Historical Context
Published
in 1925, The Great Gatsby is known as the Great American Novel and is
considered the defining work of the 1920’s, the decade often referred to as
the Jazz Age. America had just come out of World War I, one of the bloodiest and
most violent episodes in this nation’s history. Young people had sacrificed
their lives for a war that had taken place on an entirely separate continent,
and with many families losing fathers, sons, and husbands in the war, the entire
society was submerged in disillusionment, skepticism, cultural experimentation,
and hedonism.
After
suffering through this tragic war, Americans felt entitled to having a little
fun and concentrating their energies on finding pleasure and comfort for
themselves in order to forget about the war and the deep emotional and social
scars that they had suffered. Let me rephrase that – they didn’t want to
have “a little fun” – they wanted to have a lot of fun. Conservatism and
moderation were thrown out of the national window – instead, pleasure-seeking
and fast times became the national values.
The 1920’s
were an era of optimism and aspiration — a time when individuals felt that
they could leave behind their pasts completely and could become anyone they
wanted to be. It seemed as if any person could rise to become a member of the
social or economic elite. It was a decade obsessed with superlatives – with
being the most beautiful, the most powerful, the most wealthy.
One of the
most important themes in The Great Gatsby is its focus on money as the
foundation of American society. Keep in mind that at the turn of the twentieth
century, immigrants were coming to the United States by the millions because
they believed in the American Dream of abandoning a past of poverty and
embracing the possibility of rolling in money in the land of freedom and
liberty. They fled the economic and political oppression of their own countries
because they believed that in the United States, they could do anything that
they put their minds to. Gatsby/James Gatz had believed in that same dream and
believed that he could win anything, even love, with money.
During the
1920’s, the country also experienced an unprecedented economic boom that
allowed the values of materialism and ambition to take over the American
mindset. With social mobility apparently possible for everyone during the
1920’s, many Americans did try to involve themselves in “get-rich-quick”
schemes that sometimes included illegal activities such as gambling and
bootlegging. The color green, the color of money, plays an especially important
role in this book – the light at the end of Daisy’s deck, the same light
that Gatsby watches every night, is green, and at the end of the novel, Nick
describes North America as the large, undeveloped piece of green land had filled
that the original Dutch explorers with hope and ambition. In this work, the
color green symbolizes the quest for the American Dream and the belief of many
Americans that money could solve any problems.
The novel is
set in the era when organized crime became a means of rebelling against
Prohibition, and Gatsby has made an obscene amount of money as a bootlegger. At
his lavish parties, he entertains movie stars and singers, celebrities who
gained great acclaim and social position during a decade that was obsessed with
beauty, entertainment, and pleasure. The 1920’s was known as the Jazz Age for
a reason – the country fell in love with music and flapper girls, both of
which became intimately associated with hedonistic good times and illegal
activities. Gatsby introduces the narrator, Nick Carraway, to a gambler named
Meyer Wolfshiem, who apparently had been the man responsible for fixing the 1919
World Series (seven Chicago White Sox players were accused of fixing the series
for gamblers who had made bets on the games’ outcomes). It is appropriate that
Fitzgerald included a Wolfshiem character in his book, for the fixing of the
World Series reflected the idea that money could buy any American absolutely
anything, even love and happiness.
And of course,
everything good must come to an end. The Roaring Twenties exited to make way for
a decade of tragedy and unfulfilled want. After the nation spent an entire
decade celebrating the great economic boom that it had enjoyed in the 1920’s,
the stock market crash in 1929 sent the economy into a tragic tailspin that
began the terrible Great Depression of the 1930’s, when poverty and hunger
afflicted millions of Americans who had lost their jobs and their homes. Instead
of valuing hedonism and materialism, Americans struggled to survive and learned
to cherish the values of frugality and self-discipline. The party was over, and
the American Dream seemed to be nothing but a myth.
