Miss Baker is described as “a slender, small-breasted girl” and compared to a “young cadet.” This description of her androgynous features characterizes her as a “flapper,” and makes her representative of the novel’s emphasis on modern styles that clash with established, traditional standards, including gender roles.
The Great Gatsby – 1
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Tom Buchanan is supposedly reading a book called “The Rise of the Colored Empires,” which is a reference to the real-life book The Rising Tide of Color, by Lothrop Stoddard. Stoddard was a white supremacist and Buchanan’s association with his ideas–in particular, the notion that northern Europeans have contributed everything that makes civilization worthwhile and must guard their dominant position vigilantly–is likely to make Tom unpopular with readers.
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Fitzgerald makes reference to the Fourth of July in the same sentence in which a “gray, scrawny Italian child” is described. Tom comments that the neighborhood is “terrible” immediately after the reference to the child. Maybe this kid represents the classes of people he feels like civilization, and the country, needs to be guarded against.
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Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson, is described in a manner that contrasts with the descriptions of Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan. She’s “faintly stout” and carries her “surplus flesh sensuously.” She’s also described as having “rather wide hips.” She is not a flapper, so she might be symbolic of something more traditional.
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Gatsby stands absorbed in his observation of the point where the green light appears at Daisy’s house, even though Daisy is standing at his side. He’s focused on the light that symbolizes her, as he has been for so long, instead of interacting with her while she’s actually present. The green light is losing significance for him now that he and Daisy are interacting, and Fitzgerald writes “His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”
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Nick concludes that there must be moments during Daisy’s interaction with Gatsby when she falls short of the dream of her that Gatsby’s created, the “colossal vitality of his illusion.” If Daisy is Gatsby’s dream, in a novel about the American Dream, what do her shortcomings say about how that Dream can be unfulfilling?
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Fitzgerald describes the “vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” James Gatz re-creates himself for when assumes the name Jay Gatsby. This concise description is a bleak summary of the American Dream.
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When Tom confronts Gatsby about his affair with Daisy, he makes hypocritical reference to “family life and family institutions,” even though he’s guilty of infidelity himself. This reference to traditional institutions symbolizes the challenge to tradition that is at the heart of this modernist novel. Gatsby’s modern dream is to be the upstart who topples tradition and wins the girl of his dreams, despite the fact that he’s not from an old, established family. Furthermore, Tom compares the affair between Gatsby and Daisy to the idea of interracial marriage, another prospect that represents a challenge to tradition and, in Buchanan’s mind, civilization.
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As they recover her mangled body, Myrtle Wilson is described as having “tremendous vitality.” This description contrasts with that of the other women, the lithe, androgynous, modern flappers. What does it mean that the woman with the traditional appearance is killed, albeit accidentally, by the modern woman?
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Nick notes that Gatsby’s guests guessed at his “corruption” while he waved at them, “concealing his incorruptible dream,” his intensely personal version of the American Dream, his yearning for Daisy.
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Nick describes Gatsby as having “paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” This sounds a lot like the “grotesques” from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, men and women who are disfigured by their fixation on things they aren’t able to obtain or accomplish. Fitzgerald uses the word “grotesque” in the same paragraph.
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Nick notes that the story’s main characters are from the West and asserts “perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”