists are pursuing. Some of them achieve such a moment, but it is evanescent, vanishing when they attempt to arrest and preserve it. This is a personal book for Irwin, growing out of a fascination with Fitzgerald that began over fifty years ago when he first read The Great Gatsby. Irwin’s tone is agreeably self-revelatory—about his own life, his previous writings, and his long experience in reading and teaching Fitzgerald. It is a great pleasure to make one’s way through his extended analysis of the Fitzgerald oeuvre. He possesses a fluent style and a well-furnished mind; he deploys quotations from Fitzgerald’s fiction and letters with great skill. The discussion ranges widely, from the songs of Cole Porter to the myths of Pygmalion and Galatea, and Orpheus and Eurydice. Asides about Freud, Veblen, Eliot, and Sartre are on the mark. One of the works that Irwin explores for supporting ideas is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), a seminal work of sociology that helps to open up new interpretations of some of Fitzgerald’s best-known characters—Amory Blaine from This Side of Paradise, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, Dick Diver from Tender Is the Night, and Basil Duke Lee, the autobiographical hero of a series of superb stories about adolescence that Fitzgerald published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1928 and 1929. All of these characters are playacting, inventing social roles for themselves that, they imagine, will allow them to achieve their dreams of status and fulfillment. One of the great mysteries about Fitzgerald’s career is that he did not put such characters on the stage. He spent much of his apprenticeship scribbling plays for an amateur theater group in his native St. Paul, Minnesota; he also wrote some unusually good lyrics for the Triangle Club productions at Princeton between 1915 and 1917. But his one professional stab at Broadway, a satirical play called The Vegetable, flopped in tryouts in Atlantic City, sending Fitzgerald scurrying back to the mass-circulation “slicks”—the Post, Liberty, Metropolitan, Redbook, et al.—for which he had learned to manufacture top-drawer short stories. And he met with only limited success when he tried to write for the movies near the end of his career. What [End Page xxxvii] Irwin discerns, however, is that a marked theatricality shows itself in the fiction from beginning to end, in the portrayal of personality and above all in the handling of dialogue. Irwin’s analysis of these elements in The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night is fresh and engaging; his interpretation of The Last Tycoon, the Hollywood novel that Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death, is as good as any I have read. By taking an approach other than the chronological, by organizing his analysis around themes and narrative approaches, Irwin fleshes out some new insights. I was taken by his identification of contrasts between the South and the North, not only in the three stories that Fitzgerald sets in the fictional town of Tarleton, Georgia, but also in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “The Swimmers,” two works of short fiction in which I had never thought to look for a southern element. Fitzgerald romanticizes the South in all of these stories, playing its slow eroticism against the frigidity of the North, showing his sympathy for the southern concern for manners, family, and the past. Almost the only thing I would disagree about...

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby are two of the literary works that masterfully delineate the existential anxiety of their protagonists: Willy Loman and Jay Gatsby. This paper attempts to delve deep into the characters- Willy Loman and Jay Gatsby with a view to exploring the existential angst that Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman and Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby goes through. Existential angst refers to a profound feeling of anxiety, fear, or unease that stems from reflecting on the meaning or purpose of life, one’s existence, and the unavoidable nature of death. Both Willy Loman and Jay Gatsby grapple with the relentless worship of the American Dream and the pursuit of success, ultimately leading to the decay of their true selves. Primary data for conducting this research have been collected from the texts- Death of a Salesman and The Great Gatsby, whereas secondary data have been collected from different articles, research papers, and different online sources. The content analysis method is used to analyze the data collected from different sources. Willy Loman, a traveling salesman, seems obsessed with achieving his version of the American dream, but unfortunately, he can never fulfill his dream. Jay Gatsby, on the other hand, is a wealthy, ambitious, and idealistic man. Although Gatsby had always desired wealth, his primary motivation for amassing his fortune was his love for Daisy Buchanan, whom he met as a young military officer in 1917 before leaving to fight in World War I. Both the men appear to be awfully lost in the anxiety of their existence. This paper seeks to unearth the unstable mental condition, the loss of individual identity, and the deep-rooted existential anxiety of the two characters, Willy Loman and Jay Gatsby.

As America becomes a dynamic new world power after World War I, the fallout of the war lingers in the hope and promise of the economically successful Roaring Twenties. The Great War shadows many of F. Scott Fitzgerald's protagonists, including Amory Blaine (This Side of Paradise), Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby), Anthony Patch (The Beautiful and Damned) and Dick Diver (Tender is the Night); all are World War I veterans, and each is haunted by his experience at war. This specter looms over their varied career, marital, and societal successes, condemning each to a shallow existence stripped of any true meaning. Focusing specifically on his first and last published works, This Side of Paradise (1920) and Tender is the Night (1934), I explore how Fitzgerald utilizes the Gothic to represent the haunting of characters who served in the Great War. Through using antiquated Gothic elements, Fitzgerald is able to blend Romanticism and Realism into an American Modernist voice that traverses the cultural trauma experienced by Americans at home and abroad. v

<i>F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work: The Making of</i> The Great Gatsby

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

Gatsby:<i>The Cultural History of the Great American Novel</i><i>Beyond</i>Gatsby:<i>How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture</i><i>So We Read On: How</i>The Great Gatsby<i>Came to Be and Why It Endures</i>

Gatsby: <i>The Cultural History of the Great American Novel</i> <i>Beyond</i> Gatsby: <i>How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture</i> <i>So We Read On: How</i> The Great Gatsby <i>Came to Be and Why It Endures</i>

Another Side of Paradise

This study entitled “The Structure of Jay Gatsby’s Personality in The Great Gatsby Novel” is aimed to describe Jay Gatsby’s structure of personality and his behavioral representations. The data were taken from the novelThe Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Qualitative method was applied to analyze Jay Gatsby’s structure of personality and his behavioral representations. The theories used to analyzed are the theory of literature proposed by Kenney, theory of psychoanalysis and theory of anxiety proposed by Freud. The theory of literature showed that The Great Gatsby used mixed plot and in order to reveal the character of Jay Gatsby, mixing method was used.The psychoanalysis theory showed three structures of personality of human minds: the id, the ego, and the superego. The behavioral representations of the structure of personality showed in anxiety and defense mechanism of the ego: repression, fixation, and regression. The result of analysis showed that the desire of human beings must not be negative and must be realistic otherwise it will effect his/her behavior and how he/sheis treated in society.