The Great Gatsby and the twenties

Abstract

The Great Gatsby , published in 1925, seems to speak directly to its current audience about love and existential freedom. Yet the ideas we bring to the story may not be the ideas that the story brings to us. The book was written before most of its readers were born. It inhabits a different world, with barriers between men and women, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, rich and poor, capital and labor, educated and half-literate. It was a more defined and morally harder world then: at no point in the novel does Daisy Fay Buchanan ever appeal to the transcending authority of love, or Jay Gatsby to that of equality. Social judgment matters more. Daisy knows that life has many things more permanent than love, and Gatsby knows, or Fitzgerald knows for him, that equality is only a political virtue. Part of the meaning of the text can be explained by sources, influence, background. Research on these things has concentrated on three broad issues: the novel’s development from Fitzgerald’s earlier writing about love and money; the influence of other writers like Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot; and its powerful retelling of the story of Scott and Zelda. Fitzgerald’s own “Winter Dreams” (1922) and “‘The Sensible Thing’” (1924) are both about men who need money, in love with women inaccessible without it. The first of these stories “examines a boy whose ambitions become identified with a selfish rich girl.” Part of it was absorbed into The Great Gatsby : “Indeed, Fitzgerald removed Dexter Green’s response to Judy Jones’s home from the magazine text and wrote it into the novel as Jay Gatsby’s response to Daisy Fay’s home.”