Romantic Revisions in Novels from the Americas by Maxwell Lauren Rule;

Author:Maxwell, Lauren Rule;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Purdue University Press

Chapter Four

Keatsian Echoes and US Materialism in The Great Gatsby

In Blood Meridian McCarthy focuses on the violence associated with expanding the US westward, making the human and cultural costs brutally apparent. F. Scott Fitzgerald likewise considers the costs of US empire, but he is concerned primarily with socioeconomic and political commentary. Instead of revisiting the 1800s, Fitzgerald writes on the age he made famous, the Jazz Age, a time when the US was emerging as the world’s superpower. In his retrospective essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931), he examines this shift in power and discusses the symbol he uses in his fiction to critique the shift’s effects. Fitzgerald begins “Echoes of the Jazz Age” by “look[ing] back with nostalgia” on the era he named, chronicled in his fiction, and personified in his very public private life. He quickly shifts, however, toward a more ironic critical examination of why this period represents a turning point in US history, claiming that it marks the passage of “the style of man” to America:

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. A Stuffed Shirt, squirming blackmail in a lifelike way, sat upon the throne of the United States; a stylish young man hurried over to represent us to the throne of England. A world of girls yearned for the young Englishman; the old American groaned in his sleep as he waited to be poisoned by his wife, upon the advice of the female Rasputin who then made the ultimate decision in our national affairs. But such matters apart, we had things our way at last. With Americans ordering suits by the gross in London, the Bond Street tailors perforce agreed to moderate their cut to the American long-waisted figure and loose-fitting taste, something subtle passed to America, the style of man. During the Renaissance, Francis the First looked to Florence to trim his leg. Seventeenth-century England aped the court of France, and fifty years ago the German Guards officer bought his civilian clothes in London. Gentlemen’s clothes—symbol of “the power that man must hold that passes from race to race.”

We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun? (15)

Fitzgerald suggests that because gentlemen’s clothes historically symbolize “the power that man must hold that passes from race to race,” the US’s acquisition of “the style of man,” while seemingly “subtle” and superficial, signifies a much more meaningful transfer of global power from Great Britain to the US. Belonging to “the most powerful nation,” Americans now had the prerogative to decide “what was fashionable and what was fun,” but nonetheless they sought clothes produced by Bond Street tailors and continued to fashion themselves—in terms not only of garments but also of identity more broadly—after British models. Fitzgerald characterizes the US during the Jazz Age as a “whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure,” which with its newfound prosperity “attempt[ed] to adapt English customs to American conditions” (The Crack-Up 15).

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