The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925. The reviews were lacklustre, and so were sales, failing to reach the acclaim of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s previous two novels. Then high school English teachers got their hands on it and . . . the rest is history.
I’ve taught Gatsby several times, each time with some reluctance. I’m subjecting students to a hoary old chestnut that they will have encountered first as a film, or through countless pop culture references. There are more contemporary and diverse texts that I’d like them to read. But Gatsby is accessible, inexpensive, and relatively short, and the plot moves briskly. Class members can enjoy the modern film adaptations as an adjunct to reading. So Gatsby is fun to teach, and students are responsive.
Lots of books I prefer to analyze have not encountered nearly as positive a classroom reception. Some have fallen so flat that the pleasure of the text was diminished for me. This is probably about the Coles Notes quality of introductory classes. Symbolism, imagery, that green light at the end of the dock! I weave in critical race theory and play jazz for students when we read Gatsby, and we talk about suffrage and Prohibition, but there’s a prefab quality to a lot of the discourse about the novel. It’s hard to shift out of that, especially when students have been taught literary analysis as spot-the-metaphor.
I’ve typically taught the novel in a Grade 12-equivalent course where all class members are returning/nontraditional, or what we once called “mature” students. Many of them are reluctant readers, who may have grown up with undiagnosed learning disabilities. Or their current food and housing insecurity is far more pressing than exposure to fiction. A reminder, here, that teaching in a college like mine means our students encounter multiple obstacles to getting through the day. Attending class is sometimes subordinated to last-minute shifts that pay the rent. Our colleges serve vital, life-saving needs in Canada, and they’re being abandoned by politicians and policymakers as we spiral into budget crises.
Oddly, in this context of greater need and vulnerability, The Great Gatsby connects to students. It is “relatable”, to use the lamentable but now accepted jargon. Because it’s about striving. And my Access students understand, to their core, what it means to want and not have. This is my simplistic explanation for a phenomenon that surprises me with each iteration. The fierce pleasure, and intense identification, that some class members manifest when we read this book.
But today I’m thinking about Gatsby as noir (avant la lettre). It has tough guys and corruption, social class conflict and sexual frissons. People want things, desperately, and die from wanting. The wonderful Lisa Levy, a terrific literary critic, has given this comparison careful attention.
“The incursion of noir themes into the book makes contemporaneous sense: Dashiell Hammett published The Maltese Falcon only five years later in 1930, and the magazines like Black Mask where many noir writers got their starts were already extant. Though the heyday of American noir was in the economically depressed 1930s and the war-ridden 1940s (which is also when the term noir was coined), Fitzgerald presciently wove many noir elements into the book that would be his greatest success. A simple definition of noir holds that the hero is morally compromised and haunted by the past–that’s the book’s protagonist, Jay Gatsby, without question–and that crime will be an element of the story. That’s Gatsby too. Gatsby also works with novelist Laura Lippman’s wonderful summation of noir, a world where ‘dreamers become schemers.’ Jay Gatsby, like his creator, is both dreamer and schemer. Fitzgerald’s writing might be soft-scrambled rather than hard-boiled, but the argument for a reading of Gatsby as noir is complex and compelling.”
Crimes pile up in Gatsby. He can’t have earned his entire fortune honestly, that quickly, and the timeline is a puzzle. He’s a compulsive liar, who’s sometimes caught up in a truth. He consorts with unsavoury characters, and there we have some unsavoury antisemitic stereotypes from Fitzgerald. All in service to his vision of winning Daisy away from her racist, insensitive lug of a rich husband, Tom. (With historical revisionism now accelerating across the border, will English teachers be coached to teach The Great Gatsby with a gentler view of Tom’s reading habits and worldview? His white supremacist mindset is having a moment. Shuddering.)
And the crimes–Gatsby is murdered, but it’s no mystery. The murder is prompted by previous violence; Tom’s working-class mistress dies in a vehicular homicide, with Daisy driving Gatsby’s car. Re: Tom’s relationship to Myrtle, it’s very much worth reading Sarah Churchwell’s Careless People, not to be confused with a more recent non-fiction text by the same title. The reference is to Tom and Daisy, of course. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
I disagree with The Guardian about the significance of Churchwell’s analysis of a contemporaneous murder case, which might have helped inspire Gatsby. Personally, I found this segment of her book fascinating. The deaths of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills in 1922 became a cause célèbre: “Hall had been a prominent Episcopal minister and the husband of a blue-blooded wallpaper heiress with family ties to Johnson & Johnson; Mills, a working-class homemaker, was a soprano in the choir at his church–and the wife of the parish sexton.”
They were both shot, and her throat was cut, but it was the staging of the scene that guaranteed media attention. “Someone had arranged the corpses beneath a crab-apple tree in a pose suggesting intimacy, then further guaranteed a scandal by placing the victims’ love letters between their bodies.” After a brief and botched investigation, charges were not successfully pursued against the most obvious suspects, Hall’s widow and several of her close male relatives.
A few years later, the case was revived amid new tabloid interest. Frances Hall, the widow, went on trial in the fall of 1926 with her two brothers and her cousin. They were ultimately acquitted. And they sued William Randolph Hearst’s fledgling newspaper, which had stirred up curiosity again, and whose sensationalized claims seemed to feed the testimony of some witnesses. Vanity Fair describes the investigation, trial and aftermath as “Gatsbian.”
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