F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby and The Roaring Twenties

1
F Scott FitzgeraldThe Great Gatsbyand The
Roaring Twenties

• American Studies
• Mr. Harmon
• Mr. Venezia

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1920-1929 Changing Times
The 1920s were a time of unprecedented social
and technological change in so many areas
An economy stimulated by WW1 fueled a massive
economic boom.
3
General Business Conditions

• Stable prices
• High employment
• Number of firms increased annually until 1929
• Steady failure rate
• Prime interest rate averaged less than 5

4
Income Distribution

• Equalizing effect of income tax during the war
  but
• 1922 Top 1 held 32 of nations wealth
• 1929 Top 1 held 38 of nations wealth
• The rich get rich and the poor get children

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The Roaring Twenties
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!
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Jazzy Sounds

• Prohibition brought many jazz musicians north
  from New Orleans to Chicago and New York
• Joe King Oliver was one of the best
• Jazz became the soundtrack of rebellion for a
  younger generation

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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.

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Jazzy Talk -Twenties Slang
Gee I wish a torpedo would bump off this flat tire

• All Wet - wrong
• Bees 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

Dumb Dora
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Music in Gatsby

• Yellow cocktail music of Gatsbys parties
• This was Jazz and Ragtime
• Louis Armstrong,
• Duke Ellington
• King Oliver

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Symphonic Jazz and Gatsby

• George Gershwin wrote both classical and popular
  music
• He was the first composer to combine jazz and
  classical music with Rhapsody in Blue in1924
• Was this Vladimir Tostoffs Jazz History of the
  World?

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Lifestyles and fashions of the 1920s

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

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Womens Rights Movement

• Suffrage - the right to vote
• Nineteenth Amendment (1920)
• Changing attitudes and fashions help bring about
  the new woman e.g. Jordan Baker

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The Flapperby Dorothy Parker

• The playful flapper here we see,
• The fairest of the fair.
• Shes 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

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Prohibition

• The Volstead Act
• 18th Amendment (1919)
• Bootleggers
• Sold, bought, consumed alcohol.
• Gangsters

Al Capone and a gonnection
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Media and Technology

• Automobilisation
• the car is available to many
• from courting to dating
• Mass Media
• Magazines and literacy
• Readers Digest
• Time
• Radios and advertising
• New forms of narrative
• Movie - talkies e.g. The Jazz Singer

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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 1920s.
• Fitzgerald was also influenced by Modernist
  theories about art.

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F Scott Fitzgerald

• Descendent from prominent American stock
• Attended Princeton but left without graduating
• Missed WWI (just)
• Met Zelda but couldnt 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

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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 1960s

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The Great Gatsby

• Most popular classic in Modern American fiction
• Romanticism/Realism
• Nick Carroway
• Jay Gatsby
• The American Dream
• Modernism
• Universal Themes

• Themes
• Heroism
• Search for Identity
• Self-Creation
• Regionalism (East vs West)
• Corruption vs. Purity
• Idealization of Romantic love
• Violence
• Carpe diem
• Class and Economic Division

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Modernism in the Twenties
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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
• (Gatsbys car)
• new (replaceable) fashions
• mass entertainment
• Using new means of Representation
• the development of cinema,
• the mass media and advertising

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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

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Modernism and Romanticism

• Nick Gatsby

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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?

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The Great Gatsby Is it a period piece, or does
the novel step outside its time and address
universal themes?