To what extent and to what ends does the American novel of the 1920s investigate opportunities for mobility? Answered with reference to Passing by Nella Larsen and The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald.
The concept of ‘The American Dream’ is arguably inextricably intertwined with the idea of upwards social mobility. This essay will investigate the extent to which The Great Gatsby (1926) and Passing (1929) are a means of interrogating the boundaries and taboos of social movement in 1920s America. Despite the fact that they are both focussed on a very small socio-economic class, the characters and writing techniques in each nonetheless offer the chance to explore three broad and interconnected areas of social mobility: economic, class and racial. The exploration of these three areas will lead me to conclude that both novels explore the possibilities of mobility to the end of examining nationhood and identity.
In the 1920s the American economy boomed, increasing by 42%. The financial innovations and shifts in the market, combined with a lagging European market in the wake of the First World War, meant that America was fast becoming an economic world superpower (Amadeo). As this occurred, the mass manufacturing of consumer goods began to shape the landscape of American life on both an individual and collective basis (Amadeo). It is against this setting of economic growth and possibility that both The Great Gatsby and Passing are set.
Through his parties, Gatsby shows that, monetarily speaking, he can keep up with the very wealthiest members of the American upper class in what commodities he can purchase. The idea of money is so infused into these scenes that it stretches right into the language which Nick uses to describe ‘the whisperings and the champagne and the stars’, the ‘turkeys bewitched to a dark gold’, the ‘yellow cocktail music’ (28). Fitzgerald’s synesthetic flare infuses the party’s – already excessive – exhibition of wealth with a gold tinted hue. It is interesting then that a novel which seems to be so overtly focussed on the possibility of economic ascension in the ‘Land of Opportunity’ seems to leave a lasting impression of the inhospitable nature and apparent unsustainability of a rise as meteoric as Gatsby’s.
The conspicuous consumption of Gatsby’s hosting acts, for the observers of Gatsby’s life, as ‘an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay’ (Veblen 8). In Gatsby’s dream, this equates to his impression that his economic rise has put him in the position in which he is able to ‘“ [...] fix everything just the way it was before,”’ (Fitzgerald 69), youth, beauty, and most importantly his possession of Daisy. As the geography of the novel shows, however, Gatsby’s social mobility is limited; he is only able to rise so far, and only economically speaking.
The separation between East and West Egg is distinctly one of class. It is a distinction noted keenly by the narrator Nick Carraway, of the Carraway clan, cousin of Daisy Buchanan, and therefore of the Buchanan’s class, if not their economic bracket. When Nick lists all of the people who attended Gatsby’s parties that summer, he notes not only who these people are, but also where they came from on Long Island: ‘From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen who I knew at Yale, [...]’ (Fitzgerald 40) and ‘From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys [...] all connected to the movies in one way or another.’ (Fitzgerald 40). The point he makes is very clear: East Egg is old money, privately educated, a leisure class of the sort that Veblen discusses, West Egg the land of new wealth, and more significantly, uncertain background. The connection to Hollywood which is made here adds an extra implication of inauthenticity which is revealed at the second description of a party that Fitzgerald offers the readers - the party that Daisy and Tom attend.
Here at this party, just as overtly lavish as the first, Nick’s narration lacks the sense of awe found in the description of the first party and instead seems to inherit Daisy and Tom’s distaste for an overt display of wealth. As he claims: ‘She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village – ’ (Fitzgerald 68). The limits of this economic aspiration and gain are exposed by the very existence of Daisy and Tom’s relationship. The fact is that Daisy can’t and won’t leave the aristocracy of her upbringing for Gatsby, ‘Tom, having originally "bought" Daisy with the gift of a $350,000 necklace, deploys brutality to keep her [...]. Though Gatsby does not know it, no matter how great his acquisitive spirits as a bootlegger, the acquisition of Daisy is taboo.’ (Canterbury 301). Despite Gatsby’s economic success - although the origins of his money is suspect to say the least - there are some things which Gatsby’s lack of social ‘credit’ prevent him from having access to. Although he may not be entirely aware of it, Gatsby wants Daisy for the very reason he cannot have her, because ‘She was the first “nice” girl [Gatsby] had ever known’ (Fitzgerald 91) and therefore ‘a member of the established American aristocracy of wealth’ (Canterbury 300). This seems to support the reading of the novel which suggests that Gatbsy’s downfall lies in his social naiveté, his belief that money to match the girl whose voice was ‘full of money’ (Fitzgerald 75) will allow him limitless opportunity. In contrast, Nick infuses the novel with an inherent awareness of, and – as the framing technique allows – scepticism for the subtler upper class divisions which underpinned 1920s east coast society.
Passing enters this conversation from a different angle. Both novels are equally drenched in the implications of both class and race and it is these qualities which seem to inherently act in opposition to the possibility of economic mobility. In the opening scene on Passing ‘Larsen reveals that economic security is a critical concern in the lives of these middle-class black women.’ (Van Thompsen 79). In contrast to the way in which class, and as I will discuss, race, emerge from the question of economy in the Great Gatsby, it is through the discussion of race that the conversation of money arises in Passing. When asked by Clare if she had ever thought of trying to ‘pass’ as white ‘Irene answered promptly: “No. Why should I?” [...] “You see Clare I have everything I want. Except, perhaps, a little more money.” (Larsen 23). Of course, the irony of a statement such as this as Irene sits safe in the Drayton, far above the ‘scorching cement’ and ‘sweating bodies’ (Larsen 7) of the masses below, is that she is passing for white – albeit temporarily – in that moment. Irene’s self-perception aside, this moment illustrates that in American society at this time, economic mobility was inextricably bound to visual perception, to the perception of class and visibility of race.
A significant scene investigating this in Passing is what Van Thompson has labelled the ‘Masquerade Tea Party’. Occurring at the end of part one of the novel, it is here that Irene is faced with not only Clare and Gertrude, two people she used to know who have married white men, but also Clare’s husband Jack, a ranting racist. In this setting, Irene is the only one of the trio who has married a black man, had a family with him, and remains in the black bourgeoise society into which she was born. Clare and Gertrudes marriages, their racial mobility, relies - to a greater or lesser extent in each circumstance - on their ‘invisible blackness’ (Moynihan 37). When John Bellew intrudes upon the already uncomfortable scene and calls his wife ‘Nig [sic]’ (Larsen 34) because her skin colour keeps ‘gettin’ darker and darker’ (Larsen 35) he makes a joke which is aimed at Clare but actually falls ironically onto himself. John’s certainty in Clare’s racial heritage, in combination with Clare’s (tres)passing across sharply defined racial boundaries, shows that the ‘epistemology of the concept of "race"’ (Ginsberg 5-6) is not as certain a binary as John would like to imagine. By showing Clare’s mobility across these binary oppositions Larsen uses the mode of the novel to question the foundations which these race bound social hierarchies are built upon and richly complicates these dichotomies (Ginsberg 11).
That being said, the only person in the room who is truly anxious about the breaking of these binaries by Clare, is Irene. Arguably, Irene is discomforted by the sense that – via her use of the racial masquerade – Clare has ‘refused her true station in the social hierarchy [...] Clare, formerly a janitor’s daughter, has achieved a class status higher than Irene’s own.’ (Askew 311-12). When Nick is taken to Myrtle’s apartment in The Great Gatsby – a top floor apartment in a slice-of-cake building, in slightly the wrong part of the city – he notes that ‘The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles.’ (Fitzgerald 22). This seems to reference the threat of Myrtle’s (and Clare’s) ambition. The way in which Nick notes these scenes at Versailles which fill her living room, implies that Myrtle’s ambition to join aristocratic wealth could in turn break the very social boundaries which maintain it. Irene’s fear and insecurity is for this very thing – the breaking down of clear cut social lines in race, class and economics, as well as arguably gender and sexuality – that the narrative of the novel seems to reveal. If as Caughie suggests ‘Irene’s domestic milieu is clearly a stage set for her performance of class’ (527) then Clare’s movement in and around it works to display ‘the ultimate manipulability of the socio-symbolic order,’ (Askew 313). From the way in which the narrative falls apart within its tight three part structure, through to small moments where Irene almost assures herself of her security of her situation despite its obvious collapse around her, there remains a psychological ambiguity underpinning the novel.
Irene’s anxiety around mobility is actually perhaps best mirrored by Tom more than any other character in the Great Gatsby. At the hotel in Manhatten where Tom confronts Gatsby and Daisy about their affair the thing that he objects to, but cannot seem to articulate, is that Gatsby might not be white enough for him. In the most heated moment of conflict in the novel Tom states:
“I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea you can count me out … Nowadays people begin to throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”
Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.
“We’re all white here,” murmured Jordan.
(Fitzgerald 81)
The statement ‘Mr. Nobody from Nowhere’ could in one reading imply that it is Gatsby’s lower class upbringing Tom takes issue with. However, the statements which follow reveal that Tom’s greatest fear is not - like Veblen suggests, and Irene fears - the egality of the economic classes, but instead the perceived threat of declining racial ‘purity.’ This is a fear which he reveals early on in the dinner party which Nick attends in chapter one, but it is only in the revelation of both Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship, and Gatsby’s past that Tom’s ‘fear’ opens into a genuine possibility. The implicit suggestion of this passage is that Gatsby for whatever reason - whether that be a jewish, or african-american heritage - is not white enough in Tom Buchanan’s mind to be associating with his wife. But by this point in the novel the border has been crossed and those binaries are disintegrating and Tom is left ‘alone on the last boundary of civilization.’
At the end of Passing, Irene assures herself and her spinning narrative: ‘For she would not go to Brazil. She belonged in this land of rising towers. She was an American. She grew up from this soil, and she would not be uprooted. Not even because of Clare Kendry or a hundred Clare Kendrys’ (Larsen 107). This small passage seems to hint at something which Gatsby captures as well. It brings to the forefront the question of nationality, of what it means to be American. To be American for Irene, for Tom, for Daisy to some extent for Mr Wilson – contrary to the image of the American Dream – is to be adherent to the social structures which condemn and place taboos in the way of social mobility. Despite this, both novels seem to touch upon the deeply performative nature of such boundaries. This is illustrated early in Gatsby by way in which Nick is so quickly disillusioned with the Buchanan’s picture perfect life which falls apart behind the scenes, as he says driving away from dinner at theirs: ‘Their interest touched me and made them less remotely rich – nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away’ (Fitzgerald 18) suggests that the imperfections of these structures are best not protected. As Van Thompson notes of the effect of boundary crossing in Passing ‘Their discourses of anxiety reveal just this very slippage and subjective fragmentation of their identities’ (93). This suggests that the way in which both novels resist clear readings around socially structured binaries allows for an ambiguity which simultaneously questions the necessity for, and affirms the presence of, boundaries between class and race, particularly in the name of national identity.
Overall The Great Gatsby and Passing both layer murky ideas of race, class, economics and further binarised categories in a way that resists easy reading and demands the reader to question the circumstances of a nation built upon them. This is best summarised by Nick’s assessment of Gatsby’s fate from the beginning of The Great Gatsby: ‘No – Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short winded elations of men.’ (Fitzgerald 7-8). Despite Gatsby’s flaws, Nick seems to note here that it is not Gatsby that is the problem, nor is it Clare. Their transgressive actions are threatening to convention and the maintenance of the status quo, and it is for that reason that at the end of each novel they have to die. The discussion about these characters' movements through society has laid the groundwork and created the opportunity for novels such as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and The Invisible Man (1952) to similarly question what it means to be American, later in the 20th century.
Works Cited:
Amadeo, Kimberly. “The Economy in the 1920s and What Caused the Great Depression.” The Balance, www.thebalancemoney.com/roaring-twenties-4060511#:~:text=The%201920s%20is%20the%20decade,of%20being%20a%20global%20power.
Canterbery, E. Ray. “Thorstein Veblen and ‘The Great Gatsby.’” Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 33, no. 2, 1999, pp. 297–304.
Caughie, P. L. "The best people": The making of the black bourgeoisie in writings of the negro renaissance. Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 20, no. 3, 2013. Pp. 519-537.
Fitzgerald, F. S., The Great Gatsby. Amazon. 2021.
Ginsberg, E.K. “Introduction: The Politics of Passing,” Passing and the Fictions of Identity, 2020. pp. 1–18.
Larsen, Nella. Passing. Penguin Random House. 2020.
Van Thompson, Carlyle. “ ‘Makin a Way Outta No Way’: The Dangerous Business of Racial Masquerade in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” Passing. Ed. John L. Jackson, Jr., and Martha S. Jones. Spec. issue of Women & Performance 15.1, 2005. pp. 79-104.
Veblen, Thorstein. “Conscious Consumption” The Theory of the Leisure Class. 2008. Pp. 1-14
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