The Passing of Jay Gatsby: Class and Anti-Semitism in Fitzgerald's 1920s America
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1755-6333.2012.01077.x
ISSN1755-6333
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoPublished in 1925, six years after the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified and one year after the Immigration Act was signed into law, The Great Gatsby reveals the extent to which Prohibition and nativism respectively represent important subjects of literary discourse for the period. More importantly, a careful analysis of this novel reveals the extent to which these two movements are so closely connected. Central to this connection and to the narrative are Gatsby's professional identity and his even more ambiguous ethnic/religious identity, not to mention his class status and origins. While various critics over the past ten years have argued that this novel either approximates or represents a passing narrative, none have explicitly argued that Jay Gatsby is a Jewish American who has concealed his identity in order to transcend class, ethnic, and religious barriers. However, as one reconsiders The Great Gatsby in the convergent historical contexts of Prohibition, nativism, and American anti-Semitism, just such a claim can be made. Perhaps more importantly, accepting the possibility that Fitzgerald's protagonist is a passing Jew necessitates a significant reinterpretation of the work itself, as well as a reevaluation of its cultural and historical importance. For more than a decade, the influence of nativist ideology, rhetoric, and politics during the 1920s has been the subject of a great deal of literary discourse. Analyzing pivotal works by authors such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cather, and Faulkner, Walter Benn Michaels, in Our America: Nativism , Modernism , and Pluralism (1995), argues that this period in American literature is marked by questions centered around national identity, an identity that can be seen as a response to post-Reconstruction and to the nation's largest influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, whose ethnic otherness represented new challenges to a racially defined sense of nationality. Also shaping the political and literary discourse of the period are the rather prominent nativist and classisi ideologies of several pseudo-scholars. Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy and eugenicist Henry Herbert Goddard's Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence , both published in 1920, helped shape political views and, in the case of Fitzgerald at least, the literature of the period.1
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