Working Class In Great Gatsby Essay Research

Working Class In Great Gatsby Essay, Research Paper

The Working Class in Fitzgerald s “Great Gatsby”

The first half of the twentieth century saw dramatic changes in the social structure of the United States. In the nineteenth century, it was relatively unusual in many parts of the country to meet a Roman Catholic — similarly odd to meet someone whose native tongue was not English. Anyone who fit these descriptions was likely to be unabashedly working class. Suddenly, however, the country saw an enormous influx of people whose backgrounds were very unlike those of the founding fathers: Italians, Poles, Russians, Hispanics, Greeks, Slovaks. Some were Roman Catholic, some Orthodox, some Jewish. But their languages and their customs made them suspect to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had come to consider themselves indigenous to the continent, and, taken together with the freed blacks who were steadily making their way into the Northern cities, they reveal a different face from the one the wealthier side of America was used to.

We can see the degree to which this makes people like Tom Buchanan nervous from the context of his discussion of Goddard’s The Rise of the Colored Empires. According to Judie Newman and Douglas Tallack, this book did not really exist, but was intended by Fitzgerald to represent two real books of that era, T.L. Stoddard s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920), and Madison Grant s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) (Newman and Tallack, context.htm). These books were written to counter the “melting-pot” philosophy which so dominated liberal politics, particularly in the East. Tom says Goddard has written “a fine book . . and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It s all scientific stuff; it s been proved” (Fitzgerald, 19).

When he says “white”, we need to realize that he means something completely different than we do when we use that term. He might not, for example, consider Jews “white”, or Italians “white.” White to Tom means people who are just like him. He is therefore expressing fear — fear that those people who have so far been confined to the working class will move up from the ghettoes and displace him socially. Newman and Tallack add that “The phase of mass immigration from south-eastern Europe which had begin in the 1890s [was] superseded by the Great Migration of blacks from the South which had begun in 1914 with the war boom so that [Fitzgerald's] reference to ’short upper lips’ and ‘the yolks of their eyeballs’ does not necessarily signify an endemic racism but a historically specific fear. In the case of immigrants, the fear provoked Congress in 1921 and then again in 1924 to pass acts establishing quotas for immigrants. These acts hit would-be immigrants from southern and eastern Europe particularly hard. In the case of blacks the fear manifested itself in an increasing ghettoisation in Harlem, Chicago s South Side and other urban areas as half a million blacks moved north between 1914 and 1919″ (Newman and Tallack, context.htm).

Isn’t it ironic, then, that Tom’s “got some woman in New York”, whom herself is of the working class. Not really, because Tom sees a man’s sexual relationship with a woman as being one of dominance and submission — just like one’s relationship with one’s butler. Tom would not have a problem with having a black man as his butler, because he would unquestionably be in charge. Similarly, Tom doesn’t have a problem having an unquestionably socially-inferior woman as his mistress, because there is no confusion about who’s running this situation.

Just as Tom’s choice of books indicates that he fears “uppity” minorities, his choice of mistresses shows that he fears “uppity” women. Fitzgerald says of Tom that “There was something pathetic in his concentration [on the topic of the racist book] as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more” (Fitzgerald,17). In other words, Tom used to simply take for granted that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were superior to everyone else, and he also assumed everyone else knew it too. But now it seems to be something he has to prove. It’s not that he doubts himself or his own worth; it’s more that he fears being required to prove the obvious.

On the ethnic issue, there is no doubt that Fitzgerald is mocking Tom’s xenophobia. But on the issue of the working class, Fitzgerald almost seems on his side. It is significant that Myrtle Wilson’s husband is not an Italian or a Pole; his name is as English as Jordan Baker’s. But he is nonetheless a member of a class which by the 1920s was being increasingly monopolized by minorities — a class whose encroachment men like Wilson fear.

There is no indication, at any point in the novel, that George B. Wilson could have done anything whatsoever to vault himself out of the working class. His place is in the Valley of Ashes, his characteristic color is gray; he therefore stands in opposition to the bright, colorful people who populate Gatsby’s world. His general attitudes, right up until the moment when he sets out to avenge Myrtle’s death, seem to be subservience and desperation. Fitzgerald never shows us anything joyful, anything extraordinary, coming out of the Valley of Ashes; it is a metaphor for spiritual death, and Wilson is trapped there because h