Lesbian criticism

thousand dollars” (107; ch. 6), promised to the twenty‑three‑year‑old Gatsby in Cody’s will, went instead, through some “legal device that was used against him” (107; ch. 6), to Cody’s companion, Ella Kaye. Gatsby is also, in a sense, cheated out of Daisy Fay when Tom marries her while Gatsby is still overseas after World War I. Fitzgerald’s hero perseveres, however, in his pursuit both of fortune and of Daisy, and before the novel closes he attains both goals. Finally, the role of the lesser hero who helps the Alger hero in some way is played by Nick Carraway, and the role of the businessman‑father figure is played by Dan Cody, as we saw above, and by Meyer Wolfsheim, who “raised him up out of nothing” (179; ch. 9) when Gatsby returned penniless from the war. Perhaps the most pervasive vehicles for the ideology of the self‑made man were the McGuffey Readers, a series of elementary school books used to teach reading, which were a dominant force in American education from the mid‑ nineteenth century to the early 1920s. The stories and poems contained in the Readers extol the same virtues promoted by the success manuals of the period: honesty, hard work, kindness, and the avoidance of alcohol and bad company. In addition, like the success manuals, Horatio Alger novels, and other texts that circulated the discourse of the self‑made man, the Readers illustrated the belief that success is a product of good character. For example, a poor boy receives a job because the old man he has kindly helped cross the street turns out to own his own business. Or an orphan boy is adopted by a wealthy man because he has resisted the temptation to steal the man’s gold watch. As we have seen, Gatsby has many traits in common with the self‑made hero, of which McGuffey’s protagonists are just another version. And the job Gatsby receives from Dan Cody, which serves as his introduction to the world of finan‑ cial success to which he has always aspired, is the product of the good deed he performed in rowing out to Cody’s yacht to warn him of an impending storm, just as the success of McGuffey’s boys is a product of their good character. Finally, there is a startling resemblance between Gatsby’s early life and the for‑ mative years of America’s most famous self‑made millionaires, the oft‑told stories of which were another way in which the discourse of the self‑made man circu‑ lated. In The Robber Barons (1934), Matthew Josephson details many of the com‑ mon experiences shared by such self‑made millionaires of the late nineteenth century as Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Philip Armour, Andrew Carnegie, James Hill, John Rockefeller, and Jay Cooke. Although Josephson is not interested in liter‑ ary analysis and makes no comparisons with The Great Gatsby, the similarities between the life stories Josephson narrates and the biography of Jay Gatsby are too striking to be ignored. Born into poverty, “most of these young men,” Josephson notes, “left the paternal shelter early in youth, to wander alone and make their own way. . . .

[T]hey showed promising signs of shiftiness and self‑reliance in boyhood” (33). Although their companions often drank and gambled, these young men did not. Cool under pressure, “violence [did] not shake [them]” (35). Indeed, they often made their fortunes in the rush for gold or for the monopoly of natural resources, railroad lines, or stocks, all of which pursuits were not merely finan‑ cially dangerous but physically dangerous as well: as fortunes were quickly made and lost, one’s companions on the frontier, or even a group of stockholders one had defrauded on Wall Street, could turn into an angry, vengeful mob. And “[a]t the center of the stirring, shifting drama of material progress toward new rail‑ roads or gold fields,” Josephson observes, “was the notion of individual fortune and change of station” (37). In other words, much like Jay Gatsby, the self‑made men of whom Josephson writes were driven by a desire to become rich and rise up out of the class into which they were born. And much like these self‑made men, Gatsby left his par‑ ents’ home as a teenager, wandered alone, and made his own way. Like them, he did not adopt the debilitating personal habits of his companions, and he made his fortune according to the dangerous rules of a violent subculture. Clearly, The Great Gatsby reflects the discourse of the self‑made man circulating in so many of the texts that both shaped and were shaped by American culture during the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. For ideology does not observe boundaries between “high” and “popu‑ lar” culture: a discourse circulating in such practical and mundane texts as suc‑ cess manuals, children’s readers, and didactic formula‑novels can also saturate the pages of one of the era’s most sophisticated artistic productions. However, the novel also serves as a comment on the discourse of the self‑made man to the extent that it reveals one of its central contradictions, which con‑ cerns the relationship of that discourse to history. Although the discourse of the self‑made man claims to open the annals of American history to all those who have the ambition and perseverance required to “make their mark” on its pages, the discourse is permeated by the desire to escape history, to transcend the historical realities of time, place, and human limitation. This contradiction appears in many of the autobiographical stories of the self‑ made millionaires mentioned above. Although self‑made men often spoke of the harsh historical realities they experienced as children, particularly of their poverty, they did so only to celebrate how far they had come. And the form that celebration took, I would argue, constitutes a denial of historical reality because it was a way of reinventing the suffering self‑made men saw in their youth as nothing but a prelude to their success. Looking back on their lives, they saw their boyhood selves as “future millionaires in training,” so to speak, being honed in the workshop of “hard knocks” and fired in the kiln of poverty. Such

an ideology didn’t permit them to see the debilitating effects of the poverty they escaped on those who didn’t manage to do the same. Among the general population of America’s impoverished, relatively few, in any generation, have become millionaires. According to the discourse of the self‑made man, those who didn’t rise to the top had only themselves to blame, which implies, of course, that poverty and the degrading influence of tenement life (not to mention the almost insurmountable obstacles raised against business opportunities for women and people of color) are no excuse for the failure to rise in the business world. Such failure was defined as a failure of one’s character, pure and simple. This is why many self‑made millionaires refused to give money to charity, confining their philanthropy to endowing libraries, museums, and universities, which could, they reasoned, help only those who were willing to help themselves and not encourage the slothful behavior that charity would, they believed, encourage.3 For example, in his autobiography, Andrew Carnegie describes the happy fam‑ ily life he enjoyed as a child of poor immigrant parents. He notes, in addition to his family’s economic hardship, how politically active his relatives were, how education was valued by his parents, and how he was trained by his home envi‑ ronment to engage in rigorous debate on the issues of the day. Indeed, Carn‑ egie observes that the economic poverty he suffered in childhood was richly compensated by the training and support he received in the bosom of a strong family. Yet he was apparently unable to realize that many other poor youngsters in his own neighborhood—for example, the sons of parents who did not under‑ stand the value of education or the sons of drunken, abusive parents—did not have the same advantages he had and therefore could not be expected to raise themselves up as readily as he did. That is, in Carnegie’s desire to focus on his own transcendence of historical reality, he ignores those aspects of history that cannot be overcome so readily. The Great Gatsby reflects this same desire to transcend history in Gatsby’s efforts to deny his true origins. Gatsby’s “parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people,” but “his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all” (104; ch. 6). Instead, Gatsby invented a family, an Oxford education, and an inheritance in order to convince himself and others that he was born to wealth and social position. That is, Gatsby wants to deny the historical realities of socioeconomic class to which he had been subjected all his life. As Nick puts it, “Jay Gatsby . . . sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (104; ch. 6). A Platonic conception is one that, by definition, is outside history: it exists in a timeless dimension untouched by daily occurrences in the material world. And this is the dimension in which Gatsby wants to live.

Gatsby’s claim that Daisy’s love for Tom “was just personal” (160; ch. 8), a state‑ ment that confuses Nick as well as many readers, makes sense in this context. In Gatsby’s eyes, Daisy’s love for Tom exists within history, within the domain of the personal, and is thus no competition for the love she and Gatsby share, which exists in a timeless dimension beyond history. Similarly, Gatsby’s belief in our power over the past makes sense only if he conceives of his own life outside the bounds of historical reality. His conviction that the three years Daisy has spent married to Tom can be “obliterated” by her telling Tom that she never loved him, and that they can “repeat the past” by “go[ing] back to Louisville and be[ing] married from her house—just as if it were five years ago” (116; ch. 6) is a conviction one can hold only from a place outside history, a place where the past is repeatable because it is timelessly preserved, forever accessible. The discourse of the self‑made man also “erases history” in choosing to ignore or marginalize the enormous character flaws of many famous self‑made men while simultaneously defining self‑made success as a product of one’s character rather than of one’s environment. The success manuals from this period offered very little, if any, practical advice about business matters. All of their advice focused, instead, on attributes of character—from honesty and integrity in the workplace to frugality and sobriety in the home—because it was believed that success comes from within the man. Therefore, character, rather than education or business acumen, was considered the foundation of the self‑made man. Yet some of the moral failings of self‑made millionaires were the very factors that enabled them to rise to the top by enabling them to ruthlessly and often unethi‑ cally destroy their business rivals. Of course, this aspect of historical reality was absent from the proliferation of texts that extolled the virtues of the self‑made man, or it was recast, in the popular imagination, as a capitalist virtue: competi‑ tiveness, aggressiveness, toughness. It is interesting to note in this context that since the publication of The Great Gatsby, the majority of critical response to the novel’s title character has roman‑ ticized him much as American culture has romanticized the self‑made man, by idealizing his desire to succeed and ignoring or marginalizing the means by which he fulfilled that desire. What an early reviewer said of Gatsby in 1925 has continued to represent the feeling of a good many readers over the course of the novel’s reception: Gatsby’s “is a vitality . . . the inner fire [of] which comes from living with an incorruptible dream, even if extraordinary material corruption has been practised in its realization” (E. K. 426). In 1945, William Troy describes Gatsby as the “projected wish fulfillment” of the “consciousness of a race” (21). And Tom Burnam argues in 1952 that Gatsby “survives sound and whole in character, uncorrupted by the corruption which surrounded him” (105). In 1954, Marius Bewley writes that Gatsby is “all aspiration and goodness” (25): “an heroic personification of the American romantic hero” (14), who represents “the

energy of the spirit’s resistance” and “immunity to the final contamination” of “cheapness and vulgarity” (13). And Barry Edward Gross suggests in 1963 that “Gatsby’s dream is essentially ‘incorruptible’ ” because it “is essentially immate‑ rial,” which is why “he turns ‘out all right at the end’ ” (57). Similarly, in 1978 Rose Adrienne Gallo argues that Gatsby “maintained his innocence” to the end (43), or as André Le Vot puts it in 1983, Gatsby never loses his “fundamental integrity, his spiritual intactness” (144). Even when the protagonist’s darker side is acknowledged, it is excused. As Kent Cartwright argues in 1984, “Gatsby can be both criminal and romantic hero because the book creates for him a vision‑ ary moral standard that transcends the conventional and that his life affirms” (232). Or as Andrew Dillon sums up, in 1988, what he sees as the protagonist’s merger of worldliness and spirituality, Gatsby is “a sensual saint” (50).4 Finally, the connection between the discourse of the self‑made man and the desire to transcend history can be seen in the McGuffey Readers. In the self‑ improvement discourse that informs the bulk of the material in the Readers there is a striking absence of reference to historical reality. Even during the period directly after the Civil War, when poems and songs about the war abounded, the only “historical” piece included isn’t historical at all: it’s a sentimental poem called “The Blue and the Gray” (1867) in which soldiers from both sides are glorified in terms such that they could be soldiers from almost any war fought during almost any historical period. In other words, the poem creates a timeless world that remains untouched by historical events. As Henry Steele Commager puts it, [t]hough the original volumes of the Readers appeared when men could still remember the Revolutionary War and the War of 11—McGuffey himself lived through that war, and on the Ohio frontier, too—there is no ardent hostility to Britain, no execration of George III, no atrocity story about the Indians. And though new Readers, and revisions of old Readers, poured from the presses all through the era of the Mexican War, of Manifest Destiny, and of Young America, the Readers reflect none of this: even the Oregon Trail and the gold rush to California were not allowed to ruffle the serenity of their pages. Even more startling is the fact that those who later revised the Readers . . . managed to avoid the Civil War! Aside from Francis Finch’s “The Blue and the Gray”—a masterpiece of impartiality—the war might never have happened, as far as the Readers are concerned. (xiii) History is also transcended in the McGuffey Readers through the sentimental‑ ization of experience. The Readers are full of sentimental descriptions of injured animals, of virtuous children rewarded for their unselfishness by some mon‑ etary windfall, of the peaceful deaths of angelic children, and of heroic deeds. When experience is depicted in sentimental terms, that experience becomes general rather than specific, “larger than life” in the same way that fairy tales are

larger than life: they exist in some timeless dimension beyond the daily course of human events, beyond history. As Stanley W. Lindberg observes about one of McGuffey’s war poems, it is “safely sentimental” (320), by which he means, of course, outside the fray of the political and social issues of the day, that is, outside history. There is a striking similarity between the overblown sentimentality of the McGuffey Readers and the “appalling sentimentality” (118; ch. 6) of the auto‑ biographical narrative Gatsby offers Nick, a sentimentality that removes Gats‑ by’s life, just as it removed the McGuffey Readers, from the realities of history. Gatsby tells Nick, My family all died and I came into a good deal of money. . . . After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe . . . collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little . . . and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago. (0; ch. ) Gatsby’s autobiographical sketch sounds more like an outline for a staged Vic‑ torian melodrama than a narrative about an actual life. As Nick puts it, “The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore” (70; ch. 4). But it is this sentimental “translation” of his life—which he offers, Nick says, in a “solemn” voice, “as if the memory . . . still haunted him” (70)—that allows Gatsby to escape historical reality into a “larger‑than‑life” fairy tale. Of course, the discourse of the self‑made man retains much of its vitality today. On an episode of the television series Matlock, for example, a son attempts to recuperate his murdered father’s reputation as a ruthless, unethical business executive by saying that his father was a self‑made man. Thus, the phrase still has the power to suggest that men capable of achieving such an important and respected goal should not be judged too harshly for their ruthless, unethical behavior because it requires “toughness” to make it as a self‑made man. Simi‑ larly, the television series America’s Castles, which offers guided tours of Amer‑ ica’s great mansions and of the lives of the men who built them, relies heavily on the discourse of the self‑made man, even quoting uncritically the self‑serving statements of nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century self‑made millionaires concerning their own hard work and integrity. Furthermore, Jay Gatsby remains the icon of America’s romanticization of the self‑made man. That actor Robert Redford, who is generally typecast as a romantic hero, was chosen to play Gatsby in the movie version of Fitzgerald’s novel released in 1974 reveals the persistence of a romantic view of Gatsby in the American popular imagination. Indeed, during a discussion of self‑made, Oklahoma oil millionaire E. W. Marland on an episode of America’s Castles, the

narrator notes Fitzgerald’s belief that the story of a hero is always a tragic story while it superimposes the cover of The Great Gatsby over a photo of Marland’s mansion. In other words the television show attempts to romanticize Marland by associating him with Jay Gatsby. Clearly, The Great Gatsby’s embodiment of the complexities and contradictions of the discourse of the self‑made man reveals the complexities and contradictions that informed the attitude of Fitzgerald’s America toward the achievement of financial success. Without the discourse of the self‑made man, Fitzgerald’s best‑ known novel would not be possible. For the character of Jay Gatsby would sim‑ ply be the “cheap sharper” (159; ch. 8)—just another criminal—he fears people will see in him. It is this discourse, as much as his devotion to Daisy and his boyish optimism, that makes it possible for Gatsby to remain the romantic figure he is today. Fitzgerald’s novel also shows us how the circulation of discourses has very per‑ sonal implications for all of us. For it illustrates the ways in which cultural dis‑ courses are the raw materials from which we fashion our individual identities. Nick Carraway may think that Gatsby “sprang from his Platonic” ahistorical “conception of himself” (104; ch. 6), a belief Gatsby clearly shares, but Gatsby’s personal identity did not so originate. As we have seen, James Gatz’s creation of Jay Gatsby drew heavily on the discourse of the self‑made man, one of the dominant discourses circulating in the culture in which he lived. And like Jay Gatsby, all of us do the same. We each may draw on different discourses, and we each may draw on them in different ways, but it is through the discourses circulating in our culture that our individual identities are formed, are linked to one another, and are linked to the culture that both shapes and is shaped by each of us.

Questions for further practice: new historical and cultural criticism of other literary works

The following questions are intended as models. They can help you use new historical and cultural criticism to interpret the literary works to which they refer or to other texts of your choice. Your purpose in addressing these ques‑ tions, the way in which you focus your essay, and your own self‑identified critical orientation will determine whether your essay is considered an example of new historical or cultural criticism.