The Great Gatsby
A04: Contexts of Production
Fitzgerald’s Life:
· Born in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 24th, 1896.
· His birth was haunted by death; three months earlier, two of his infant sisters had died.· Dominant theme of his boyhood, which would figure strongly in his fiction, was social insecurity. He later wrote that he, ‘developed the dual strands of his family background: an Irish strand with the money, and an old American strand with ‘the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions’ and the ‘series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word ‘breeding.’” The disparity between money and ‘breeding’ would be one of the key concerns of The Great Gatsby.
· Fitzgerald’s sense of inferiority was increased by his father’s downward mobility. When the novelist was born, his father owned a furniture factory but this failed less than two years later and consequently his father, Edward Fitzgerald, was forced to take a job as a wholesale grocery salesman. Then in July 1908 when Fitzgerald was 11, his father, then aged 55 lost his job, which the young Fitzgerald considered to be a decisive blow.
“That morning he had gone out a comparatively young man, a man full of strength, full of confidence. He came home that evening, an old man, a completely broken man.”
· His father had suffered an experience that would permeate his son’s fiction: failure.
· Family now dependent on his mother’s capital and while this allowed them to maintain a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle, it also highlighted for Fitzgerald, the gap between his own, broken father and the successful men who lived around them in St. Paul.
· In September 1913, Fitzgerald went east to Princeton University; he never completed his degree.
· Since Christmas, 1914 Fitzgerald had maintained a romantic attachment to Ginevra King, a girl from St. Paul who seemed to embody all of his aspirations: she was beautiful and wealthy, held a high place in the social hierarchy, and had many admirers. But the relationship did not endure and came to an end in January, 1917; it seemed to demonstrate to Fitzgerald his sense of the social and financial barrier which stopped poor boys from marrying rich girls – a concern that would be crucial to Gatsby.
· On 6th April 1917, the USA entered the First World War, and Fitzgerald signed up for the army in May.
· In July, 1918, he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a local judge at a country club dance in Alabama and he fell for her.
· In November 1918, Fitzgerald reported to Camp Mills, Long Island, to await embarkation for military service in Europe; but the war came to an end before his unit could be sent abroad. He would always regret that, as the title of a 1936 short story put it, ‘I didn’t get over.’ In Gatsby he would portray, in the narrator, Nick Carraway, and in the eponymous hero, men who did get over and whose war service forms one of the bonds between them.
· Fitzgerald returned to civilian life wanting to marry Zelda but she would not rush into a marriage with a jobless, unproven writer. After many rejections of his short stories, and a broken engagement with Zelda, Fitzgerald reworked an earlier novel ‘The Romantic Egoist’ – renaming it ‘This Side of Paradise’ and whilst waiting for its publication, his short-stories broke in to the mass-circulation magazine market which paid well.
· The eventual success of ‘This Side of Paradise’ enabled him to marry Zelda on 3rd April, 1920. Fitzgerald did not forget however what might have happened if he had not won the financial means to marry Zelda.
· Marriage was characterised by the pursuit of pleasure: partying, leaping into fountains, riding on the roofs of taxi cabs etc.
· The couple made frequent trips to Europe, with Fitzgerald writing Gatsby on the French Riviera, in the summer and autumn of 1924.
· Reviews of Gatsby were mixed and its sales were sluggish and resultantly Fitzgerald’s life thereafter was both demanding and de-habilitating. It involved his decline from celebrity to obscurity; his alcoholism and bouts of depression hindered his efforts to write another novel and he had to continue to try to write short stories to pay for his daughter Scottie’s upkeep and for Zelda’s psychiatric care after her mental illness became acute in 1930. (Zelda’s intense ballet work damaged her health and contributed to the couple’s estrangement)
· Fitzgerald died of a massive heart attack and died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity. Only 20-30 people attended his funeral, parallels with Gatsby’s funeral in the novel.
Historical Context:
World War I:
The war took young men abroad, from the New World back to Europe, and some of them returned to the USA restless. Yet, after the war ended, the economy skyrocketed, making it possible for people to spend more time and money on leisure activities. Thus, this post-war period became known as The ‘Roaring Twenties’.
ProhibitionIn January 1919, American Congress passed the 18th Amendment which prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The Amendment was designed to create a sober and temperate society but it backfired dramatically.
It fuelled the rapid growth of organised crime networks who engaged in bootlegging (the making and selling of illegal alcoholic drinks) and fostered the emergence of wealthy and powerful gangsters. Gangsterism provided a means of upward social mobility for certain members of ethnic groups at a time when restrictions on immigration were being tightened. Yet in America there was anxiety about immigrants and racist attitudes were frequent in the 1920s among the indigenous population.
Booming economy of the 1920s:
The total of national wealth rose from approximately $187 million in 1912 to $450 million in 1929. This economic boom was fuelled by new industries, particularly the manufacture of automobiles. Automobiles had existed before the Twenties, but were expensive, unreliable, and generally only toys for the rich. What made the automobile so influential in the 1920's was its increased availability and dependability. Henry Ford was largely responsible for this movement, pioneering efficient production methods and striving to produce a reliable and practical car for the masses.
Change in the position of women:
The Nineteenth Amendment introduced by Congress in 1920 emancipated women as it gave them the right to vote for the first time. For those who could afford them, technological innovations and rise in consumer goods lessened the burden of housework which traditional had fallen on women. During the 1920s opportunities for female employment increased, although they were still considerably restricted. In advertisements and magazines, a new model for femininity emerged – known as the flapper.
The term ‘flapper’ had originally been coined in the early twentieth century to refer to a teenage girl with a plait tied in a large bow which flapped against her back as she walked. But in the 1920s it came to refer to a young woman who pursued her own pleasure – including sexual pleasure. Frequently ‘flappers’ would have used their sexuality to attract and exploit men.
These changes in the roles of women was both liberating and disturbing: women would have to negotiate mixed, conflicting demands and men would be faced with apparent threats to their own patriarchal assumptions and privileges.
