Aylie Rudge
In the Modernist era, the mythic tale was having its resurgence; many authors looked to their ancient predecessors for guidance and integrated allusions to legendary heroes who often met a tragic fate. One such author was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, before naming his most famous work The Great Gatsby, entitled it Trimalchio in West Egg. Fitzgerald is referencing the Roman legend The Satyricon by Petronius and invoking images of the sinful and overindulgent character Trimalchio. Although Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby is not overtly like his Roman predecessor, the events of The Great Gatsby are built upon corruption, carefully constructed lies, and grandiose forms of speculation. These lies and distorted perceptions infect not only the male protagonists but also their female counterparts. The import of these mythic lies exceeds the limitations of the novel and creates a larger commentary on Fitzgerald’s own American society. This paper will suggest new ways of thinking about Fitzgerald’s utilization of mythic elements and how they contribute to the portrayal of female characters in the Modernist Era. Ultimately, we will see that Gatsby’s mythologizing of Daisy mirrors the distorted idealizing of the Jazz Age and points to its ill-fated destiny.
With knowledge of the novel’s original title, Trimalchio in West Egg, readers can understand that Fitzgerald wanted to create a frame lens that presents the novel as a modern myth. Fitsgerald wishes for readers to read the novel in such a way that requires the reader to look for a clear moral or answer to a universal question, as well as to understand how the protagonist is doomed before the story even begins. Fitzgerald was well-versed in ancient Greek and Roman myths, and he clearly intended a connection between the overindulgent and often grotesque Roman elites and Jay Gatsby. However,The Great Gatsby echoes many other ancient stories, such as Ovid’s tale of Phaeton, a mortal son born to the sun god Apollo. Phaeton asks to use his father’s sun chariot, a request that is granted with the warning that the chariot is not easily controlled. Phaeton is unwavering in his hubris and boldly flies out in the chariot, only to come too close to the Earth and begin destroying it. Zeus casts a thunderbolt at Phaeton, and he falls from the sun chariot to his death (Michelson). This story clearly becomes a representation of Gatsby and his own chariot, his car being described as “terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns” (63). His car is the literal and figurative vehicle of his destruction as it is used to kill Myrtle, thus leading to his murder. Gatsby also resembles Phaeton in that he is a man who comes from nothing and is driven by his ambition to become a figure of greatness. While much of Gatsby’s journey to eminence is driven by his love for Daisy, his dream of personal splendor seems to come from birth. In explaining his name change from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, Nick Carroway states, “I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination never really accepted them as his parents at all” (95).
Gatsby follows an honorable hero’s quest as he aims to win back the woman he loves while also building an empire from nothing. Yet, like many heroes before him, he seems to be doomed from the start, and critic Edwin Moses argues that Gatsby’s tragic fall can be predicted just from reading the first chapter of the novel. When Tom and Daisy are introduced to the reader they are seen as integral to their setting, being a necessary part of the rich landscape they inhabit. When Nick first sees Tom again, he says, “The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch” (12). When first seeing Daisy and Jordan he remarks, “The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back after a short flight around the house” (13). The Buchanans not only inhabit a luxurious home, but they are also built into it in their gleaming gold and white glory. The light that they inhabit is contrasted by Gatsby, who is in the darkness when Nick first encounters him. While Gatsby may own an opulent mansion, he is detached from it, seen only as a shadowy figure outside it. Moses argues that Gatsby’s love for Daisy doesn’t just make him a tragic hero for his hubris, but for his attempt at disrupting the established setting and societal fabric of wealthy American life. He refers to an aspect of tragedies called “nemesis,” which is “the inevitable, convulsing righting of a balance in nature which the tragic hero has disturbed” (52).
Another of Ovid’s tales is relevant here, that of Icarus. The son of an inventor who is trapped within a labyrinth, he escapes using wings created by his father, who warns him not to fly too close to the sun. Icarus is equally as confident as Phaeton, and upon flying too close to the sun he plunges to his death. Like Icarus, Gatsby is not only once again blinded by his desire for greatness, but also, as a figure associated with darkness, he errs in seeking to possess Daisy as a figure of light. Gatsby “flies too close to the sun” because Daisy is the sun, and his attempt to bend nature to his will, like Phaeton and Icarus, was a losing battle from its inception.
Placing Daisy in the world of ancient myth also suggests Aphrodite, the effortlessly beautiful and wealthy goddess. As critic Andrea Lagomarsino points out, Daisy is always seen in white, exalting her to a divine idol status. Yet I would say she does not only exist as a traditional mythic figure but as an interior myth to Gatsby himself. As we are eventually made aware of his past as James Gatz, the beginnings of his intrinsic myth of Daisy are presented. Gatsby’s tale of his love for Daisy begins by his description of her as “the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known” (141), before quickly going on to describe the house that she inhabits. According to the narrator Nick Carroway, Gatsby had “never been in such a beautiful house before” and “there was a ripe mystery to it” (141). Here, we see another instance of Daisy being built into the setting, and this is essential to Gatsby’s burgeoning love for her. Nick relates Gatsby’s excitement about how many men “already loved Daisy,” and then how “she vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby – nothing. He felt married to her, that was all” (142). This image of his love seems to be missing a key aspect: any actual descriptors of Daisy herself. Daisy is an empty figure, a dream for Gatsby of what his life could be like. While he convinces himself that his next five years of pining for Daisy are because he truly loves her, it becomes clear that Gatsby loves the way in which Daisy is effortlessly wealthy. She has been rich her whole life, and he even says to Nick that her voice is “full of money” (115). He loves her because other men love her, and he wants to feel that he can exalt himself by possessing what other rich men also desire. While Gatsby is often seen as being the elusive figure, it is Daisy who is so often described as “flying about the room” or as having a flighty demeanor. She seems to not exist for herself, but only in Gatsby’s conception of her.
Daisy Buchanan is one representation of a larger problem of the Modernist Era: female characters who exist in a liminality between the “old” and “new” woman. As women gained the right to vote in the 1920s, the women’s rights movement began to make steps in securing independence. While this provided a new perspective for the portrayal of female characters, the change was a slow process to integrate. As Heike Wrenn states in “Women in Modernism,” “Women had been seen and treated more as complements to the men in their lives than as individuals or spiritual entities; they were depicted in literature as womanly, weak, dutiful, and stupid. Most authors continued to write with the misguided perception that women were always inferior to men” (9). While this version of the “old” woman was still dominant, glimpses of the “new” woman began in the Modernist era. Wrenn writes that these women were looking for “intellectual freedom” and “self-realization,” for “the ability to use their intellectual abilities and talents to find themselves and their true identity… this new woman became not only a threat to male- dominated societies but also a great source of material for the writers of the time” (10).
This reconciliation of old and new ways of thinking about female agency created a liminal space for Modernist female characters, so many of which seem to grasp for their own identity only to fall short. Other Modernist characters, such as Caddy from The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner or Brett from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, are free spirited young women who aim to live their lives according to their own rules. While they are both intelligent, bold, and somewhat masculine women, they are ultimately demonized for these qualities. Caddy and Brett attempt to escape their rigid confines of traditional womanhood and are ostracized as selfish and promiscuous.
A main element of this depiction is due to these women being seen through the male narrators, men who admire these women for their independence and yet shun them for it. The case could be made that this is due to both books being written by male authors, but the problem still exists in novels by Modernist female writers. Women like Antonia from My Antonia by Willa Cather and Ellen from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton fall into the same trap as Caddy and Brett. They cannot escape the confines of their male protagonists’ conception of who they should be, not who they really are. Since we are never given insight into the perspective of these women, they fall short of being well-rounded individuals, becoming only flimsy idealizations. Daisy is no different as she exists through Gatsby’s eyes as a dream to actualize, not as an independent figure existing outside the confines of his own mind. Daisy attempts to create her own narrative by leaving Tom and building a life with Gatsby, but she cannot make the leap to attaining her own agency. She says to him, “Oh you want too much! she cried to Gatsby. ‘I love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past’… ‘I did love him once – but I loved you too” (126). Here, Gatsby’s conception of Daisy begins to fracture, and the myth is somewhat dissolved. She cannot rewrite the past because she does not exist in Gatsby’s idea of her past self, the version of her that was never real. Yet she also cannot escape her sham of a marriage with Tom and be with the man she truly believes she loves. Daisy is perpetually caught between the “old” and the “new,” between existing as her own person or only inside the narrative that men have created for her.
One of the most complex mythic allusions in The Great Gatsby is that of The Fisher King from Arthurian legend. The Fisher King is the keeper of the Holy Grail yet has been rendered infertile by a wound. This infertility leads to his land itself becoming barren, and he must wait for a knight to come to heal him so that his land and fertility may be restored. In many versions of the story, a knight of the Round Table comes and heals The Fisher King in exchange for the grail. Fitzgerald was a proud admirer of T.S. Eliot, whose famous poem “The Wasteland” incorporates the Fisher King legend. This comparison often sets up Gatsby as being on a quest for the grail, to restore the barren “valley of ashes” of West Egg. Thus, the grail would be Daisy Buchanan, the most obvious object of desire in the narrative. Andrea Lagomarsino has argued that Gatsby is not the knight on a quest but The Fisher King himself, emasculated by his love for Daisy. This viewpoint makes the narrator Nick Carraway, the quester with his strong desire to heal Gatsby’s wounds, while the grail is the knowledge of “mortality and divinity” (46) that Nick receives from Gatsby.
However, I would argue that although The Fisher King connection portrays Gatsby as the figure on a quest, his grail is not Daisy but the nebulous American Dream. Gatsby’s love for Daisy clearly lacks a solid basis, as he is more entranced by what she represents. From his early life, he does not dream of love but of social mobility and status. This is what Daisy symbolizes, and she becomes, for him, the green light, always propelling him onward and upward. If Daisy is not the grail, then perhaps she herself becomes the Fisher King, waiting for Gatsby to come and heal her wounds of the past. When Gatsby leaves for the war, Daisy is made to wait in “nervous despair,” and as she waits for him to reach the end of his quest, she seeks to have “her life shaped now, immediately– and the decision must be made by some force of – love, of money, of unquestionable practicality” (144), waiting for her life to be fixed and molded by a worthy knight. While not infertile, as she has a child, her marriage becomes barren of love, causing both partners to enter affairs. As Daisy is so entrenched in her setting that she cannot escape it, she then becomes stuck in her own empty wasteland, unable to break free unless her wounds are healed with Gatsby’s long-awaited love. When they are finally reunited, it is pouring rain, finally bringing life and fertility to the wasteland. If Gatsby and Daisy were indeed able to be together, she ultimately would give him the grail that he truly desires: the belief that he has fulfilled the American Dream. Gatsby would tie together the “old” and the “new” ways of living, something we have already seen Daisy cannot achieve herself. Gatsby believes his ultimate happiness with Daisy is so intimately tied to rewriting their past that he fails to heal her wounds. Ultimately Gatsby is unable to rewrite the history of Daisy marrying Tom. He cannot heal the Fisher King because she is unable to give him his grail, as it does not truly exist—the American Dream is only a fantasy. Gatsby is doomed to meet his tragic end from the very beginning, his journey never capable of having an ending.
The hollowness of Daisy as well as other Modernist female characters would prove to be representative of the ultimate hollowness of the Jazz Age itself. While an opulent and seemingly majestic time in American history, authors like Fitzgerald seemed well-aware of its ill-fated trajectory. Fitzgerald, raised in a very traditional Irish-Catholic family, perhaps hesitated at the change he saw in American society and the potential destruction of moral values. He belonged to the “Lost Generation” and shared the same post-war disillusionment with American society as many of his Modernist peers. Within this conception of Fitzgerald’s societal views, critic Derek Lee invites readers to think of Fitzgerald not only as being a modern Romantic writer but a modern Gothic one. While this is more obvious in his later works, in which he writes of ghosts and decay, Fitzgerald doesn’t need ghoulish monsters to represent the degradation of society in The Great Gatsby. As Lee writes,
Inflected in eighteenth-century Gothic works were uncertainties over changing class dynamics, ethics, and socioeconomic structures—the very same issues that concerned Fitzgerald at the turn of the twentieth century. As a genre, the Gothic provided Fitzgerald with the perfect medium to express his ambivalence, to simultaneously celebrate and condemn America’s burgeoning values. (136)
While not overt, the Gothic can certainly be felt in The Great Gatsby, with images of shadow and ash being recurring themes. Lee likens Jay Gatsby to Victor Frankenstein, another tragic hero whose ultimate destruction is caused by the life he has constructed for himself. This potential to see Gatsby in so many tragic heroes is surely intentional; Bruce Michelson argues that Fitzgerald wanted The Great Gatsby to not only teach an important moral lesson but also for any reader to be able to see themselves in the titular character. Gatsby deliberately remains elusive and invokes several mythic figures to allow a timeless contemporaneity to the novel. It remains an everlasting warning to the follies of living in our fantasies, and as Michelson writes,
These stories are all one: a bold young man sacrifices everything for a few moments of impossible glory, pays with his life for an instant of supreme privilege, for living out the wildest fantasy of youth. The young doomed heroes, too, are all one: they are all faceless, known to us only in the mad, fine dreams they share with everyone. (566)
These gloomy Gothic allusions function much like the traditional myth, an overdramatized version of events used to warn readers, as a premonitory vision of what awaits those who cannot see what lies at the end of the blinding light of the Roaring Twenties. Fitzgerald himself embodies the role of the all-knowing father figure of the myths he invokes, and it is up to the reader whether they will heed his warning or face the same fate as those before them.
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Penguin Books, 2000.
Lagomarsino, Andrea. “The Fisher King of West Egg: The Influence of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance on The Great Gatsby.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 44–66. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.12.1.0044.
Lee, Derek. “Dark Romantic: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Specters of Gothic Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 41, no. 4, 2018, pp. 125–42. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.41.4.09.
Michelson, Bruce. “The Myth of Gatsby.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 26, no. 4, 1980, pp. 563–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26280602.
Moses, Edwin. “Tragic Inevitability in The Great Gatsby.” CLA Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, 1977, pp. 51–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44329324.
Wrenn, Heike. “The Woman in Modernism.” University of South Carolina Upstate, ELF, 2010, pp. 9–13.