CRITICAL CONTEXT-

THE GREAT GATSBY

Agata Wójtowicz
1922 2022
 Contemporary critism
Why 'The Great Gatsby' is called the great
American novel?

'We’re Still Reading — and Changing Our Minds About —

Gatsby' (The New York Times)

It's the most American of stories. He captured and distilled the

essence of the American spirit
Topic of money's power and love as a purpose

It remains relevant it is probably the American novel most often

taught in the rest of the world

Language: "There's not one flabby sentence,"

Posthumous revival and
criticism
_______________
 William Troy
http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/critics-eng/troy-authority.html

William Troy called Gatsby: one of the 'mythological creations in

our culture' and 'Fitzgerald's only successful novel'

insofar as the book is Gatsby’s insofar as it is the narrator’s he (Gatsby) becomes a

story it is a story of failure—
the prolongation of the
adolescent incapacity to
distinguish between dream
and reality, between the
terms demanded of life and
the terms offered
story it is a successful
transcendence of a particularly
symbol of America
bitter and harrowing set of itself, dedicated to “the
experiences, localized in the service of a vast, vulgar
sinister, distorted, El Greco-like
and meretricious
Long Island atmosphere of the
later twenties beauty.”
Arthur 1) This is what Fitzgerald’s imagination
grasped about American life, that wealth is
Mizener enormously important to it because as
American society is constituted—just possibly
as any society is constituted — only wealth
'Fitzgerald’s true provides the conditions that make the full
greatness as a realization of life’s promises possible [...]
writer that he
helped his age—and
2) There is a special irony in the belated fame
therefore us—to see
of "Gatsby" because Fitzgerald was a man like
that this was “the
Gatsby himself
way it was.'

http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/critics-eng/mizener-20s.html
The new criticism of the 1950s

Scholarly study of The Great Gatsby began in the 1940s; “its

earliest focus was on its criticism of the American experience and
as a work with universal themes and appeal”

The begining of exploring

ethical, economic, social, erotic,
etc. topics of the Great Gatsby,
not only a simple story of man
and his love.
 ETHNIC CRITICISM
Tom Buchanan's as the represnetation of 1920s situation in America
supremacy of white people, standing up against 'giving black people
equal rights'
fear of the white population to be submerged by the black community
John Whitson Cell. The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South. Cambridge University Press, 1982.

“it’s up to us [white people], who are the dominant race, to watch out or these
other races will have control of things”

“Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and
next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between
black and white”

The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly
submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved”
 Great Gatsby through the Lens
of Feminism
patriarchy is deeply internalized for main women characters,
demonstrating how powerful and often devastating this ideology can be.

DAISY
'She wanted her life shaped now, immediately – and the decision must be made by some force –
of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality – that was close at hand. (8.19)' (Nick Carraway
about Daisy)

MYRTLE
'Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.' ; I married
him because I thought he was a gentleman…[...]'

JORDAN
There was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams
from age to age.
Great Gatsby through the Lens
of Feminism

Daisy Buchanan about her daughter

“All right, I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the
best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little food”
Everything in your past creates everything
in your present, but only you have the
power to create new future -
psychoanalytic criticism and reference to
Freud
Psychoanalytic
The Fear of
criticism Intimacy and
systematic structure of theories Romantic
concerning the relation of conscious
and unconscious psychological
Relationship
processes as
Defense Mechanisms
'disfunctional
Denial love'
Fear of intimacy
Family relationships
Marxist criticism
'Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy named after
Karl Marx. It examines the effect of capitalism on labor, productivity, and
economic development and argues for a worker revolution to overturn
capitalism in favor of communism.'

1. Consumers, class division (Tom & Daisy, Nick, Gatsby)

2. Unfair privilege
3. Changing class (reinforcing the unfair classification)
4. The glass ceiling (Gatsby, pretending about his social
status)
5. The proletariat (George Wilson)
6. Female economic status
 SUMMARY
Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s third novel, and in writing it, he
consciously set out to write something more artistic and creative
than his previous two books

In 1920s and 1930s the novel was not a commercial success and
the opinions were cold

By 1945, 123,000 pocket-sized copies of Gatsby had been

shipped to American soldiers. The story of unrequited love and
the failure of the American Dream resonated with the young men
fighting abroad.

Finally, in the twenty-first century, Gatsby’s continued popularity

has made it a cultural touchstone
 https://crossref-it.info/textguide/the-great-gatsby/34/2452

https://studycorgi.com/racism-in-the-great-gatsby/

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitz
gerald-gatsby60.html?module=inline

https://www.jstor.org/stable/441376

https://www.yorknotes.com/alevel/english-literature/the-great-gatsby-
2017/study/contexts-interpretations/04010302_critical-interpretations

https://study.com/academy/lesson/literary-criticism-of-the-great-
gatsby.html

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210209-the-worlds-most-
misunderstood-novel