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F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby and The Roaring Twenties. 1920-1929: Changing Times. The 1920’s were a time of unprecedented social and technological change in so many areas:. An economy stimulated by WW1 fueled a massive economic boom. . General Business Conditions. Stable prices
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1920-1929: Changing Times The 1920’s were a time of unprecedented social and technological change in so many areas: An economy stimulated by WW1 fueled a massive economic boom.
General Business Conditions • Stable prices • High employment • Number of firms increased annually until 1929 • Steady failure rate • Prime interest rate averaged less than 5% • Stock yield higher than bond yields
Income Distribution • Equalizing effect of income tax during the war but • 1922: Top 1% held 32% of nation’s wealth • 1929: Top 1% held 38% of nation’s wealth • “The rich get rich and the poor get… children”
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 • Joe “King” Oliver” was one of the best • 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.
Lifestyles and fashions of the 1920s • Symbolically, she cut her hair into a boyish “bob” and bared her calves in the short skirts of the fashionable twenties “flapper” • No more Victorian Values • Independent women • Gaiety • Increasing wealth • Social mobility
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
Prohibition • The Volstead Act • 18th Amendment (1919) • Bootleggers • Sold, bought, consumed alcohol. • Gangsters Al Capone and a ‘gonnection’
Gangsters in Prohibition Era • Speak-easies, nightclubs, and taverns that sold liquor were often raided, and gangsters made illegal fortunes as bootleggers, smuggling alcohol into America from abroad. • Another gangland activity was illegal gambling. • Perhaps the worst scandal involving gambling was the so-called Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were indicted for accepting bribes to throw baseball’s World Series.
Media and Technology • Automobilization • 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
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 • 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 at age 45 • Zelda perished in a mental hospital fire in 1948 • Only became a “literary great” in the 1960s
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.
The Modernist Era • Rejected Romanticism; troubled by moral uncertainty • the catastrophe of World War I • Embraced the new (i.e. mechanization and industrialization) • Cars • 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”
Nick Gatsby Modernism and Romanticism
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?
