Critical analysis
Major themes
The American Dream
Following the novel’s revival, later critical writings on The Great Gatsby focused on Fitzgerald’s disillusionment with the American Dream in the hedonistic Jazz Age, a name for the era which Fitzgerald claimed to have coined. In 1970, scholar Roger L. Pearson asserted that Fitzgerald’s work—more so than other twentieth century novels—is especially linked with this conceptualization of the American dream.
Pearson traced the literary origins of this dream to Colonial America. The dream is the belief that every individual, regardless of their origins, may seek and achieve their desired goals, “be they political, monetary, or social. It is the literary expression of the concept of America: The land of opportunity”.
However, Pearson noted that Fitzgerald’s particular treatment of this theme is devoid of the discernible optimism in the writings of earlier American authors. He suggests Gatsby serves as a false prophet of the American dream, and pursuing the dream only results in dissatisfaction for those who chase it, owing to its unattainability.
In this analytical context, the green light on the Buchanans’ dock (visible across Long Island Sound from Gatsby’s house) is frequently interpreted as a symbol of Gatsby’s unrealizable goal to win Daisy and, consequently, to achieve the American Dream. Also, scholar Sarah Churchwell points out that adultery in the novel is linked to the loss of faith and broken promises, which symbolizes the corruption of the American Dream.
Class permanence
Scholars and writers commonly ascribe Gatsby’s inability to achieve the American Dream to entrenched class disparities in American society. The novel underscores the limits of the American lower class to transcend their station of birth. Scholar Sarah Churchwell contends that Fitzgerald’s novel is a tale of class warfare in a status-obsessed country that refuses to acknowledge publicly it even has a class system.
Although scholars posit different explanations for the continuation of class differences in the United States, there is a consensus regarding the novel’s message in conveying its underlying permanence.
Although Gatsby’s fundamental conflict occurs between entrenched sources of socio-economic power and upstarts like Gatsby who threaten their interests, Fitzgerald’s novel shows that a class permanence persists despite the country’s capitalist economy that prizes innovation and adaptability.
Dianne Bechtel argues Fitzgerald plotted the novel to illustrate that class transcends wealth in America. Even if the poorer Americans become rich, they remain inferior to those Americans with “old money”. Consequently, Gatsby and other characters in the novel are trapped in a rigid American class system.
Gender relations
Besides exploring the difficulties of achieving the American dream, The Great Gatsby explores societal gender expectations during the Jazz Age. The character of Daisy Buchanan has been identified specifically as personifying the emerging cultural archetype of the flapper. Flappers were typically young, modern women who bobbed their hair and wore short skirts. They also drank alcohol and had premarital sex.
Despite the newfound societal freedoms attained by flappers in the 1920s, Fitzgerald’s work critically examines the continued limitations upon women’s agency during this period. In this context, although early critics viewed the character of Daisy to be a “monster of bitchery”, later scholars such as Leland S. Person Jr. asserted that Daisy’s character exemplifies the marginalization of women in the elite social environment that Fitzgerald depicts.
Writing in 1978, Person noted Daisy is more of a hapless victim than a manipulative victimizer. She is the target first of Tom’s callous domination and next of Gatsby’s dehumanizing adoration. She involuntarily becomes the holy grail at the center of Gatsby’s unrealistic quest to be steadfast to a youthful concept of himself. The ensuing contest of wills between Tom and Gatsby reduces Daisy to a trophy wife whose sole existence is to augment her possessor’s socio-economic success.
As an upper-class white woman living in East Egg during this time period, Daisy must adhere to societal expectations and gender norms such as actively fulfilling the roles of dutiful wife, nurturing mother, and charming socialite.
Many of Daisy’s choices—ultimately culminating in the fatal car crash and misery for all those involved—can be partly attributed to her prescribed role as a “beautiful little fool” who is reliant on her husband for financial and societal security. Her decision to remain with her husband, despite her feelings for Gatsby, is because of the security that her marriage to Tom Buchanan provides.
Race and displacement
Many scholars have analyzed the novel’s treatment of race and displacement; in particular, a perceived threat posed by newer immigrants to older Americans, triggering concerns over a loss of socio-economic status.
In one instance, Tom Buchanan—the novel’s antagonist—claims that he, Nick, and Jordan are racially superior Nordics. Tom decries immigration and advocates white supremacy. A fictional book alluded to by Tom is Goddard’s The Rise of the Colored Empires, which is a parody by Fitzgerald of Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color, a 1920s bestseller. Stoddard warned that immigration would alter America’s racial composition and destroy the country.
Analyzing these elements, literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels contends that Fitzgerald’s novel reflects a historical period in American literature characterized by fears over the influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants whose “otherness” challenged Americans’ sense of national identity. Such anxieties were more salient in national discourse than the societal consequences of World War I, and the defining question of the period was who constituted “a real American”.
In this context of immigration and displacement, Tom’s hostility towards Gatsby, who is the embodiment of “latest America”, has been interpreted as partly embodying status anxieties of the time involving anti-immigrant sentiment. Gatsby—whom Tom belittles as “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere”—functions as a cipher because of his obscure origins, his unclear ethno-religious identity and his indeterminate class status.
Although his ethnicity is vague, his last name Gatz and his father’s adherence to the Lutheran religion indicate his family are recent German immigrants. This would preclude them from the coveted status of Old Stock Americans. Consequently, Gatsby’s socio-economic ascent is deemed a threat not only due to his status as nouveau riche, but because he is perceived as an outsider.
Because of such themes, The Great Gatsby captures the perennial American experience as it is a story about change and those who resist it—whether such change comes in the form of a new wave of immigrants, the nouveau riche, or successful minorities.
Since Americans living in the 1920s to the present are largely defined by their fluctuating socio-economic circumstances and must navigate a society with entrenched racial and ethnic prejudices, Fitzgerald’s depiction of resultant status anxieties and social conflict has been highlighted by scholars as still enduringly relevant nearly a hundred years after the novel’s publication.
Sexuality and identity
Questions regarding the sexuality of characters have been raised for decades and—augmented by biographical details about the author—have given rise to queer readings. During his lifetime, Fitzgerald’s sexuality became a subject of debate among his friends and acquaintances. As a youth, Fitzgerald had a close relationship with Father Sigourney Fay, a possibly gay Catholic priest, and Fitzgerald later used his last name for the idealized romantic character of Daisy Fay.
After college, Fitzgerald cross-dressed during outings in Minnesota. Years later, while drafting The Great Gatsby, rumors dogged Fitzgerald among the American expat community in Paris that he was gay. Soon after, Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda Fitzgerald likewise doubted his heterosexuality and asserted that he was a closeted homosexual.
She publicly belittled him with homophobic slurs, and she alleged that Fitzgerald and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway engaged in homosexual relations. These incidents strained the Fitzgeralds’ marriage at the time of the novel’s publication.
Although Fitzgerald’s sexuality is a subject of scholarly debate, such biographical details lent credence to critical interpretations that his fictional characters are either gay or bisexual surrogates. As early as 1945, critics such as Lionel Trilling noted that characters in The Great Gatsby, such as Jordan Baker, were implied to be “vaguely homosexual”, and, in 1960, writer Otto Friedrich commented upon the ease of examining the thwarted relations depicted in Fitzgerald’s fiction through a queer lens.
In recent decades, scholarship has focused sharply on the sexuality of Nick Carraway. In one instance in the novel, Carraway departs a drunken orgy with a “pale, feminine” man named Mr. McKee and—following suggestive ellipses—Nick next finds himself standing beside a bed while McKee sits between the sheets clad only in his underwear.
Such scenes have led scholars to describe Nick as possessing an overt queerness and prompted analyses about his emotional attachment to Jay Gatsby. For these reasons, the novel has been described as an exploration of sexual identity during a historical era typified by the societal transition towards modernity.
Technology and environment
Technological and environmental criticisms of Gatsby seek to place the novel and its characters in a broader historical context. In 1964, Leo Marx argued in The Machine in the Garden that Fitzgerald’s work evinces a tension between a complex pastoral ideal of a bygone America and the societal transformations caused by industrialization and machine technology.
Specifically, the valley of the ashes, in between East and West Egg, represents a man-made wasteland which is a byproduct of the industrialization that has made Gatsby’s booming lifestyle, including his automobile, possible.
Marx argues that Fitzgerald, via Nick, expresses a pastoral longing typical of other 1920s American writers like William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Although such writers cherish the pastoral ideal, they accept that technological progress has deprived this ideal of nearly all meaning.
In this context, Nick’s repudiation of the eastern United States represents a futile attempt to withdraw into nature. Yet, as Fitzgerald’s work shows, any technological demarcation between the eastern and western United States has
