Civilizations going to_pieces_the_great

the pennsylvania state university press | volume 13 | 2 0 1 5
T H E F . S C O T T F I T Z G E R A L D R E V I E W

Editors
William Blazek, Liverpool Hope University
Jackson R. Bryer, University of Maryland
Kirk Curnutt, Troy University Montgomery
Michael K. Glenday, Open University
Heidi M. Kunz, Randolph College
David W. Ullrich, Birmingham-Southern College
Susan Wanlass, University of California, Sacramento
Editorial Board
Ronald Berman, University of California, San Diego
Elisabeth Bouzonviller, Université Jean Monnet
Scott Donaldson, The College of William and Mary
Andrew Hook, University of Glasgow
Horst H. Kruse, University of Münster
Richard Lehan, University of California, Los Angeles
Alan Margolies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Kim Moreland, George Washington University
James L. W. West III, The Pennsylvania State University
Sponsors
F. Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul
Liverpool Hope University
Troy University
Cover: F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896–1940, American Writer. Culver Pictures / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

v for frances kroll ring (1916–2015)
vii editors’ note
Articles
1 The Gilded Man in Nickel City
Madison Smartt Bell
15 “Mending Sails by Candlelight”: A Preface to Clothes for a Summer Hotel
Tennessee Williams
Edited by John S. Bak
29 “Civilization’s Going to Pieces”: The Great Gatsby, Identity, and Race, From
the Jazz Age to the Obama Era
Joseph Vogel
55 Landscape with a Tragic Hero: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Trimalchio
Sara Antonelli
76 The Muse and the Maker: Gender, Collaboration, and Appropriation in the Life
and Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
Ashley Lawson
110 Authorship and Artistry: Zelda Fitzgerald’s “A Millionaire’s Girl” and
“Miss Ella”
Christine Grogan
130 My Own Personal Public: Fitzgerald’s Table of Contents in Tales of the Jazz Age
Ross K. Tangedal
146 F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mary Harriman Rumsey: An Untold Story
Horst H. Kruse
163 Party-Going in Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries
David Seed
184 This Side of Sexuality: Reproductive Discourse in the Works of F. Scott
Fitzgerald
Tanfer Emin Tunc
T H E F . S C O T T F I T Z G E R A L D R E V I E W
volume 13 2015

202 Narrative Authority and Competing Representations: The Pat Hobby Stories
and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hollywood
James Stamant
219 Master and Model: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Role in Richard Yates’s “Saying Goodbye
to Sally”
Steven Goldleaf
236 “Scott Fitzgerald As I Knew Him”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Secondary
Memoir
Jace Gatzemeyer
Book Reviews
260 The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography, by Scott Donaldson
Reviewed by Sara A. Kosiba
263 F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work: The Making of The Great Gatsby, by Horst H. Kruse
Reviewed by Shosuke Kinugawa
270 Tender Is the Night & F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Identities, by Chris
Messenger
Reviewed by Philip McGowan
273 West of Sunset, by Stewart O’Nan
Reviewed by Steven Goldleaf
278 Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel, by Bob Batchelor
Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped
American Culture, by Robert McParland
So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, by
Maureen Corrigan
Reviewed by Kirk Curnutt
292 current bibliography
Compiled by Jeanne M. Alexander

The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Vol. 13, 2015
Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Abstract
With the release of Baz Luhrmann’s bold and controversial adaptation of The
Great Gatsby in 2013, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s once-neglected story reached an unprec-
edented level of popularity. The film grossed a remarkable $144 million in the
U.S. and $350 million worldwide. Meanwhile, the novel, already a perennial
classroom favorite, reached the top of bestseller lists. From these statistics alone,
one might conclude that The Great Gatsby resonates more in the Obama era than
it ever did in the Jazz Age. Its remarkable popularity, however, raises the question:
Why? This essay contends that its currency—both as a film and a novel—has to
do with its intersectional exploration of identity. Race and ethnicity in particular
have been the focus of a growing body of scholarship on Gatsby over the past two
decades. This essay attempts to add to this relatively new body of work by focusing
on how The Great Gatsby functions as a multi-media text in the Obama era, and
speaks in strikingly familiar—and incisive—terms to the intersectional identity
politics of our time..
Keywords
Fitzgerald, race, Obama, The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann
“Civilization’s Going to Pieces”
The Great Gatsby, Identity, and Race, From the Jazz Age
to the Obama Era
Joseph Vogel

30 JOSEPH Vogel
Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can.
—Jay Gatsby
History don’t repeat itself. It rhymes.
—Jay-Z
The Rebirth of The Great Gatsby
In the spring of 2013, weeks before Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s sparkling
new film adaptation hit theaters, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reached
#1 on the Amazon.com bestseller list. In late April it also became the bestselling
paperback at Barnes & Noble (Bosman). “It’s going to be the summer of Gatsby,”
declared Luhrmann. “The idea is that you don’t just come see the movie, but also
celebrate that extraordinary book throughout the summer” (qtd. in Kit). As liter-
ary historians like to remind us, Fitzgerald’s novel sold a mere 23,870 copies dur-
ing his lifetime. When the author died in 1940, Gatsby was out of print; copies of
thesecondeditionweregatheringdustinawarehouse(Scribner203).Overeighty
years later, sales of the novel were expected to pass well over one million copies in
2013 alone (Donahue). The film, meanwhile, grossed over $144 million in the U.S.
and $350 million worldwide, more than many 2013 franchise blockbusters. From
these numbers alone, one might conclude that The Great Gatsby resonates more
in the present than it ever did in the Jazz Age (“The Great Gatsby”).
Thisassertionmaysoundblasphemous,asveryfewnovelsareaslinkedtoahis-
torical moment as The Great Gatsby is to the Roaring Twenties. Yet clearly Gatsby
has proven, since its first revival of popularity in the 1940s, to be, like its protago-
nist, amenable to regeneration. The handful of critics who praised Luhrmann’s
film credited it for not repeating the past—as the relatively faithful but lifeless 1974
Jack Clayton-directed version attempted to do—but daring to reimagine it in a
twenty-first-century context. While the original Gatsby was inspired by the tempo
and excitement of the Jazz Age, this new incarnation was largely informed by the
beat and energy of the hip-hop era. The film’s soundtrack was compiled by rap
mogul Jay-Z (a figure not unlike Jay Gatsby) and features tracks by contemporary
artists like Beyoncé, Will.i.am, and Kanye West.1
While this contemporized adap-
tation did not please many literary purists, Luhrmann justified the anachronistic
use of music by explaining the commonalities between 1920s jazz and 2000s hip-
hop: “Jazz in 1922 was being referred to as an African-American fad. Why would
Fitzgerald put such ephemeral stuff, actual song lyrics, in his book? Because it
made it immediate and visceral and exciting for the reader. And when you think of
anAfrican-American street music today that is visceralandexcitingandismaking

“Civilization’s Going to Pieces” 31
a big impression on popular culture, that’s hip-hop” (qtd. in McGrath). Listening
to the driving beat of “No Church in the Wild,” featuring Jay-Z, Kanye West, and
Frank Ocean, as a newsreel montage presents us with the ecstatic, throbbing, flick-
eringnightlifeof1920sNewYorkCitydemonstratesLuhrmann’spoint.“Veryearly
on,” says the director, “I made a decision to address this movie as though F. Scott
Fitzgerald were making it. And when he was creating the novel, he wasn’t nostal-
gic. He was a modernist—he was mad about cinema and other modern things,
and he embraced them. And they influenced his writing” (qtd. in Wood).
Luhrmann, then, was less interested in historical reverence—although
he did extensively research Fitzgerald’s life and career, even reaching out to
Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III (West)—than he was in “making it new,”
to borrow Ezra Pound’s modernist credo. His aesthetic followed the so-called
“Red Curtain” sensibility of his earlier films—Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin
Rouge (2001)—offering a stylized MTV-meets-Broadway theatricality rather
than historical realism. The contemporary music, quick pacing, cross-cutting,
kaleidoscopic sets, and swooping cameras of Luhrmann’s Gatsby are attempts to
make the audience feel the excitement, the turbulence, and the sensory overload
of the novel’s original context. In one scene, a black man, embodying the energy
of the Harlem Renaissance, plays a passionate trumpet solo on the fire escape
outside an apartment orgy overlaid by Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Who Gon Stop
Me”; in another scene, the frenetic jazz/electro-pop fusion of Will.i.am’s “Bang
Bang” gives way to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” amidst a glittering, carni-
valesque West Egg party. In this way, Luhrmann’s Gatsby collapses space and
time; the film provides a combination of history, myth, fantasy, and mirror.
While Luhrmann’s stylistic approach and musical mash-ups suggest a close
kinship between the Jazz Age and the Obama era, however, it begs the question
of why and how this relationship matters. Why, in other words, does this story—
even without the assistance of a hip-hop soundtrack and CGI overhaul—reso-
nate so much in the present? This essay contends that part of the currency of
The Great Gatsby—both as a film and novel—has to do with its intersectional
exploration of identity. This exploration is particularly compelling in narrator
Nick Carraway’s contrasting assessments of two characters: Tom Buchanan,
who represents a more traditional ideal of white American masculinity: strong,
wealthy, dominant, “capable of enormous leverage,” as Nick Carraway puts it
(GG 9); and Jay Gatsby, who represents difference, insufficient breeding, ambi-
guity, and mystery.
The 1920s was a decade preoccupied with delineating and protecting borders
of identity, from the Immigration Act of 1924—which was explicitly designed
to “preserve the ideal of American homogeneity” (“Immigration”)—to the

32 JOSEPH Vogel
Racial Integrity Act, which banned miscegenation and further codified the
so-called “one-drop-rule” into American law (“Racial”). In his book Our
America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995), Walter Benn Michaels
argues that our contemporary preoccupation with race and cultural identity can
in fact be traced back to the modernist era, in which new, intensified national
anxieties about the “internal minority” in America transformed the way we
think about identity. This difference, he writes, “involved not only a reassertion
of the distinction between American and un-American but a crucial redefini-
tion of the terms in which it might be made” (2). These new terms were often
understood and defined in racialized language. “Breeding” became the ultimate
hierarchy. For Michaels, this is where modernism goes astray—with repercus-
sions that are still being felt today. “Nativist modernism,” he argues, elevated,
or at least intertwined, concerns about race and ethnicity with concerns about
class, planting the seeds not only for white supremacy, but also for multicultur-
alism, pluralism, and identity politics (Michaels 6). The emphasis on racial dif-
ferences, then, far from constituting a challenge to racism, perpetuates its logic.
While Michaels’s argument about how modernism marks a new, intensified
preoccupation with race, identity, and difference is persuasively articulated, his
evaluation of its implications reverts to simplistic, class-determinist paradigms.
Yet far from distracting from class inequality, among the most significant con-
tributions of The Great Gatsby to the present is its intersectional exploration of
identity—the ways, that is, in which the text draws connections between class,
race, and power, and renders visible the myths, illusions, ideologies, and con-
sequences of white supremacy. Whiteness, the novel demonstrates, is indeed
an invention. But it is an invention with profound individual, social, cultural,
political, and economic effects. These effects are still with us in “post-racial”
America, which remains plagued by an array of unresolved racial anxieties and
fears. The critique of white power and panic in The Great Gatsby is thus not only
central to understanding the novel, but also central to its cultural relevance as a
multi-media text in the twenty-first century.
The past ten years have seen a wave of new scholarship exploring race and
ethnicity in The Great Gatsby, including Meredith Goldsmith’s “White Skin,
White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby” (2003),
John Rohrkemper’s “Becoming White: Race and Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby”
(2003), Carlyle Van Thompson’s The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading
in the American Literary Imagination (2004), Barbara Will’s “The Great Gatsby
and the Obscene Word” (2005), and Benjamin Schreier’s “Desire’s Second Act:
‘Race’ and The Great Gatsby’s Cynical Americanism” (2007), among others.

Such works respond to Toni Morrison’s call in her landmark book Playing in
the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993) for greater attentive-
ness to the role race plays in the American literary canon. This analysis attempts
to add to this relatively new body of scholarship by focusing on how The Great
Gatsby functions as a multi-media text in the Obama era, and speaks in strik-
ingly familiar terms to the issues of our time.
“The Idea Is That We’re Nordics”
Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, true at least to the tone of Fitzgerald’s novel,
begins with the waking hangover of the American Dream. Nick Carraway
(played by Tobey Maguire) is in a psychiatric clinic, The Perkins Sanitarium,
where he is being treated for alcoholism, insomnia, fits of anger, and anxiety.
He has returned from New York, and he declares that he is “disgusted with
everyone and everything.” He is “inclined to reserve all judgments,” he says,
quoting directly from the novel (GG 5), before adding, in a slight modification
of Fitzgerald’s text, “but even I have a limit.” This limit comes from recog-
nizing what the seductive dream Jay Gatsby once believed in does to people
and to society. What happens when race, class, and other identity hierarchies
are named and interrogated? What happens when power is stripped of its
gloss and glamour? The film’s narrative frame was widely panned by critics.
Certainly it is not subtle. But similar to the novel, it allows the story to be nar-
rated by a disillusioned Nick, a white man born into relative privilege, who
comes to see the grotesqueness and depravity of that privilege, its values and
expectations.
Nick arrives in New York with an understandable sense of hope and excite-
ment. He is self-aware enough to recognize that the fundamental decencies of
life are “parceled out unequally at birth” (GG 5); but he is not about to forego
the advantages of his breeding. He is “descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch”
(6); he comes from an upper-middle-class background and attends New Haven
(Yale) with Tom Buchanan; he serves in the Great War; and while starting out
in the “less fashionable” (8) West Egg, his prospects for upward mobility are
bright. His father finances him “to go east and learn the bond business” with
the expectation that he cash in on these “advantages” and become, like Tom, a
member of the Nordic elite (6).
The problem is that for all of his breeding, Nick has difficulty accepting his
received role. As several critics have noted, including Keath Fraser and Edward

34 JOSEPH Vogel
Wasiolek, part of his alienation has to do with his sexuality. No one interests
Nick more than Jay Gatsby, the enigmatic, flamboyant outsider who coinci-
dentally ends up as his neighbor on Long Island. While Jordan and Daisy alter-
nately charm and disturb Nick, they never elicit anything close to real intimacy.
By contrast, his first and last impressions of Jay Gatsby are injected with deep
admiration, connection, and emotion. “[He] understood you just so far as you
wanted to be understood,” Nick effuses, “believed in you as you would like to
believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you
that, at your best, you hoped to convey” (GG 40). Luhrmann’s film does not
explicitly define the nature of Nick’s interest in Gatsby, but it does capture its
intensity. Indeed, a strong case can be made that the most compelling story of
unrequited love—in both the novel and the film—is not between Jay Gatsby
and Daisy, but between Nick and Jay Gatsby, an important paradigm shift to
which I will return.
There are other indications of Nick’s queerness. Before officially meet-
ing Gatsby, the typically straight-laced, Midwestern Nick finds himself at a
debauched afternoon party in a Harlem apartment, drunk for one of the first
times in his life. In Luhrmann’s film, this scene is represented as a full-on,
drug- and booze-induced orgy. “High over the city,” narrates Nick, “our line
of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the
casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and
wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled
by the inexhaustible variety of life” (GG 30). In Luhrmann’s film, these words
appear on the screen as Nick looks out the window at hundreds of other illu-
minated windows in the building across the street, each filled with its own
secrets and stories. In the 3d version, these visualized stories—which include
a young black woman lap dancing for an older white man—literally float out
of the facade of the building, allowing the audience to voyeuristically “look in”
with Nick.
The spell of wonder is broken, however, when an enraged Tom strikes
Myrtle in the face, breaking her nose. It is a sharp reminder that for all of
life’s variety, men like Tom still dictate the terms. In the film, the orgy scene
transitions to Nick awakening safely in his cottage. In the novel, however,
Fitzgerald has Nick leave with a man named Mr. McKee. As the elevator
takes them down, the liftman scolds Mr. McKee for grabbing “the lever.” A
drunken McKee and Nick agree to meet for lunch someday. This is followed
by suggestive ellipses and a fragmented account of the rest of the night: “I
was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad
in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands” (GG 32). The chapter

ends with Nick lying alone, half asleep at Pennsylvania Station at four in
the morning, contemplating what may have been his first sexual experience
with a man.
Nick’s difference, however, is not only about sexuality. It is also about his
masculinity. “Like his father,” observes Frances Kerr, “Nick projects an upper-
middle-class masculinity, taking pride in his patient objectivity, moral disci-
pline, and emotional reserve” (410). Yet he also “fancifully imagines escaping
to a different masculinity altogether, one that can accommodate his ‘feminine’
emotional excesses and his occasional, casual attraction to men” (411). Nick’s
“occasional, casual attraction to men” seems a bit of an understatement, but
Kerr’s characterization of his struggles with the American ideal of masculin-
ity is an important point. Nick’s desire to explore, experiment with, or violate
social roles is curbed through most of the novel by deeply internalized rules
about how white men of his standing are supposed to behave and understand
the world. This tension percolates throughout Nick’s narrative, but most signifi-
cantly in his contrasting assessments of Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby.
The Tom we are first introduced to in Luhrmann’s film is a familiar character.
He is the embodiment of traditional, masculine Anglo-Saxon aristocracy.2
He
comes from wealth and tradition; he plays polo on his immaculately groomed
estate; he has dozens of servants (many of whom are represented in the film as
black), a mistress, trophies, and awards. No one tells Tom what to do; he calls
the shots and does as he pleases. “Life is something you dominate, Nick,” he
boasts in Luhrmann’s film, a line borrowed in slightly revised fashion from the
title essay of Fitzgerald’s 1936 Esquire “The Crack-Up” trilogy (MLC 139). In the
opening scenes of the film, Nick takes it all in good humor, but in Fitzgerald’s
novel not only can Nick not relate to the relentless display of machismo and
impulse for conquest he senses in Tom, he is deeply resentful of it, from the
opening chapter. Nick describes Tom as a “sturdy, straw-haired man,” with a
“hard mouth,” “arrogant eyes,” and a body “always leaning aggressively forward.”
In Tom’s “gruff husky” voice, he tells us, is “a touch of paternal contempt.” It
seemed to say: “Now don’t think my opinion on these matters is final . . . just
because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” Clearly, these are not
neutral observations. Nick dislikes Tom, in no small part because he under-
stands that he is expected to be like Tom to rise in society. The recurring adjec-
tives in this introduction convey dominance, aggression and strength. “Not even
the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of
that body,” Nick observes. “It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel
body” (GG 9). This description can, in essence, be read as Fitzgerald’s assessment
of privileged white capitalist patriarchy: powerful, ruthless, and cruel.

36 JOSEPH Vogel
Tom is also described by Daisy, teasingly, as “a brute of a man, a great big
hulking physical specimen.” In her description, like Nick’s, it is noteworthy
that Fitzgerald makes Tom’s body and physicality prominent and visible. Being
described as “a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen” connotes
coarseness and savagery. It transforms his white hypermasculinity from its usual
invisible superiority to the corporeal, the particularized. Exposing him in this
way subtly undercuts his naturalized dominance. Indeed, in the passage when
Daisy makes this remark, Tom winces at being scrutinized in this way. “I hate
that word hulking,” he objects (GG 13). He hates, that is, not only being repre-
sented as a brute, but the very idea of being described and defined by others.
In Fitzgerald’s representation, then, Tom’s physical strength ironically
works against him. The specialness of his white masculinity cannot hold up to
scrutiny—cannot, that is, pass as more than a body. His “physical accomplish-
ments,” while impressive, are on the wane (as is, it is suggested, his ideology).
Once an elite and celebrated football player at New Haven, Tom, it now seems
to Nick, “would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic tur-
bulence of some irrecoverable football game” (GG 9). Nick’s characterization of
Tom makes him seem, far from a secure and confident man, rather nostalgic
and pathetic (not so unlike, it should be noted, Jay Gatsby, the man from whom
he so desperately tries to distance himself). This insecurity comes through quite
well in Joel Edgerton’s portrayal of Tom in Luhrmann’s film. Beyond the aggres-
sive exterior reside profound insecurity, paranoia, and panic.
In safeguarding his privilege, Tom is particularly obsessed by the notion of
racial infiltration. “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be
utterly submerged,” he says. To justify this fear, Tom appeals to “scientific stuff,”
particularly a book by “this man Goddard,” author of The Rise of the Coloured
Empires (GG 14). As numerous scholars have noted (Gidley, Berman, Michaels),
Goddard is likely an amalgam of prominent race thinkers of the time, includ-
ing leading eugenicist H. H. Goddard, Madison Grant, author of The Passing of
the Great Race (1916), and Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color
(1920).3
The latter author was, not unlike Tom Buchanan, a respectable figure
in high society. A graduate of Harvard University, his books were well read and
generally well received. The Rising Tide of Color was published by Scribner’s
(which also published Fitzgerald’s novels) and recommended by the Saturday
Evening Post (which published many of Fitzgerald’s stories) and the New York
Times (Berman 25–30). The book was so prominent in popular culture that
President Warren G. Harding recommended that people read it in a 1921 speech
in Birmingham, Alabama. “He was a household name,” notes Ronald Berman,
“which is probably why he is encountered in Tom’s household” (25).

Tom’s conviction that white civilization is under siege is propped up by
another myth: the idea that American culture was created by white people.
“[W]e’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and
art and all that,” Tom explains to Nick (GG 14). By this standard, it is easy to
see why he would despise Jay Gatsby’s carnivalesque parties; they blatantly defy
Tom’s notions of racial superiority, demonstrating how profoundly black cul-
ture influenced white culture, from music to dance to language. For Tom, the
modern world not only threatens order, hierarchy, and “civilization,” it threat-
ens the very meaning of his identity.
While Tom’s racist monologue is met with cynical sighs at the dinner
table, his views were not out of step with mainstream views of the time.
Throughout the 1920s, the imperiled status of whiteness—and the urgent
need to preserve or recover an older (whiter) version of America—was
arguably the most pervasive theme in literature, film, political debates, and
sociological studies. Just ten years before The Great Gatsby was published,
D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), America’s first blockbuster
film, presented a national crisis caused by perceived racial infiltration in
the aftermath of the Civil War. In the Red Scare summer of 1919, postwar
social tensions resulted in race riots in over a dozen American cities. Over
the ensuing decade, the Ku Klux Klan surged in membership, peaking at
around six million members in 1924, the year The Great Gatsby was writ-
ten (Berman 22–33). Anti-Semitism was rampant, as was persisting dis-
crimination and stereotypes surrounding many other “internal minorities”
(Michaels 2).
Of particular prominence in discussions of protecting Nordic American
“civilization” was a national panic about immigration. From 1890 to 1920,
an estimated twenty million immigrants made their way to America, con-
stituting approximately 15 percent of the total U.S. population (“Nation”).
The resentment and repulsion many established white Americans felt toward
these new immigrants is captured in a passage from Fitzgerald’s first novel,
This Side of Paradise, in which his protagonist, Amory Blaine, describes
the “stinking aliens” he witnesses in the Pullman car on his way back from
Washington:
He thought how much easier patriotism had been to a homogenous race,
how much easier it would have been to fight as the Colonies fought, or as
the Confederacy fought. And he did no sleeping that night, but listened to
the aliens guffaw and snore while they filled the car with the heavy scent of
latest America. (TSOP 139)

38 JOSEPH Vogel
To combat the waves of “latest America,” in 1921, the Emergency Quota Act
restricted annual immigration from a given country to 3 percent of the number
of people from that country living in the United States in 1910. In the sum-
mer of 1924 President Coolidge signed into law the Johnson-Reed Immigration
Act, which contained the most targeted and restrictive immigration laws in
American history. The Act’s expressed purpose was “to preserve the ideal of
American homogeneity” and specifically restricted the entrance of Southern
and Eastern Europeans, as well as Asians, Africans, and Middle Easterners
(“Immigration”).
As Ronald Berman notes in The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, concerns
about immigration and race were far more prevalent in print coverage in the
early 1920s than concerns about the after-effects of World War I. Identity was
the number one issue of the time. Who counted as white? Who was a real
American? Was it possible for non-whites to be “Americanized”? “When Tom
alludes to his favorite racial or geographical or class prejudices (and when
Daisy plays to them) a public dialogue is refracted,” Berman observes. “The
most interesting thing about that dialogue is that many of those ‘advanced’
people who deplore civilization in America are considerably less attractive than
Tom Buchanan. He only echoes their discourse” (33).
That discourse bears striking resemblance to racial discourse in America
today. In the Obama era, Buchanan-esque rhetoric has experienced some-
thing of a revival, from conservative panic about “illegal aliens” and race-based
“re-distribution of wealth,” to lamentations of waning white voting power; from
racially coded individualist rhetoric about the “makers” and “the takers,” to dis-
dainful resentment of the so-called “47 per cent.” “It’s not a traditional America
anymore,” declared Fox News television host Bill O’Reilly on election eve in
2012, echoing the sentiment of Tom’s “civilization is going to pieces” monologue:
It’s a changing country. The demographics are changing. . . . And there are
fifty percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And
who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it. And
he ran on it. . . . Whereby twenty years ago President Obama would have
been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney,
the white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them,
feel that this economic system is stacked against them, and they want stuff.
You’re going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama,
overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably

break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things,
and which candidate between the two is going to give them things? (qtd.
in Moloy)
Like Tom, O’Reilly sees the “white establishment” as not only in decline,
but also under siege by people of color who want “things” that they do not
deserve.
O’Reilly, of course, is not the only present-day purveyor of Buchanan-
esque ideology. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney conveyed similar senti-
ments throughout the 2012 election season. In many ways, the 2012 election
was a battle of identities: the Obama campaign cast Romney as the privileged,
out-of-touch, ruthless boss of Bain Capital; while the Romney campaign cast
Obama as the sinister Other: the unfit “food-stamp president” who was driv-
ing the country into ruin through un-American economic, social, and cultural
values. The campaign was described by the Washington Post as the most racially
polarized election since the Reagan Era (Cohen and Helderman).
At every opportunity, Romney emphasized his whiteness and American-
ness (which, in essence, became synonyms). “No one’s ever asked to see my birth
certificate,” he boasted at a campaign rally in Michigan. “They know that this is
the place where both [Ann and I] were born and raised” (qtd. in Sonmez). The
crowd erupted in cheers. In a private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida, speak-
ing to a room of wealthy white contributors, Romney joked about having a bet-
ter chance of winning the election if he were Mexican. The line elicited hearty
laughs from fellow white millionaires who, like Romney (and Tom Buchanan),
believed (or pretended to believe) that minority groups—in this case, Latino
Americans, who constituted a growing but still relatively small 10 percent of
the total voting bloc—were taking over the country (“Full Transcript”). In the
paranoid privileged white imagination, that is, African Americans and Latinos
had an unfair “advantage.” Victimized rich whites needed to be vigilant, or, as
Tom Buchanan put it, they would “be utterly submerged” (GG 14).
These attitudes were made explicit in what became the defining remarks of
Romney’s campaign, spoken at the same private fundraiser. “There are forty-
seven percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,”
Romney proclaimed (qtd. in Corn). His job was not to worry about those peo-
ple because he could never “convince them to care for their lives” and “take per-
sonal responsibility.” For Romney, this “forty-seven percent” believed that they
were “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it” (qtd. in Corn). Of

40 JOSEPH Vogel
course, for Romney and his audience, the 47 percent was racially coded as non-
white. These were the lazy, dependent phantoms that had haunted rich white
men for decades, for centuries even. Every “gain” for people of color was per-
ceived as a “loss” for the wealthy white. Every gradual shift in the racial demo-
graphics was a sign of impending crisis. The “rising tide of color” must be “beat
down,” as Daisy cynically jokes at the dinner table, or the very essence of “real
America” might be destroyed. “The idea is that we’re Nordics,” Tom Buchanan
explains to Nick. Then, as today, this “idea” depended on the specter of other-
ness, of difference, of “social-climbing primitives” always already about to pen-
etrate white borders and defile white myths and ideals. “It’s up to us who are the
dominant race to watch out,” warns Tom, “or these other races will have control
of things” (GG 14).
“Mr. Nobody From Nowhere”
In sharp contrast to Nick Carraway’s assessment of Tom Buchanan is Jay
Gatsby: the enigmatic, ostentatious, social climber residing in West Egg. In
Baz Luhrmann’s film, Jay Gatsby is played by the decidedly white Leonardo
DiCaprio. Yet just as there are many twenty-first century incarnations of Tom
Buchanan, there are also many twenty-first-century Jay Gatsbys. Over the years,
numerous articles have drawn comparisons between the literary icon and his
modern-day equivalents, from P-Diddy to Michael Jackson, Jay-Z to Barack
Obama (O’Hehir, Hsu, Stern). There are many connecting threads, of course,
between these individuals: their humble beginnings; their rags-to-riches
narratives; their outsider-insider positions; their name-changes, mystiques,
re-inventions, and ambition. One other connection, however, is that they are all
black men. This is no accident. Jay Gatsby signifies in numerous ways as a racial
outsider. Luhrmann’s film mostly closes off this possibility, but in Fitzgerald’s
novel, it is almost impossible to ignore.
Jay Gatsby is not only mysterious; he is different. Tom Buchanan famously
labels him “Mr. Nobody From Nowhere” (GG 101). For Tom, Gatsby’s breeding
fails to check out. “I’ll be damned,” he snarls, “if I see how you got within a mile
of [Daisy] unless you brought the groceries to the back door” (102). Buchanan
is not alone in his suspicion. At Gatsby’s parties and throughout New York,
rumors swirl about his identity: He may be a gangster or a gambler; he may
have “killed a man once” (36); he is most certainly an impostor of some kind.
Even Nick, who is sympathetic to Gatsby, wonders at one point “if there wasn’t

something sinister about him after all” (52). What was one to make, after all,
of his strange story? “I would have accepted without question the information
that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side
of New York,” says Nick. “That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at
least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of
nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound” (41).
Given such rampant skepticism about Gatsby’s roots, identity, and legiti-
macy, it is easy to see why he has elicited comparison with one contemporary
figure in particular: Barack Obama. Like Gatsby, Obama’s rapid rise to success
has been difficult for many white Americans to process and accept. His origin
story resembles no president before him. Born to a black father from Kenya
and a white mother from Kansas, his life is filled with contradictions, ambigui-
ties, exotic locales, and sensational transformations. Known as Barry Obama
in his early life, his mythical journey takes him from the shores of Honolulu
to the crowded neighborhoods of Jakarta; from the uncertainty and confusion
of his teenage years to the blazing ambition of his adult life; from the streets of
Chicago, to the rarefied courtyards of Columbia and Harvard, and finally to the
palatial corridors of the White House. “As a result,” writes Obama in his 1995
memoir, Dreams From My Father, long before his rise went stratospheric, “some
people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don’t know
me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery,
for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when
I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the
split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some
tell-tale sign. They no longer know who I am” (xv).
As his power and status increased, of course, so did the scrutiny. As presi-
dent, he has become a cipher for America’s greatest hopes, fears and prejudices.
Discovering his “true identity” has become a public obsession.4
Was he secretly
a Muslim? A socialist? A militant? Anti-colonialist? Kenyan? Particular focus
has been placed on his origin of birth. From the earliest stages of his first cam-
paign, there were whisperings that he was not really American. Those whisper-
ings soon exploded into viral email campaigns, blogs, news articles, elaborate
conspiracy theories, and attempts to discredit his legitimacy.
Part of Gatsby’s resonance in the twenty-first century, then, is the way he is
similarly read not merely as a social climber, but as a kind of racial infiltrator.
Like Barack Obama, Gatsby is a man “without a past”—or at least without an
acceptable past. His presence in West Egg is not simply problematic because
he is new, but because he is perceived as Other. Perhaps most conspicuous is the

42 JOSEPH Vogel
way his relationship with Daisy is interpreted, particularly by Tom, as akin to
miscegenation. Gatsby, in Tom’s mind, threatens to defile Daisy’s white purity
(orasDaisyherselfputsit,her“beautifulwhite...girlhood”[GG19]).“Isuppose
the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to
your wife,” Tom rants in their confrontation at the Plaza Hotel suite. “Well, if
that’s the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays, people begin by sneering
at family life and family institutions and next they’ll throw everything over-
board and have intermarriage between black and white.” Tom’s characterization
of Gatsby once again draws attention to his deficiency of “breeding.” Jordan’s
feeble reassurance, “We’re all white here” (101), does nothing to clear the air.
“I picked him up for a bootlegger the first time I saw him,” Tom boasts (104).
“Bootlegger,” in this context, acts not simply as a description of criminal activ-
ity, but illicit identity. Preventing Daisy, the idealized white Southern belle, from
marrying a racial alien, and thus defiling white civilization, is Tom’s cause from
first chapter to last. In safeguarding Daisy’s purity, Tom sees himself as “the last
barrier of civilization” (101).
Speculation about Gatsby’s “real” racial identity has been the subject of
both popular and scholarly literature for at least two decades now. Some crit-
ics, including Michaels, have read him as Jewish, noting his original name
“Gatz” and his intimate “gonnegtion” to Meyer Wolfshiem (25). Wolfshiem,
of course, is based on the historical figure Arnold Rothstein, gambler, king-
pin of the Jewish mob in New York City, and fixer of the 1919 World Series.
Interestingly, in Luhrmann’s film, Wolfshiem is played by a Bollywood star,
Amitabh Bachchan. While some critics felt this safely evaded the novel’s anti-
Semitism, it did make visual the notion that Jews in the 1920s were still per-
ceived as “not quite white.”
In Fitzgerald’s text, Wolfshiem’s skin tone is never specified, though he is
very clearly presented to us through Nick’s overtly anti-Semitic filter. He is
described as a “small flat-nosed Jew” with a “large head” and “two fine growths
of hair which luxuriated in either nostril.” References to his prominent nose
are made repeatedly. Gatsby, however, makes no such observations, refer-
ring to Wolfshiem not simply as a business partner, but as a “friend” (GG 55).
Wolfshiem seems to possess a similar affection for Gatsby, describing him to
Nick as “a man of fine breeding” and the “kind of man you’d like to take home
and introduce to your mother and sister” (57). None of this, of course, “proves”
Gatsby is Jewish, but given the rampant anti-Semitism of the time (refracted so
clearly through Nick), it could help explain Gatsby’s difficulty integrating into
the WASP establishment.

More controversially, some have read Jay Gatsby as black. Several articles,
both scholarly and popular, explore the subject. Most prominent among these
is Carlyle Van Thompson’s essay, “The Tragic Black ‘Buck’: Jay Gatsby’s Passing
in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby” (the essay was subsequently included
as part of his The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American
Literary Imagination [2004]). In it, he asserts that Gatsby is a light-skinned
black man passing as white. “The narrative constantly whispers the presence
of blackness,” writes Thompson (75). As evidence, he cites Nick’s description of
Gatsby’s “tanned skin” (GG 41); the “pale, well-dressed Negro” (109) who wit-
nesses the car accident that kills Myrtle Wilson; Gatsby’s “forty acres of lawn
and garden” (8), an oblique allusion to the forty acres and a mule promised to
emancipated slaves; and Tom Buchanan’s frequent linking of Gatsby with black-
ness. Predictably, such interpretations have not gone over well with Fitzgerald
traditionalists. “It’s mishigas!” declared Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli
in a 2000 interview. “If Fitzgerald wanted to write about blacks, it wouldn’t have
taken 75 years to figure it out. If that’s what Fitzgerald wanted, he would have
made it perfectly clear in April 1925. Great works of literature are not fodder for
guessing games” (qtd. in Manus).
Great works of literature do, however, invite different interpretations. The
case for reading Jay Gatsby as black is compelling both in the Obama era and
in the context of the 1920s, regardless of whether it was intended by Fitzgerald.
As Meredith Goldsmith notes, Gatsby bears many key similarities to the pass-
ing narratives of the Harlem Renaissance, particularly James Weldon Johnson’s
The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912, 1927) and Nella Larsen’s Passing
(1929), both of which similarly explore how race is intertwined with social
mobility and status. Two years after The Great Gatsby was released, America’s
first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer (1927), featured a Jewish protagonist, Al Jolson,
using black speech patterns, singing black music, and wearing blackface, in an
attempt to break from his inherited identity and be something new. Such texts
are not unrelated to Gatsby; rather, they highlight the complicated ambiguities
surrounding issues of racial identity in the Jazz Age. “Race,” writes Matthew
Frye Jacobson, “is not just a conception; it is also a perception” (9). Indeed,
even if Gatsby is read (as he most often is) as Irish Catholic like Fitzgerald
(Michaels; Goldsmith; Schreier), it must be remembered that for many decades
Irish-Americans were not simply viewed as of a lower class, but a lower race.
An infamous political cartoon in Harper’s Weekly represented a Celt and black
man as equally simian, while prominent anthropological studies claimed Irish
Iberians had a different skull shape than other Caucasians, and therefore, may

44 JOSEPH Vogel
have originally derived from the African race (Jacobson 49). Who counted as
white or Caucasian, then, particularly during the period of mass European
immigration in the early twentieth century, was in profound flux and highly
contested.
Although Luhrmann’s film does not dare go so far as to represent Jay Gatsby
as racially other and passing, a couple of scenes undercut the notion that his
exclusion from the white oligarchy is simply about “new money” or illegal activ-
ity. In the film, when Nick discovers Daisy in a private moment with Gatsby at
one of his parties, she explains to Nick that they were just talking about “the
future—the future of the colored empires.” Later in the scene in the film at the
Plaza Hotel, when Tom and Gatsby are fighting, Tom asserts: “We were born
different than you. It’s in our blood” (the line is also grafted into Jay-Z’s track
“100$ Bill,” featured in the underground speakeasy scene). Such scenes hint
that Gatsby’s identity may be more problematic and threatening than assumed.
In both the film and the novel, Tom Buchannan identifies the most profound
threat to white civilization as racial infiltration—and the embodiment of that
threat is Jay Gatsby, the impostor who “had no real right to touch [Daisy’s]
hand” (GG 116). In this way, the lines between class, race, identity, and breeding
are blurred. As Mathew Frye Jacobson notes, “The policing of sexual bound-
aries—the defense against hybridity—is precisely what keeps a racial group a
racial group. . . . Thus sexuality is one site at which all the economic advan-
tages, political privileges, and social benefits inhering in a cultural invention
like Caucasian reside” (3).
“Once We Crossed Over That Bridge”
One of the most talked-about scenes in Luhrmann’s film takes place as Jay
Gatsby and Nick drive into New York City. As they reach the Queensboro
Bridge, an “impossibly confused” Nick marvels at a drop-top car full of glam-
orous African Americans, drinking champagne and dancing to Jay-Z’s “H to
the Izzo.” For many spectators, it provokes a sense of dissonance, perhaps even
resentment. It represents the ultimate in “excess” precisely because it subverts
social hierarchies surrounding art, wealth, taste, and class. For contemporary
audiences, part of the reaction also has to do with the way the scene injects
contemporary low (black) culture into an established high (white) culture
literary classic. Featuring Jay-Z’s music in Fitzgerald’s sacred text is a direct
challenge to the purity of the novel. Of course, Fitzgerald’s novel also contains

this brief, but significant, representation of black opulence, sophistication,
and upward mobility (minus Jay-Z) and the white response it elicits. Through
Nick’s prism, however, the response seems less about resentment than it is
about genuine astonishment. It is a sort of threshold moment—the rigid logic
of the old world dissolves, as the possibilities of the modern, diverse city
unfold. “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge” he mar-
vels, “‘anything at all. . . .’ Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular
wonder” (GG 55).
For all of Nick’s provincial Midwestern prejudices, he is far more intrigued
by the possibilities of modern America than by Tom Buchanan’s “stale” notions
of Nordic “civilization.” Nick describes the beginning of Gatsby’s first party as
having a “dignified homogeneity.” This was not intended as a compliment. It
“assumed to itself,” says Nick, “the function of representing the staid nobility
of the country-side—East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on
guard against its spectroscopic gayety” (GG 37) By contrast, the city is “racy”
and “adventurous.” It is diverse, vibrant, fresh, offering the “constant flicker”
of new sights and sounds (46). Anything could happen in the city. This sense
of excitement and possibility comes through in Luhrmann’s film: the city is a
kind of Technicolor pleasure dome, where inhibitions, rules, and traditions are
temporarily abandoned. “The tempo of the city had changed sharply,” narrates
Tobey Maguire as Nick. “The buildings were higher. The parties were bigger.
The morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper. The restlessness approached
hysteria.” For some (including Tom), the city represents anti-civilization. The
irony, of course, is that Tom also indulges in what the city has to offer, while
sanctimoniously denouncing it and defending traditional American values and
institutions.
Nick’s initiation to this new America takes place in gradual steps. His guide
is Jay Gatsby, the embodiment of “latest America” (TSOP 139), who both fas-
cinates and disturbs him. Nick knows he does not like what Tom represents,
but for the majority of the book he vacillates about Gatsby. Driving in Gatsby’s
flamboyant yellow car (Tom calls it a “circus wagon” [GG 94]), he suddenly
feels “sorry I’d ever set foot upon his overpopulated lawn.” Gatsby’s difference
unnerves him. The allusion to overpopulation echoes one of the major anxiet-
ies of the time: anti-immigrant sentiment. Gatsby’s “correctness”—his authen-
ticity or acceptability—Nick tells us, only grows on him as they near the city.
He is able to “pass” as normal here. When he is pulled over by a police officer, he
hands over his “white card,” and is allowed to proceed without being ticketed
(GG 54).

46 JOSEPH Vogel
The threshold moment, however, takes place in the aforementioned scene
at the Queensboro Bridge. “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge,” says
Nick, “is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all
the mystery and the beauty in the world.” As they pass over the bridge they
confront a hearse followed by carriages of southeast European immigrants and
a limousine “driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes.”
At the sight of the hearse, Nick hopes “Gatsby’s splendid car” might cheer their
“somber holiday.” He seems to believe they will in some sense identify with
Gatsby and recognize in him some promise of their future. Likewise, with the
“three modish Negroes,” while Nick defaults to stereotypes in describing them,
his laughter is far from the rage the scene likely would have elicited in Tom.
Where Nick comes from, such a sight would be impossible. But here in the
great new city with its “promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world” race
hierarchies seem to be turned upside down. In this scene, then, Gatsby is once
again associated with racial others and the new America. He is also associated
with the city. In suburban Long Island or the “pure” Midwest he is suspect and
strange, but here he can pass “without any particular wonder” (GG 55).
New York City in the 1920s was, of course, a time and place when, as Langston
Hughes famously put it, “the Negro was in vogue” (223). In Harlem, the conver-
gence of black people from all over the country (and the world) led to an explo-
sion of creativity. “The younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology,”
declared Alain Locke (3). African Americans revolutionized the face of art and
entertainment in the 1920s, from music to poetry to dance to drama. It was the
era of Duke Ellington, and Bessie Smith; of Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer;
of Josephine Baker, Bill Bojangles Robinson, and Paul Robeson. It was the era
of popular Broadway shows such as Shuffle Along (1921), Running Wild (1927),
and The Emperor Jones (1920); of dance crazes such as the Charleston and the
Black Bottom. As Gilda Gray sings in a 1922 production of The Ziegfield Follies,
“It’s getting very dark on old Broadway / You see the change in ev’ry cabaret. . . .
Real dark-town entertainers hold the stage / You must black up to be the latest
rage” (qtd. in Goldsmith 452).
These lyrics reveal the extent to which blackness pervaded popular culture
in America during the time of The Great Gatsby. White people not only began
appropriating black styles and ventriloquizing black identities, they began
flocking to Harlem in droves, where they flooded the local clubs, speakeas-
ies, cabarets, and bars (Hughes 225). While the Harlem Renaissance did many
things, it did not, however, fundamentally change white power structures or
shift the dynamics of black-white relations. White enthusiasm for black culture

often simply exemplified the latest attempt to exploit, purchase, and/or exhibit
black bodies. At “whites-only” nightspots like the Cotton Club, black entertain-
ers were frequently presented as exotic savages or asked to play “jungle music”
to satisfy the white imagination. Even in the clubs blacks were allowed to enter
as patrons, whites were often “given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at
the Negro customers—like amusing animals in a zoo” (Hughes 225).
White interest in black art, entertainment, and culture in the Jazz Age, then,
was often grounded in primitivism, voyeurism, and exploitation. However, it
also revealed a general dissatisfaction with the stale and inhibiting logic and
aesthetics of white European culture (what Tom calls “civilization”). The excite-
ment Nick and others feel in the city and at Gatsby’s parties has to do with
at least temporarily dismantling conservative white values and traditions, and
offering instead the thrilling “inexhaustible variety of life”—which not only
includes, but is largely fueled by minorities, especially African Americans.
At its best, then, the city in The Great Gatsby becomes a site of possibility and
promise for the “rising tide of color.” “Harlem,” conceded Alain Locke, “I grant
you, isn’t typical—but it is significant, it is prophetic. . . . [The people] stir, they
move, they are more than physically restless” (50). The city, in this context, rep-
resents what cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin describes as the “carnivalesque,”
occasions in which the authority of the major apparatuses of power—the state
and the church, the ideological underpinnings of Western Civilization—are
temporarily inverted. “People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human
relations,” writes Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, “These truly human rela-
tions were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were expe-
rienced. The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience,
unique of its kind” (10).
Much of the energy and inspiration for these figurative carnivals comes
from popular culture—particularly black popular culture. It is, in certain
ways, an attempted replica of the throbbing nightlife of Harlem. The white
attendees, prompted by the music, dance, and drinking, temporarily let go.
As Rudolph Fisher writes of the whites in Harlem, “They camel and fish-tail
and turkey, they geche and black-bottom and scronch, they skate and buzzard
and mess-around” (81). Yet black characters are nowhere to be found at these
parties. Gatsby has created these carnivals to prove his own worth, to level
the playing field, as it were; yet in doing so he also tries to replicate the privi-
leged white reality he assumes a “nice girl” like Daisy would find impressive.
Thus, as Meredith Goldsmith astutely points out, Gatsby’s parties ultimately
“rein in the carnivalesque energies of popular culture.” By excising “racial and

48 JOSEPH Vogel
ethnic performance,” they “simultaneously celebrate the power of popular
entertainment and manifest the efforts of bourgeois culture to contain it” (453).
The reason these parties ultimately fail, then, is not because of their trans-
gressive pleasures and boisterous gaiety. It is because, for all their wild promise
and excitement, they are parties of white privilege, not of diversity, refusing
fully to dissolve boundaries and hierarchies of race, gender, and class. The city
comes closer. But even here, the white exploitation and appropriation of black
culture—on Broadway, in Harlem—while seeming to be a celebration and
appreciation of difference, more often becomes a distortion and denial of the
other’s humanity. Their utopian promise is illusory. And illusions, as Jay Gatsby
discovers, have consequences.
“They Are Different”
In Luhrmann’s film, the valley of ashes is presented as a multiracial wasteland;
black and white labor side-by-side in the furnace of American empire, building
the country’s infrastructure. It is “a grotesque place,” Nick observes in the film,
“New York’s dumping ground half-way between West Egg and the city, where
the burnt-out coal that powered the booming golden city was discarded by men
who moved dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.” It is here
that we are introduced to George Wilson. George has been socialized to admire
men like Tom Buchanan. If he could somehow grasp the secret to Tom’s suc-
cess, if he worked harder, if he earned enough money, perhaps he could have a
car like Tom’s, a life like Tom’s. When George sees Tom and Nick approach his
garage “a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes” (GG 22). As bleak
as his lot in life is, he still believes in the American Dream.
By the conventional standards of American success, of course, George is
a failure. Nick describes him as a “blonde, spiritless man, anaemic and faintly
handsome” (GG 22). His wife, Myrtle, is harsher in her assessment, describing
her husband as “a mistake.” “I thought he knew something about breeding,” she
says, “but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.” When they were younger, Myrtle felt
differently. She was “crazy about him” (GG 30). But like George, she has been
socialized to understand particular American ideals about “breeding” and “suc-
cess.” Her husband does not look like the men in the advertisements, does not
offer the glamorous life represented in Town Tattle. Tom Buchanan does. Rather
than identify with fellow laborers in the valley of ashes or each other, then,
George and Myrtle Wilson seek to please Tom, believing that somehow he will

deliver them from poverty and misery. But for Tom, however necessary people
like the Wilsons are in the maintenance of his own identity and “lifestyle,” they
are dispensable, replaceable. They offer services that can just as easily be offered
by hundreds of thousands of others.
“Let me tell you about the very rich,” Fitzgerald famously wrote in his 1926
story, “The Rich Boy.” “They are different from you and me. . . . Even when they
enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better
than we are. They are different” (ASYM 5). As myth has it, Ernest Hemingway
scoffed at this notion, retorting, “Yes, they have more money” (qtd. in Turnbull
278). Hemingway, that is, believed the only thing separating the rich and the
poor was material wealth. He felt that Fitzgerald saw the rich as “a special glam-
orous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him as much as any
other thing that wrecked him” (qtd. in Turnbull 278).
Perhaps this is partially true. But in The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald exposes
how deeply intertwined class and status are with race and identity. In the 1920s,
the rich were overwhelmingly (and not coincidentally) of a particular race, just
as they are today. While more and more underclass whites (the George and
Myrtle Wilsons) have slipped out of the middle class and into poverty over
the past three decades, the poor in America are still overwhelmingly people of
color, especially African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos. According
to census reports, poverty is two to three times higher for these groups than it is
for whites (DeParle). Furthermore, according to a Pew Research Center analy-
sis, the wealth of white households is twenty times that of black households and
eighteen times that of Hispanic households, both record highs (Kochhar, Fry,
and Taylor). In 2013, the Associated Press reported that the income gap between
the top 1 percent and everybody else reached its highest level since the 1920s
(Desilver).
The new valleys of ashes are found in every city in America: in bankrupt
Detroit, the south side of Chicago, South Central Los Angeles, and Ferguson,
Missouri. On one end of Park Avenue in Manhattan reside some of the wealthi-
est people in the world. They are overwhelmingly white men. On the other end
in Harlem and the South Bronx are some of America’s poorest neighborhoods,
which are overwhelmingly occupied by people of color. These are the ongoing
realities of our time; they are not as different from the past as we would like to
think.
While Fitzgerald is often associated with celebrating the glamour and excess
of the Jazz Age, then, a close reading of his work reveals something far different.
Fitzgerald himself once confessed having “never been able to forgive the rich

50 JOSEPH Vogel
for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works” (qtd. in Turnbull
150). Elsewhere he speaks of “an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the lei-
sure class—not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smouldering hatred of
a peasant” (MLC 147). There is no question that class played a crucial role in
Fitzgerald’s sense of exclusion and in his resentment toward the rich. Yet it was
also undoubtedly informed by other aspects of his identity, including his softer
masculinity (not unlike Nick’s) and his Irish Catholic roots. Like Jay Gatsby, he
somehow always felt like an outsider, in spite of his proximity to the wealthy elite.
The consequent “smouldering hatred” he writes of in The Crack-Up comes
through viscerally in The Great Gatsby. Yet as Fitzgerald reveals, this hatred
is often misdirected. In the climactic scene, George Wilson’s pain and anger
is initially directed at Tom Buchanan. George realizes it is Tom who has been
having an affair with his wife, and it is Tom who somehow must be responsible
for her death. But, as he has been throughout the novel, George is manipulated.
Power trumps perception. In Luhrmann’s film, as in the book, after confronting
Tom about Myrtle’s death, he is forced down on a chair and given a drink. Tom
pacifies him. His rage is re-directed away from the real sources of his loss (Tom
and Daisy Buchanan) toward an easier target: Jay Gatsby.
The death of Jay Gatsby is not merely the death of an overreacher, but
the death of an infiltrator who gets swallowed by the brute force of a system
operating as intended. As Nick looks at Gatsby’s empty mansion, he notices
an obscene epithet scrawled on his steps with brick.5
At Jay Gatsby’s funeral,
nobody shows up but his father and Owl Eyes. Clearly, for all the “uninvited”
guests he welcomed to his parties, he himself never quite belonged. This, in part,
is why Nick ultimately absolves Gatsby as “different” than the “rotten crowd”
that surrounded him (GG 121). “Gatsby turned out all right at the end,” Nick
famously elegizes, “it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the
wake of his dreams” (GG 6). Nick has witnessed the elite white world of Tom
and Daisy. It was supposed to be his model, a model his father hoped he would
replicate. But Nick cannot do it. His apprehensions about the cruelty of what
Tom represents are evident from the very early pages of his narration and grow
as the events of the novel unfold. In the end, he sees the consequences of the
American ideal of white masculinity. He sees what happens to those who get
in the way—as George and Myrtle did, as Jay Gatsby did—to those who inten-
tionally or unintentionally disrupt the relentless machinery of American power.
While he will always benefit from his whiteness, Nick no longer identifies with
it. Unlike Daisy, he chooses Gatsby, the racial alien, the Nobody from Nowhere,
over Tom.

This is the story that has become more popular in the Obama era than in
the Jazz Age. It is not simply a story of unrequited love, ambition, and class,
but a story in which these themes are inextricably woven into questions of race,
ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In Fitzgerald’s novel, the invisibility of white
supremacy is unveiled. Beneath its seductive glamour, its naturalized veneer, its
denials and justifications, it is exposed not as the victim of America’s demise,
but the culprit; not as a biological reality, but a value system, a convenient tool of
exclusion, misdirected rage, and oppression. It is, as Nick describes Tom, cruel
and capable of enormous leverage. And Jay Gatsby—trespasser, outsider—still
beats on against this current, reborn ceaselessly into the future.
joseph vogel is an assistant professor at Merrimack College, where his research
and teaching interests include twentieth-century American literature, film, popu-
lar culture, and environmental studies. His work has appeared in The Atlantic,
Slate, The Huffington Post, PopMatters, the Journal of Popular Music Studies,
The Journal of Popular Culture and is forthcoming in Scribner’s Dictionary of
American History. He is currently working on a monograph that explores James
Baldwin’s work in the 1980s.
Notes
1. The parallels between Jay-Z and Jay Gatsby are numerous, from their rags-to-riches
stories, to their controversial money-making strategies, to their self-branding genius. “Jay
was one of the first people to identify the aspirational aspect of the film,” says Luhrmann,
who met Jay-Z through their mutual friend (and eventual Gatsby lead) Leonardo DiCaprio.
“He saw what the movie is about and understood how we could go from hearing traditional
jazz in one moment to hip-hop in the next.” After seeing a rough cut of the film, Jay-Z
reportedly told Luhrmann: “This story is not about how Jay Gatsby made his money; it’s ‘is
he a good person or not?’” (qtd. in Montgomery).
2. The term “Anglo-Saxon” is most often understood to describe Caucasians descended
from England. In the 1920s, the term was often used interchangeably with “Nordic,” which
described whites from Central and Northern Europe, though as Nell Irvin Painter notes,
usage of Nordic became much more common in the twentieth century (286–88). Generally
envisioned as blond, tall, with fair skin and blue eyes, Nordics were described by race think-
ers like Madison Grant as “the white man par excellence.” Nordics were distinguished from
Alpines and Mediterraneans (who generally hailed from Southern or Eastern Europe) and
were considered a lower, less intelligent variation of whiteness (Grant 167).
3. Grant’s book was a pseudo-scientific “attempt to elucidate the meaning of history in
terms of race” (Grant xix). In the nearly 500-page tome, he constructs a detailed theory of
“Nordic superiority” (a whiteness that excludes Celts, Slavs, Jews and Italians, among oth-
ers), while warning against the two biggest threats to white supremacy: miscegenation and
the influx of immigrants from non-Nordic nations. “If we continue to allow [immigrants]

52 JOSEPH Vogel
to enter they will in time drive us out of our own land by mere force of breeding” (qtd.
in Michaels 28). While his book was not a bestseller, his “expertise” and input was used
to justify and pass both the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Racial Integrity Act of 1924
(Michaels 28). Grant also wrote the introduction to Stoddard’s much more successful The
Rising Tide of Color, calling him a “prophet” (Stoddard xi).
4. Over the course of his presidency, suspicions and resentments about Obama’s iden-
tity have shown no signs of diminishing. By 2010, a Time poll found that 46 percent of
RepublicansbelievedBarackObamawasMuslim(Gerstein).In2011,aCBSNews/NewYork
Times poll discovered that one in four Americans (including 45 percent of Republicans) did
not even believe he was born in America. Among certain regions of the country up to
70 percent of the population refused to believe the President was a legitimate American
(Condon).
5. “Whatever the word scrawled on Gatsby’s steps may be,” observes Barbara Will, “the
point is that we cannot know it; it is a word that, precisely in its obscenity, points to a sig-
nifying void” (127). The obscenity, that is, speaks to Gatsby “as the threatening figure of
the alien, unassimilable to the discourse of political and social Americanism toward which
the text is ultimately directed, ‘unutterable’ within the narrative framework that seeks to
represent him” (128).
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