F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

and The Roaring Twenties
English II
Literature
 1920-1929: Changing Times
The 1920’s were a time of unprecedented
social and technological change in so many
areas:

Literature Music

Media / Technology Women’s Rights

Prohibition Lifestyles

An economy stimulated by WW1

fueled a massive economic boom.
General Business Conditions
• Stable prices
• High employment
• The wealth of the 1920s
however, belies careless
disregard for responsible
spending (and the
importance of hard work
and perseverence) and
for moral principles.
• “The Party has to End”:
lavish spending and
disregard for family and
more traditional values
(such as fidelity to one’s
spouse) contributed to
economic collapse and a
decline in national
morale.
 The Roaring Twenties
The decade of the twenties is often referred to as the

“ Jazz Age’. However, the term has much as much to

do with the jazzy atmosphere of the time as with the

music!
 Jazzy Sounds

• Prohibition brought many

jazz musicians north from
New Orleans to Chicago and
New York

• Jazz became the soundtrack

of rebellion for a younger
generation
Jazzy Duds
• Flappers were typical
young girls of the
twenties, usually with
bobbed hair, short
skirts, rolled stockings,
and powdered knees!
• They danced the night
away doing the
Charleston and the
Black Bottom.
Jazzy Talk -Twenties Slang
Gee I wish a torpedo
would bump off this
• All Wet - wrong flat tire
• Bee’s Knees - a superb person
• Big Cheese -an important person
Dumb
• Bump Off - to murder Dora
• Dumb Dora - a stupid girl
• Flat Tire - a dull, boring person
• Gam - a girls leg
• Hooch - bootleg liquor
• Hoofer - chorus girl
• Torpedo - a hired gunman
Music in Gatsby
• Gatsby’s music during
the parties is decribed
as the “yellow cocktail
music”

• This was Jazz and

Ragtime
– Louis Armstrong,
– Duke Ellington
King Oliver
 Lifestyles and fashions of the
1920s
• No more Victorian Values
• Flappers
• Collegiate Students
• Independent women
• Gaiety
• Increasing wealth
• Social mobility
• Alcohol consumption
Women’s Rights Movement
• Suffrage - the right
to vote
• Nineteenth
Amendment (1920)
• Changing attitudes
and fashions help
bring about the new
woman e.g. Jordan
Baker
The playful flapper here we see,
The fairest of the fair.
She’s not what Grandma used to The Flapper
be,-- by Dorothy Parker
You might say, au contraire.

Her girlish ways may make a stir,

Her manners cause a scene
But there is no more harm in her
Than in a submarine.
She nightly knocks for many a goal
The usual dancing men.
Her speed is great, but her control
Is something else again
All spotlights focus on her pranks.
All tongues her prowess herald
For which she well may render thanks
To God and Scott Fitzgerald.
Her golden rule is plain enough--
Just get them young and treat them
rough
 Prohibition
• The Volstead Act
• 18th Amendment
(1919)
• Bootleggers
– Sold, bought,
consumed
alcohol.
– Gangsters

Al Capone and a ‘gonnection’

 Prohibition Creates Bootlegging
Industry
• Crime increased
because people
rebelled
against laws
prohibiting alcohol.
● Numerous “speak-
easies”—nightclubs
where alcoholic drinks
were sold—cropped
up.
• Defiance of the Prohibition Act,
women gaining the right to vote,
relaxing of social mores, the rise in
organized crime, the influence of
Hollywood, advertising, and the
fashion industries, all contributed to
the advent of the Roaring 20s—a time
of reckless spending, get-rich-quick
schemes and an abandonment of the
noble ideals of hard and honest work.
 Media and Technology
• Automobilisation
– the car is available to many
• from courting to dating
• Mass Media
– Magazines and literacy
• Reader’s Digest
• Time
– Radios and advertising
– New forms of narrative
• Movie - “talkies” e.g. The Jazz
Singer
• Popular Sports
 F Scott Fitzgerald
• Descendent from “prominent” American stock
• Attended Princeton but left without graduating
• Missed WWI (just)
• Met Zelda but couldn’t afford to marry her
• Published This Side of Paradise in 1920 at the age of 24:
instant stardom
• Married Zelda, his “golden girl”
• Wrote “money-making” popular fiction for most of his life,
mainly for the New York Post: $4000 a story (which equates
to about $50,000 today)
• He and Zelda were associated with high living of the Jazz
Age
 Fitzgerald Continued
• A daughter, Scotty
• Wrote what is considered his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby,
in Europe in 1924-25
• Zelda has an affair and Gatsby poorly received
• Attempts to earn a clean literary reputation were disrupted
by his reputation as a drunk
• Zelda becomes mentally unstable
• Moved to Hollywood as a screen writer
• Dies almost forgotten aged 45
• Zelda perished in a mental hospital fire in 1948
• Only became a “literary great” in the 1960’s
 Literature of the 1920s
• Authors wrote about
their personal lives as
something “knowable”.
• Gatsby contains a great
deal of autobiographical
material and references
to the 1920’s.
• Fitzgerald was also
influenced by Modernist
theories about art.
Modernism in the Twenties
• East Egg (where the old money families
live) and West Egg, Long Island (where
the nouveau riche [newly rich] reside.
• The Valley of Ashes (Industrial section):
the depression and grime symbolize
the wealthy’s exploitation of the working
class. Myrtle Wilson feels trapped in the
“ash heap.”
• The nouveau riche (new rich)
emerged: a generation of wealthy
individuals who did not inherit their social
and financial status, but who became
suddenly well-off due to lucrative business
ventures (some were illegal). “The
American Dream” was attainable without
“hard work” or “perseverance.”
 The Modernist Era
• Rejection of Romanticism and the advent
of moral uncertainty
– the catastrophe of World War I
– (the wasteland and valley of ashes)

• Embracing the new i.e. mechanization and

industrialisation
– (Gatsby’s car)
– new (replaceable) fashions
– mass entertainment

• Using new means of Representation

– the development of cinema,
– the mass media and advertising
Modernism and Nick Carraway
• Because of the chaos there was a longing for
order.
• The modernist generation produced utopian
ideologies such as communism, fascism, and
futurism.

• Look at Nick in his retreat from the modern

word.
• “I wanted the world to be in uniform and to
stand to a sort of moral attention forever”
Modernism and Romanticism
Nick Gatsby
 Fitzgerald and Modernism
• Modernists mistrusted the possibility of absolute truth and
idealism.

• Consider the multiple and limited points-of-view employed in

Gatsby. What effect does this have on the concept of
absolute truth?

• How does Nick force us to view the “reality” that he

portrays?

• In modernist literature “loose ends” were embraced rather

resolved clearly. What does this suggest about the truth?

• Does Fitzgerald do this with The Great Gatsby?

Is The Great Gatsby a
period piece, or does the
novel step outside its
time and address
universal themes?