The Great Gatsby is one of America’s most famously known novels written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The success of the novel is not only due to its rich content but also its outstanding connection of what it was like living during the 1920’s. My main focus is to view The Great Gatsby through a Marxism lens in reason to why the novel is related to the configurations of power, society, and ideology during the 1920’s. Marxist Criticism deals with focusing on the ideological content of a work of literature and its explicit and implicit assumptions and values about matters like culture, race, class, and power. Marxist Critics view the literature as a reflection of the author’s own class or as an analysis of class relations (Marxist Criticism).
If one were to look at The Great Gatsby using a Marxism approach, they would know that the 1920’s were filled with partying, bootlegging, and jazz music. F. Scott Fitzgerald interpreted this time in history to be filled with extremely shallow people who were infatuated with materialistic things. People were obsessed with money and would do anything in order to create the image of wealth for themselves. The Great Gatsby can be seen as a novel that explores 1920′s America from a political view of social class and structure. Fitzgerald reflects social status through geographical locations in America and distinguishes the characters by their traits, lifestyles and mentalities (Dutta).
During this era, society showed that men held superior power over women. This is shown though many of the actions that men had towards women in the novel. We can see that Fitzgerald is criticizing American society in the 1920’s through his examples of power that the male characters had over the women in the novel. One ex...
... middle of paper ...
...h, which is shown through her carelessness towards other people. One example is when she lets Gatsby take the blame for the unintentional manslaughter of her husband’s mistress. America’s fascination with materialistic things is relevant to the moral values and obsession with wealth and power that still corrupts society to this day.
The people surrounding Fitzgerald and the people surrounding Gatsby were great examples of how society acted during the 1920’s. It was filled with people who were willing to do anything in order to satisfy their personal needs or help them acquire money (Enotes). Gatsby’s “American Dream” was driven by capitalism and materialism. The novel gives a realistic view of a tainted society and culture during this era and the things people would do in order to boost their social standing, even if it were extremely selfish, immoral, or illegal.
F. Scott Fitzgerald uses The Great Gatsby in order to display the wretchedness of upper-class society in the United States. The time period, the 1920s, was an age of new opulence and wealth for many Americans. As there is an abundance of wealth today, there are many parallels between the behavior of the wealthy in the novel and the behavior of today’s rich. Fitzgerald displays the moral emptiness and lack of personal ethics and responsibility that is evident today throughout the book. He also examines the interactions between social classes and the supposed noblesse oblige of the upper class. The idea of the American dream and the prevalence of materialism are also scrutinized. All of these social issues spoken about in The Great Gatsby are relevant in modern society. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses this novel as an indictment of a corrupt American culture that is still present today.
The Great Gatsby displays how the time of the 1920s brought people to believe that wealth and material goods were the most important things in life, and that separation of the social classes was a necessary need. Fitzgerald’s choice to expose the 1920s for the corrupt time that it really was is what makes him one of the greatest authors of his time, and has people still reading one of his greatest novels, The Great Gatsby, decades
Posnock, Ross. "'A New World, Material Without Being Real': Fitzgerald's Critique of Capitalism in The Great Gatsby." Critical Essays on Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby." Ed. Scott Donaldson. Boston: Hall, 1984. 201-13.
Unaware to some, The Great Gatsby not only tells a story, but contains great meaning to those who understand it. Published in 1925, Fitzgerald’s novel holds a myriad of topics and themes that depicts what life was like at that time. One such topic included is the class structure 1920s. During the 1920s, there existed invisible borders that separated people based off their socioeconomic class. Each class had particular attributes associated with people living in them as well as reasons why they are in that specific class. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald creates characters with specific attitudes and behaviors that generalize the social stratum they are placed in to convey a message about how the American class structure functions. Through
F. Scott Fitzgerald was accurate in his portrayal of the aristocratic flamboyancy and indifference of the 1920s. In his novel, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald explores many aspects of indifference and flamboyancy. A large influence on this society was the pursuit of the American Dream. Gangsters played a heavily influential role in the new money aristocracy of the 1920s. The indifference was mainly due to the advent of Prohibition in 1920. One major societal revolution in this period was that of the “new women,” who expressed new actions and beliefs. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald accurately portrayed his characters Nick Carraway, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and the novel’s eponym, Jay Gatsby, as a part of the society of the 1920s.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a romantic character in both his fiction life and his real life and “…was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the Romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self"(Voegeli). The inspiration for The Great Gatsby came from the experience Fitzgerald had with a Jewish bootlegger and his symbolism for the book is “never more ingenious than in his depiction of the bankruptcy of the old agrarian myth” (Trask). The realization that America had been changed and transformed into a new world arose. America has become a new world with a new set of traditional beliefs. The beliefs were onset by the growing fields of industrialization and urbanization. America is now a place in which “a revolution in manners and morals was inevitable” (Trask). The trend of this new life style and tradition was reinforced by World War 1 and the writers critiqued the traditional faiths. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald paints a story about love and intrigue. He shows the possibility of movement between the different social classes during the Roaring Twenties in the United States. The American dream was the thought that people who had talent in the 'land of opportunity' could gain success if they followed a set of well-defined behavioral rules. During this time period, Americans believed that satisfaction would automatically follow success. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald raises many important political questions: "What does it mean to live well, and on what terms people can live together?” and it shows America's thoughts and answers to these essential questions (Voegeli). These questions are referring to the different social classes and be...
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald reflects the American society in the 1920’s and the different social groups that coexisted. The Great Gatsby portrays the failure of the American Dream, where corruption, illegal trading, superficial relationships, and social classes take the main roles. The author demonstrates how the American dream has become a pursuit of wealth and materialism through the exploration of the upper class. In addition, the author uses characterization to reflect the upper class in the 1920’s as two separate groups: the “old” money, and the “new money”. These are shown through the main characters in the novel, such as Gatsby and Tom Buchanan.
The 1920’s was a time of great change to both the country lived in as well as the goals and ambitions that were sought after by the average person. During this time, priorities shifted from family and religion to success and spontaneous living. The American dream, itself, changed into a self centered and ongoing personal goal that was the leading priority in most people’s lives. This new age of carelessness and naivety encompasses much of what this earlier period is remembered for. In addition, this revolution transformed many of the great writers and authors of the time as well as their various works. The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, perfectly symbolizes many emergent trends of the 1920’s. More importantly the character of Jay Gatsby is depicted as a man amongst his American dream and the trials he faces in the pursuit of its complete achievement. His drive for acquiring the girl of his dreams, Daisy Buchanan, through gaining status and wealth shows many aspects of the authors view on the American dream. Through this, one can hope to disassemble the complex picture that is Fitzgerald’s view of this through the novel. Fitzgerald believes, through his experiences during the 1920’s, that only fractions of the American Dream are attainable, and he demonstrates this through three distinct images in The Great Gastby.
In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald explores the idea of the American Dream as well as the portrayal of social classes. Fitzgerald carefully sets up his novel into distinct social groups but, in the end, each group has its own problems to contend with, leaving a powerful reminder of what a precarious place the world really is. By creating two distinct social classes ‘old money’ and ‘new money’, Fitzgerald sends strong messages about the elitism underlying and moral corruption society. The idea of the American dream is the ideal that opportunity is available to any American, allowing their highest aspirations and goals to be achieved. In the case of The Great Gatsby it centres on the attainment of wealth and status to reach certain positions in life,
In the past century in America, one of the decades that has stood out most as a time of change is the 1920s. In a post-war economic boom, the decade was a time of cultural and societal change. Among the parties and the more relaxed way of life, Americans experienced new wealth and luxury. Capturing the essence of the Roaring Twenties is a daunting task, especially because of the many different factors contributing to the decade’s fame. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald managed to capture and define the spirit of the 1920s through his novel. In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the characters and events of the novel manifest the trademark qualities of America in the 1920s.
In the novel The Great Gatsby, the 1920’s was a “throwaway culture, in which things (and people) are used and then abandoned” (Evans). This is true of the lives of the wealthy elite who ruled the East and West Eggs, causing the domination of materialistic thought. The substitution of money for integrity ultimately provided a way for corruption to take deep roots in the characters. The frivolous lives and relationships described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby depict the emptiness of the shallow 1920’s era.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald took place in the 1920’s when the nation was undergoing rapid economic, political, and social change. Looking through different literary lenses the reader is able to see the effects of these rapid changes. The marxist lens reflects the gap between rich and poor while the feminist lens showcases the patriarchal society.
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald creates an artificial world where money is the object of everyone's desire. The characters, the setting, and the plot are very deeply submerged in a Capitalism that ends up destroying many of them. Fitzgerald's criticism of Capitalism can be seen as a move to subtly promote Socialism, an ideology in which value is placed on the inherent value of an object rather than its market value. In a late collection of notes, Fitzgerald himself proclaims that he is "essentially Marxist." [i] Marxism is a specific branch of Socialist theory. Fitzgerald makes Gatsby a novel that is not inherently Marxist or even Socialist, but one that is imbued with Marxist theory. He does this by denouncing nonhumanitarianism, reification, and market value. Fitzgerald implies that the Capitalist system does not work because at the end of the novel, all of the characters that represent typical American Capitalism end up either dead or completely unhappy. Fitzgerald's criticisms work to warn 1920's Americans of their behavior and how destructive it can be.
The Roaring Twenties is considered a time of mass corruption and excessive absurdity. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses his novel, The Great Gatsby, to criticize the American society and its values in this era. This criticism is best shown in the behaviour of the people who go to Gatsby's parties; they are careless, rude and only looking out for themselves. It is also shown in the corruption of the police, who are easily paid to look the other way. It is finally apparent in the corruption of friendship and love, the truth being that there is none. This society and its values are self-centered and materialistic, caring very little for consequences and others. Fitzgerald's message is delivered magnificently and causes one to be appalled by the behaviour of the people during this time in history.
In conclusion, The Great Gatsby reveals the carelessness and shallowness of the characters in the upper class. Society is totally corrupted and the character’s lives revolve around the money and extravagant lifestyles. All of the characters are surrounded with expensive and unnecessary itms, which in turn, dulls their dream of actual success. Scott F. Fitzgerald provides a powerful and everlasting message of a corrupt, materialistic society and the effects that it has on the idea of the American dream.