F Scott FitzgeraldThe Great Gatsby

and The Roaring TwentiesEnglish IILiterature

1920-1929: Changing Times

Literature Music

Media / Technology Women’s Rights

Prohibition Lifestyles

An economy stimulated by WW1 fueled a massive economic boom.

The 1920’s were a time of unprecedented social and technological change in so many areas:

General Business Conditions

• Stable prices• High employment

• The wealth of the 1920s however, belies careless disregard for responsible spending (and the importance of hard work and perseverence) and for moral principles.

• “The Party has to End”: lavish spending and disregard for family and more traditional values (such as fidelity to one’s spouse) contributed to economic collapse and a decline in national morale.

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!

The Roaring Twenties

Jazzy Sounds

• Prohibition brought many jazz musicians north from New Orleans to Chicago and New York

• 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.

Jazzy Talk -Twenties Slang

• All Wet - wrong• Bee’s Knees - a superb person• Big Cheese -an important

person• Bump Off - to murder• Dumb Dora - a stupid girl• Flat Tire - a dull, boring person• Gam - a girls leg• Hooch - bootleg liquor• Hoofer - chorus girl• Torpedo - a hired gunman

Gee I wish a torpedo would bump off this flat tire

Dumb Dora

Music in Gatsby

• Gatsby’s music during the parties is decribed as the “yellow cocktail music”

• This was Jazz and Ragtime– Louis Armstrong, – Duke Ellington

King Oliver

Lifestyles and fashions of the 1920s

• No more Victorian Values• Flappers• Collegiate Students• Independent women• Gaiety• Increasing wealth• Social mobility• Alcohol consumption

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

The Flapperby Dorothy Parker

The playful flapper here we see,

The fairest of the fair.

She’s not what Grandma used to be,--

You might say, au contraire.

Her girlish ways may make a stir,

Her manners cause a scene

But there is no more harm in her

Than in a submarine.

She nightly knocks for many a goal

The usual dancing men.

Her speed is great, but her control

Is something else again

All spotlights focus on her pranks.

All tongues her prowess herald

For which she well may render thanks

To God and Scott Fitzgerald.

Her golden rule is plain enough--

Just get them young and treat them rough

Prohibition

• The Volstead Act

• 18th Amendment (1919)

• Bootleggers– Sold, bought,

consumed alcohol.

– Gangsters Al Capone and a ‘gonnection’

Prohibition Creates Bootlegging Industry

• Crime increased because people rebelled

against laws prohibiting alcohol.

● Numerous “speak- easies”—nightclubs where alcoholic

drinks were sold—cropped

up.

• Defiance of the Prohibition Act, women gaining the right to vote, relaxing of social mores, the rise in organized crime, the influence of Hollywood, advertising, and the fashion industries, all contributed to the advent of the Roaring 20s—a time of reckless spending, get-rich-quick schemes and an abandonment of the noble ideals of hard and honest work.

Media and Technology• Automobilisation

– 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

• Popular Sports

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

• A daughter, Scotty• 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 aged 45• Zelda perished in a mental hospital fire in 1948• Only became a “literary great” in the 1960’s

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.

Modernism in the Twenties

• East Egg (where the old money families live) and West Egg, Long Island (where the nouveau riche [newly rich] reside.

• The Valley of Ashes (Industrial section): the depression and grime symbolize

the wealthy’s exploitation of the working class. Myrtle Wilson feels trapped in the “ash heap.”

•The nouveau riche (new rich) emerged: a generation of wealthy individuals who did not inherit their social and financial status, but who became suddenly well-off due to lucrative business ventures (some were illegal). “The American Dream” was attainable without “hard work” or “perseverance.”

The Modernist Era• Rejection of Romanticism and the

advent of moral uncertainty– the catastrophe of World War I– (the wasteland and valley of ashes)

• Embracing the new i.e. mechanization and industrialisation– (Gatsby’s car)– 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”

Modernism and RomanticismNick Gatsby

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?