materialism and materiality in f. scott fitzgerald's "the great gatsby"

U N I V E R S I T A T E A D I N B U C U R E Ş T I

F A C U L T A T E A D E L I M B I Ş I L I T E R A T U R I S T R Ă I N E

Materialism

and Materiality

in F. Scott Fitzgerals’s The Great Gatsby

Student:

Sandra Iulia RONAI

III A, series I, group 1

English – Latin

– 2010 –

Assist. drd. Dana Mihailescu Sandra Iulia Ronai

American Literature seminar III A, series I, group 1

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When crafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson changed John Locke’s list of

essential human rights, from ‘life, liberty and property or estate’ to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit

of happiness’. It seemed that, starting with this ‘scripture of nationhood’ (Callahan: 379), the

American conscience would endeavor to reach not a concrete, material state of well-being

denoted by worldly possessions, but a more abstract and elusive ‘happiness’, a ‘happiness’

whose real nature is different from person to person and from author to author. In what

follows, I will try to illustrate how the American Dream is portrayed, deconstructed and/or

reinvented in Fitzgerald’s novel, by analyzing the relation between, on the one hand, this

immaterial Dream and, on the other, materialism and materiality.

It is first necessary to define the terms of the analysis. ‘Materialism’ is a common and

easily understood term, denoting a human trait that has characterized America from the

Roaring Twenties onwards. I will try to show how Fitzgerald’s characters are materialistic in

their ideals and desires. By ‘materiality’, I understand the quality of being material and, to a

greater or lesser extent, ‘real’ – applied to things, situations and persons alike.

It has been observed that the American identity has always been caught up in the

“sometimes struggle, sometimes alliance between property and the pursuit of happiness. As

human impulses, property and the pursuit of happiness are sometimes contradictory,

sometimes complementary metaphors for experience.” (Callahan: 380) This alliance /

struggle, complementary / contradictory interplay of the two notions is visible in The Great

Gatsby as well, since, from the beginning to the end, the narrator (and the reader as well) can’t

decide whether property is a means for attaining happiness, a goal in itself or just the material

counterpart of the abstract ‘happiness’.

Setting the novel up against the more general context of the time when the action takes

place and the book itself was written, critics have observed that the consumerist, financially-

driven American society had produced a new human prototype, that of the member of the so-

called ‘leisure class’. As one critic notes, “The culture of consumption on exhibit in The Great

Gatsby was made possible by the growth of a leisure class in early-twentieth-century America.

As the novel demonstrates, this development subverted the foundations of the Protestant ethic,

replacing the values of hard work and thrifty abstinence with a show of luxury and idleness.”

(Donaldson: 201)

‘Luxury and idleness’ are what best describes the life of the main characters. We first

see it when the narrator visits his cousin for the first time, and is impressed by the opulence of

Daisy’s home. Tom’s desire to impress Nick is apparent in the way he boasts about his

possessions, from the house and lawn and ponies to Daisy’s love for him. Daisy and Tom live

in their own little world, where time itself seems to be a wealth, a commodity in excess like

everything else:

‘What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next

thirty years?’ (p. 75)

The propensity for showing off richness is again seen in Tom and Myrtle’s love-nest.

Not only does Tom keep a mistress, he also gives small, but gaudy parties in his overcrowded

apartment in New York. The whole episode is the perfect opportunity for the author to criticize

Myrtle’s lack of taste and her desire to appear as belonging to a higher social class,

emphasizing her low materialism and lack of real distinction. In the same time, the fragment is

a contrasting and preparatory scene for the unforgettable depiction of one of Gatsby’s parties

in the third chapter.

What this rather small gathering and the huge parties that Gatsby throws have in

common is the sense of solitude that clearly perspires despite the vicinity of other human

beings. Nick writes that



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People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other,

searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. (p. 25)

while he himself, at the same time participant in and observer of this extreme estrangement

phenomenon, can neither condone nor castigate this way of life:

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of

life. (p. 24)

But the episode that really illustrates the lengths to which the materialism of the age

had seized the characters, overwhelming them and forcing them to comply with this life of

idleness and luxury, is the majestic depiction of Gatsby’s gaudy parties. Just like in Petronius’

Cena Trimalchionis1, far from being an opportunity to meet other people and feel good in the

company of others, the party is a place where people are alone and try to forget about their

loneliness. Human beings are reduced to insignificant, fleeting insects:

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and

the champagne and the stars. (p. 26)

leading their unimportant, momentary lives against a background that seems to be curiously

immaterial in its extreme intended materiality. The mysterious, imprecise nature of the

‘whisperings’, the empty vivacity of champagne bubbles and the elusiveness of the remote

stars are all perfectly chosen and mixed in order to define the atmosphere of the scene. It is a

kind of carnivalesque world, where the guests

conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park.

(p. 27)

I pointed that the background, the whole environment, strives to be material. This is

apparent in the list of the enormous quantities of food and drinks that are readily offered at the

party. Just like Petronius, Fitzgerald takes time to describe the various plates, insisting on their

solid, palpable, tastable nature.

On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded

against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. (p. 26)

But apart from food and the decorations, everything else seems to assume an unreal,

immaterial quality, like strokes of color on an Impressionist painting. People are

depersonalized, obliterated into the partying crowd, and only fragments of their bodies, moves

and personalities are mentioned, all drawn together to form the general tableau:

Already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair

bobbed in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing,

and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter

and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic

meetings between women who never knew each other's names. (p. 27)

1 Which served as a major source of inspiration – even if Fitzgerald might have hidden higher meanings

underneath it, the general atmosphere of superficiality and reckless abandon is the same. Fitzgerald confesses his

literary debt to the Roman novelist when he mentions Gatsby’s “career as Trimalchio”, and one of the working

titles of the novel was Trimalchio in Long Island. A comparison between how materialism and materiality are

approached in the two novels is beyond the scope of this paper, but such a critical attempt might reveal something

more about how similar social contexts in two different eras can lead to the same human manifestations.



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In this scene, a very important element is this ‘chatter and laughter’, and generally the

seemingly joyful, yet undistinguished sounds that at one point seem to be louder than the

orchestra. Laughter, especially, has a crucial role to play in Fitzgerald’s way of portraying the

characters and the atmosphere throughout the novel. It seems to be everywhere, permeating

every party or get-together and defining the careless life of the rich and idle.

… happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose towards the summer sky. (p. 31)

Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. (p.

27)

notices Nick at Gatsby’s party, but laughter, especially forced, cultivated (in the sense of self-

induced) laughter is also present in Tom and Myrtle’s apartment:

and the room rang full of her [Myrtle’s] artificial laughter. (p. 24)

and also in Tom and Daisy’s home:

then she [Daisy] laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh (p. 8)

Daisy’s laughter, and the way she uses her voice in general, has been extremely well-

constructed by Fitzgerald, in order to convey a certain immateriality that characterizes her, an

immateriality that is in the same time artificial and a genuine product of her social class. The

first description of Daisy brings this to the forefront, making it a crucial element in her

characterization:

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate

mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult

to forget; a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen!’, a promise that she had done gay,

exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next

hour. (p. 8)

Later in the novel, the strange charm of Daisy’s voice is elucidated:

‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood before.

It was full of money – that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it,

the cymbal’s song of it… (p. 76)

But laughter is just one of the immaterial elements that try to make up a solid, material

environment. Another one is light, both the natural starlight that casts a mysterious glow over

the scene, and the artificial, electric lightning that is still a luxury of the wealthy. It is Daisy’s

porch, “bright with the bought luxury of star-shine” (p. 95) that impresses Gatsby, leading him

to later buy “a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths” (p. 51) The “following

of a Grail” that is Gatsby’s love for Daisy is closely linked to the idea of light, light as the

medium of surrounding an image and creating an appearance.

The moon, just like the stars, becomes only another part of the décor, and one almost

expects it to be equally artificial:

…the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer's basket. (p. 28)

Taken straight out of the Romantic imagery, the moon comes to be seen as a celestial

equivalent to Gatsby, equally alone and remote from the rest of the world:



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A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as before,

and surviving the laughter and the sound of his sill glowing garden. A sudden emptiness

seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation

the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell. (p.

37)

The lack of materiality is also apparent in the great role that images play – especially

constructed, orchestrated images like photographs. Together with the telephone and the

automobile, photography is one of the conquests of modern life that the author includes in the

novel, only to question its true value as a facilitator of human communication. “Photographs,

like clothes and cosmetics, not only remake the characters in the novel, they supplant them.

Indeed, photographs provide the prototypes to which people and things conform, thereby

reminding us that appearances are not just deceiving: they are predetermined by prior

appearances.” (Barrett: 542)

In contrast to these appearances, objects give the illusion of representing an anchor to

the real world. With their superficiality and inability to ‘understand’ higher feelings and ideals,

some of the characters try to have a sense of the real by desperately clutching material

possessions. It is Daisy’s case, who, unable to show her bittersweet grief at seeing Gatsby

again, recenters the source of her emotions:

Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry

stormily.

‘They're such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It

makes me sad because I’ve never seen such… such beautiful shirts before.’ (p. 59)

The newspaper clippings about Daisy that Gatsby collects, the photos of him that try to

create an honorable past for him or the photo of the mansion that Gatsby sends to his father are

all parts of this constructive and illusory reality, based on appearances and immaterial

projections.

Gatsby’s house is in itself such a projection. The solid reality of it can’t be contested,

but what it stands for is just an illusion. An illusion that is less easily noticed, but an illusion

nonetheless.

At the party scene, Nick and Jordan end up in the library, which, at first, seems to

possess both a silence and tranquility that the rest of the house lacks, and a sense of solemn,

heavy solidity:

a high Gothic library, paneled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete

from some ruin overseas. (p. 30)

The fact that the books are real is a surprise to one of the characters, who, to a certain

extent, voices the reader’s concern about the reality of the place:

‘I ascertained. They're real.’

‘The books?’

He nodded.

‘Absolutely real - have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard.

Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages and - Here! Lemme show you.’

Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One

of the ‘Stoddard Lectures’.

‘See!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s

a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too -

didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?’

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shell muttering that if one brick

was removed the whole library was liable to collapse. (p. 30)



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The last sentence draws our attention, again, to the artificiality of Gatsby’s life: it is no

more than a construct, fragile like a castle build out of a deck of cards, and ready to shatter at

any moment.

This construct is the work of Gatsby himself, invested by him with the sole purpose of

pleasing Daisy. When she eventually comes to admire it, Gatsby seems to be caught up in his

own illusion, or in another illusion, one weaved by Daisy, for him, out of his first illusion for

her.

He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house

according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he

stared around at his possessions in a dazed way as though in her actual and astounding presence

none of it was any longer real. (p. 59)

In fact, the house, vacuous and uselessly sumptuous just like the rest of Gatsby’s existence,

seems to loose all its materiality in the end, being morphed into a somewhat nightmarish place devoid

of all physical reality:

His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted

through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions, and

felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches - once I tumbled with a sort of

splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere,

and the rooms were musty, as though they hadn't been aired for many days. I found the humidor

on an unfamiliar table, with two stale, dry cigarettes inside. (p. 93 – 94, italics mine)

On the other hand, this very appearance of grandeur is the only thing that can comfort

Gatsby’s father after the death of his son:

…and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and

splendor of the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms, his grief began to

be mixed with an awed pride. (p. 106 – 107)

In this way, Gatsby himself becomes an immaterial projection, a last figure of a higher

man, an embodiment of purer values. This is how Nick will remember him, in contrast to the

other superficial people that he gets to meet:

The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his

corruption - and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved

them goodbye. (p. 98)

Gatsby had been defeated by this superficial, empty life – he had tried to fight against it

with the same weapons, but failed, being himself conquered by

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air,

drifted fortuitously about… (p. 103)

Gatsby’s defeat has been linked by critics to the defeat of the American Dream. The

character gets to find out that ‘property’ is, in fact, not a means for reaching the pursued

happiness. “On the most banal level, The Great Gatsby documents the truism that money can’t

buy your love, or at least not the tainted money that Gatsby acquires in his campaign to take

Daisy away from her husband.” (Donaldson: 195) The critic brings social status into the

equation again, questioning equality and comparing Gatsby’s fate to Myrtle’s: “the two

characters who fall in love above their station pay with their life for their presumption, while



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Tom and Daisy assuage any discomfort they may feel over cold chicken and ale. It is a double

standard with a vengeance.” (Donaldson: 197)

Other commentators, on the other hand, insist on the optimistic final message of the

book. The famous vision which concludes the novel, linked not only to the American Dream,

but also to the more universal myth of renewal, still allows the existence of hope. Even if

“America has lived through, and is still suffering from, the consequences of attempting to

blend utopian ideals with notions of materialist satisfaction.” (Hawkes: 22), the unique quality

of the American dream, with its materialism and idealism alike, is what can, in the end, prevail

over the curtain of appearances, projections and immaterial images.

“The Great Gatsby also works on a very ironic level and while it may chronicle the

death of the American Dream it also, through its poetic and lyrical writing, rebuilds the dream.

(…) The novel could never have achieved its lasting status if it was merely a cautionary tale. It

is the American Dream—the story of self-creation and fulfillment, Gatsby creating himself but

more importantly Nick retelling that story—giving a voice to the dream and thereby recreating

the dream to be taken up again and again.” (Hawkes: 21)



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WORKS CITED

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Wordsworth Classics. 2001

Donaldson, Scott. "Possessions in The Great Gatsby." Southern Review 37.2 (2001): 187.

Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

Hawkes, Lesley. "'And one fine morning': Gatsby, Obama, and the resurrection of hope."

Social Alternatives 28.3 (2009): 20-23. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 23 Apr.

2010.

Barrett, Laura. "`Material Without Being Real': Photography and the End of Reality in The

Great Gatsby." Studies in the Novel 30.4 (1998): 540. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO.

Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

Callahan, John F. "F. Scott Fitzgerald's evolving American dream: The `Pursuit of Happiness'

in Gatsby, Tender Is.." Twentieth Century Literature 42.3 (1996): 374. Academic Search

Premier. EBSCO. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

materialism and materiality in f. scott fitzgerald's "the great gatsby"

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