The family is reading The Great Gatsby. It is something new for us. About 12 years ago our daughter and I read The Sun Also Rises. After that I read For Whom the Bell Tolls on my own. My wife and I have read some of the same books—I read four Rex Stouts for her; she read some cyberpunk scifi for me—but we never read together like a book club.
About page 44 for me, Laurel asked about study guides and I examined four online, from the New York State Regents Examination Preparation down to GradeSaver and Shmoop. The Regents want you to know your tropes but the criticisms are all pretty much the same about the decadence of the Roaring Twenties. For the academic critics parallels to America today are impossible to ignore. I can take a different view. I can find in The Great Gatsby the hints and tendrils of new virtues then and now, supplanting Victorian sensibilities, which I can contend are also misunderstood by critical theorists from sociology and literature today.
Consider Jordan Baker. She earns an independent income as a golf pro, competing in tournaments. That would have been impossible before World War I. We easily accept that Nick Carraway sells bonds, but that, too, did not exist until about the 1820s. It could have been explained to a medieval banker or merchant factor. They bought and sold paper. Gaining understanding from a noble, knight, or peasant would have been difficult. Industrial capitalism of the mid-19th century created the bonds markets to finance canals, railroads, etc. The soubriquet nouveau riche was an insult. It should have been a compliment, speaking to the creation of new wealth.
When I read this in college (1967), the only thing that I took away was that Daisy’s ineptitude as a driver symbolized her inability to manage her own life. I understand. But, really, no one could drive back then. Today, we have two or three generations raised in automobiles, conditioned to perceiving the world at 60 mph. And cars are much safer with seatbelts, airbags, impact resistant superstructures, automatic transmissions, power steering, and steel belted radial tires. We still kill 40,000 people a year, but the population is three times larger than it was in 1925. So, the symbolism stands: Daisy is a wreck. That being so, automobiles nonetheless deserve context.
World War I was the turning point. When I cannot get to sleep, I imagine that I have a time machine and box of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. To whom would they go? What would be the reaction? I could have the books on a Kindle or iPad, itself a wonder to underscore the veracity of the claims. (And then I am asleep.) But what if…? Had World War I not destroyed the status quo of Europe, what would the world of 1940 have been like?
I like to think that we could have been on our way to the Moon. The Internet would exist via telephone, radio, television, and teletype. But would any woman earn an independent income playing golf? Would women vote?
I am enjoying The Great Gatsby for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing. I underline phrases and block off paragraphs of narrative. That in itself is motivation and reward.
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