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Example research essay topic: F Scott Fitzgerald Scott Fitzgeralds - 3,177 words

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From the Dream to the Womb: Visionary Impulse and Political Ambivalence in The Great Gatsby It seems hard to believe in our period, when a three-decade lurch to the political Right has anathematized the word, but F. Scott Fitzgerald once, rather fashionably, believed himself to be a socialist. Some years before, he had also, less fashionably, tried hard to think himself a Catholic. While one hardly associates the characteristic setting of Fitzgeralds novels, his chosen kingdom of the sybaritic fabulous, with either proletarian solidarity or priestly devotions, it will be the argument of this essay that a tension between Left and religiose perspectives structures the very heart of the vision of The Great Gatsby. For while Gatsby offers a detailed social picture of the stresses of an advanced capitalist culture in the early 1920 s, it simultaneously encodes its American experience, at key structural moments, within the mitigating precepts of a mystic Western dualism. Attempting both a sustained close reading of the novel, and the relocation of that reading within wider philosophic and political contexts, this essay will therefore consider the impact of a broad mystical strain of Western thought upon Fitzgeralds political analysis.

For while it is a commonplace that Fitzgerald was fascinated, throughout his life, with what is variously conceived as the ideal, the Dream, inspiration, the visionary, or Desire, a tradition with which this essay opens, the political uses of the ideal have largely escaped notice. Fitzgeralds excitably visionary sensibility, nourished in high school years by Catholic mysticism, fashioned him into a superbly perceptive critic of the appropriation of human need of the ideal by developments in American capitalism in the 1920 s. In response to economic crisis in the early years of this decade, the national advertising media developed and promoted a new cult of glamour, seeking through its allure to create a mass consumer market and revivify the foundering work ethic. Fitzgeralds entrancement by the suggestive power of beauty sensitized him both to the spell and the mendacity of that mass promise: to the cruel contradiction between the fostered impulse of ecstatic outreach and the terminal drudgery in which the many were entrapped, a drudgery ideologically occluded by the national imagery of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty allotted the glamorous few. It sensitized him, too, to the crunch choice, in a polarized yet paralyzed legitimate economy, between poverty and crime. But if at one level the novel works to demystify North American society in the Roaring Twenties, at another it redeploys the ideal to absolve the system from its inequities, aligning the failure of economic and cultural aspiration with a tradition of high metaphysical defeatism.

The ancient creed of the unattainability of the Dream thus functions in theological exculpation of a social formation in crisis, conferring apotheosis on pessimistic quietism. Fitzgeralds re mystification of social values, and the ambivalent, uneasy conservatism that asserts itself as the novels ultimate position, are confirmed, finally, in Gatsby's construction of gender relations and of the lower classes. Woman, in Gatsby, is the exquisite vehicle of solipsistic disengagement from a social order in crisis: not only at the obvious level of Romantic transcendentalism but as offering, on a subliminal plane, through a submerged and recurrent maternal imagery of sanctuarizing womb and suckling breast, a yearning for regressive, infantilizing retreat from the relentless pressures of competition. Conversely, the spectral underclass, simultaneously invisible and obtrusive, marginalized and central, wreaks the novels horrific climax, emerging as the apocalyptic assassin of that ideologically saturated ideal order.

In summary, we shall find that, in a sterile dialectic of demystification and prompt re mystifying, the Marxian critical perception so powerful in The Great Gatsby, rather than generating progressive impulse, becomes, by anxious turns, metaphysically annulled, sexually eschewed in regressive libido, and climactically demonized in proletarian displacement. It is commonly acknowledged that at the heart of the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald there runs a poetry of desire, an unshakable process of quest set in motion by beauty. The youthful reveries of Gatsby, for instance, effect perhaps what Greek philosophy called a metanoia or conversion of vision to a further dimension of truth or destiny: a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing (100). Ineluctably compelled by visitations of a transfiguring beauty, oriented round a field of transcendence, the novelist who in the 1920 s styled himself the trumpeter of the Jazz Age would in an earlier age have articulated his ravishing disturbances in the discourse and dyad of a mystic. Listening to the tuning fork struck upon a star, Fitzgerald stands squarely in an ancient and Western tradition of inescapably frustrate enchantment.

Only I discern / Infinite passion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn, wrote Browning; and these lucid terms of Romantic formulation recapitulate a metaphysical tradition common to two millennia of idealist aesthetics. In this tradition, the cravings set in motion by inspiration reach upward towards an ideality ontologically far removed in splendor from the quotidian material realm, which the ideal haunts nonetheless with a kind of incalculable and aesthetic gravitational pull. The ecstatic outreach this inspires may be interpreted as towards the immaterial world of First Forms (Plato) or an Aristotelian Unmoved Mover that calls like a lover (king hos ero menon); it may be towards a transcendent Christian Creator, upon whose natural forms play, in the discourse of Christian Platonism, dazzling beams or enargeiai that draw back the contemplative observer into their divine source; or it may be that the rates draws poets into a pantheistic Romantic world-spirit, into a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfered. However construed, structural to the entire tradition is a shining higher order by which mortals mired in a corrupt, contingent realm become, in Fitzgeralds language, for a transitory enchanted moment compelled into an aesthetic contemplation (Gatsby 182), and gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder (112). Fitzgerald, then, and his Gatsby experience intimations of what was once conceived as the beatific. Daisy, as the inexpressible exquisite disclosing the radiant higher kingdom (here, indefeasible wealth), necessarily remains descriptively discarnate, in contrast to the sexually profiled Jordan and Myrtle (11, 25).

Daisy gleams like silver, like the silver pepper of the stars, exists as a voice, a singing compulsion, an incarnation, educing the marriage of unutterable visions to her perishable breath (150, 21, 9, 112). But Daisy is, precisely, perishable: tragically inadequate to the inspiration she kindles. For Fitzgerald, the terms the world affords for the instantiation of ideality are inadequate; yet the ideal remains indefinable in terms of any other order, any specifiable transcendent origin. Fitzgerald thus diverges from the classic Western dualism that offers a transcendent situating of inspiration: for him, it has neither ground nor viable instantiation.

Displaced and demystified by contemporary secular cynicism, Fitzgeralds relation to the ideal is precisely Nicks: Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb mans, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was un communicable forever. (112) The traditional sacramental instinct endures, internalized yet alien, an elevated profundity fast fading into unintelligibility. As a liminal reflex persisting within modern Americas metaphysical amnesia, its wording proves illegible to a society whose telos is the vulgarity of private profit. If beauty lacks a transcendent ground, personality's springs become problematic, impossible of final judgment: there may, reflects Nick, or there may not be more to the lifestyle of romantic grace and aspiration than an unbroken series of successful gestures; and conduct may ultimately be founded on the hard rock or wet marshes (2).

Given the disappearance of an Absolute, the emotional triad on which Gatsby is built is decisively distinct from that of Christianity and Platonism. In the latter, awakened desire, colliding with a resistant phenomenal world, can yet remain assured of some ultimate translation to immutable and perfect transcendence. But in Fitzgeralds secular narratives of desire, the impetus of lyric promise is decisively disintegrated by the worlds crude bathos and despoliation; and the Dream lacks sanctuary beyond the sphere that resists it. Lyricism, proceeding thus to frustration, must always revert to nostalgia, to elegy: Cant repeat the past? ... Why of course you can! (111). In the tragic chiming of these three tones lyric promise, its failure, elegy is composed all Fitzgeralds work.

In Gatsby they are found from the outset in the opening meditation, where romantic readiness issues only in a foul dust [that] floated in the wake of his dreams, but where, in retrospect, [o]nly [dead] Gatsby was exempt from my reaction; and they form a pattern pursued to the final page, where the green light and orgiastic future turn out year by year [to] recede before us, our boats being borne back ceaselessly into the past, yet where the mind consolingly retrieves from a half-enchanted past the Dutch sailors and their magnitude of wonder. The triad structures, too, the essential outline of the narrative and the mood-modulation of the parties. Those parties which open with blue gardens, where men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars (39), but falter into violence, drunken stupor, screaming wives, and cars in the ditch, close upon the glance backward to Gatsby alone on his lighted porch bidding courteous farewell. Missing its final triumphant harmonic, the beat of a sacramental rhythm becomes the pulsing headache of private tragedy; Fitzgerald the mystic turns nostalgic drunk. As this brutally condensed outline suggests, Gatsby, on one crucial plane, is a religious, almost a crypto-theological narrative, displaced thoroughly and with explicit, ironic inadequacy into the secular discourse of a sharply portrayed social formation.

And within this particular society, the unutterable visions of this son of God (112, 99) may no longer figure and excite an assimilation to the universal, a passage from epiphany to serene contemptu's mundi. They are socially conditioned, on the contrary, to kindle a strife for merely personal and financial achievement, to seek a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty (99). I have emphasized this religious dimension at length because I think it vitally important to appreciate the power, centrality, and dignity of this rapturous pull toward the ideal its colossal vitality, as Fitzgerald puts it: no amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart (97) in order to understand both Fitzgerald and ourselves. The Platonic and medieval worlds though doubtless deluded in their metaphysics, which they moreover betrayed in their social practice could affirm that, in some bedrock ontological sense, the real was the radiant and the radiant was the real. The substance of joyous and visionary beauty was not the delusion of a youthful libido or abnormal temperament but rather possessed the stature of noesis: it was, that is to say, the momentary experience of authentic insight into the ultimate nature of reality as ineffably glorious. Against this, we have the society of Daisy and Tom, whose crabbed credo is Ive been everywhere and seen everything and done everything...

Sophisticated God, Im sophisticated! (18). Fitzgeralds novel thus stands as a locus classic of the affective impoverishment, the crippled cynical sensibility, of the twentieth-century West, which has shriveled and discredited the ideal, peripheralizing the human faculty of wonder to the misfit status of the merely aesthetic. At the age of twenty-three, however, Fitzgerald had written to a Catholic friend: I can quite sympathize with your desire to be a Carthusian... [I am] nearly sure that I will become a priest (quoted in Bruccoli 109 - 10). The Catholicism of his upbringing, in which Monsignor Fay had confirmed him as a teenager, was subjected to gnawing doubt in his Princeton years and finally rejected the year after leaving: the sublime cravings of Catholic mysticism had been routed by one for the freshly encountered Zelda; but a form of religious sensibility never left him. Indeed three stories (The Ordeal, Benediction, and that section on the early life of Gatsby which was to become excised from the novel and form an independent story, Absolution) center on the pain, fervor and self-consecration of visionary religious experience. Fitzgerald had been attracted to Catholicism in the first place by the way that Fay had revealed in the church a dazzling, golden thing, and by the fact that Fay loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate.

He was drawn in Fay, as in Gatsby, to the faith shining through all the versatility and intellect (Bruccoli 40 - 41). Theres that gift of faith that we have, you and I, Fay had told him, that carries us past the hard spots (quoted in Allen 44). Like the young Gatsby in Absolution, Fitzgerald outgrew Catholicism but not his sense of the ideal, which he relocated in the City of the World: in a mysterious something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God (Fitzgerald, Absolution 150). It was, one might comment, a worthy translation, for the great city, at least in one of its aspects, summons the immense poetry of the possibilities of the future, imaging transformation, joy, prosperity and beauty. Musing on the great towering cities, Raymond Williams reflects, This is what men have built, so often magnificently, and is not everything then possible? (6). It is precisely as a kind of dislocated mystic, surveying North America with the paradoxical eyes of an atheist thirsty for a visio dei, that Fitzgerald becomes, as it were, sub specie aeternitatis, acutely sensitized to what, in his period and ours, replaces the traditional teleological sublime: the allure but also the fraudulence, the spectroscopic gaiety and foul dust (Gatsby 45, 2), of capitalism's transaction with the ideal.

Transposed into more sociological terms, I hope to demonstrate that Fitzgeralds deracinated, incorrigible, vocational aestheticism positioned him, in a secular age, as a superlative critic of capitalism's appropriation and concentration of beauty in a new and historically unique institution: glamour, which Fitzgerald knows as thoroughly as a martyr his Bible. Fitzgeralds more-than-aestheticism makes possible, in a dialectic of addiction and contempt, a searching demystification of capitalist society and its debased teleology of glamour which, by the same token, he can never quite renounce. Anti-capitalistic, yet ultimately reactionary, throwing upon the commodity the devotional light of a vanished absolute, The Great Gatsby recalls Luk? cs dictum that the characteristic form of the bourgeois novel is that of the epic of a world abandoned by God (88). Although Gatsby has often been exposed in terms of its tragic paradox of corrupt hero and incorruptible dream (154 - 5), nearly all such readings have been conceived in the very general, sometimes even universalizing, cultural terms of an erosion of the American Dream by materialism. 1 We need, however, to impart economic and class specificity to such hazy generalities for so Fitzgeralds novel did and one such welcome case is the work of Michael Spindlers. My own essay, while it agrees with Spindler's that Gatsby is particularly expressive of that ideological conflict which the rise of the leisure class and the growth of consumption-oriented hedonism was generating in American society in the 1920 s (167), will attempt a textually and psychologically fuller reading than Spindler's shrewd, cogent but very brief study allows.

Further, I do not agree that Fitzgerald repudiates and distances himself from Nicks constant romanticizing of Gatsby's love of Daisy and of wealth: Nicks ambivalence is precisely Fitzgeralds, as his essays, My Lost City, Echoes of the Jazz Age, and Early Success make clear. Such ambivalence can rather be traced, I feel, to the coexistence in Fitzgerald of the cool Marxian eye with the fervent dislocated mysticism of his Catholic inheritance, though I must also disagree sharply with the santa simplicity of Joan Allens conclusion in her pious study of the Catholic Sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald that the novels project an Augustinian antithesis of matter and spirit by which the fate of the world and its revelers is one simply of damnation for sin (44, 103). A properly historicist reading of Gatsby is one true, perhaps, not only to the tension we shall see between the work ethic and the ethos of consumption but to the fullness of bathos between the meretricious ideal hymned by capital and the ideal of a joyous, stable and beautiful integrity of being, adumbrated in older traditions: an ideal whose very violation suggests so hauntingly that infinitely richer structures of human social life and feeling are both necessary and possible. Allen, Joan M. Candles and Carnival Lights: The Catholic Sensibility of F.

Scott Fitzgerald. New York: New York UP, 1978. Bailey, Marius. Scott Fitzgeralds Criticism of America. Mizener 125 - 41. Bruccoli, Matthew J.

Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Carrol and Graf, 1993. Douglas, Ann.

Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920 s. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995. Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism. London: Verso, 1984. Fetterley, Judith.

The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Fielder, Leslie. Some Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mizener 70 - 76.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Absolution. 1924. Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. New York: Scribner Classic, 1987. 136 - 51... Echoes of the Jazz Age. 1931.

The Crack-Up. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 9 - 19... The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner Classic, 1986... The Last Tycoon. 1941. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977...

My Lost City. 1945. The Crack-Up. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 20 - 31... This Side of Paradise. 1920. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes. New York: Pantheon, 1994. Luk? cs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature.

Trans. Anna Boston. London: Merlin P, 1978. McClellan, David. Marxism After Marx.

London: Macmillan, 1979. Mizener, Arthur, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Piper, Henry Dan.

Social Criticism in the American Novel in the 1920 s. The American Novel and the Nineteen Twenties. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer. London: Edward Arnold, 1971. 59 - 83.

Posnock, Ross. A New World, Material Without Being Real': Fitzgeralds Critique of Capitalism in The Great Gatsby. Critical Essays on Scott Fitzgeralds Great Gatsby. Ed. Scott Donaldson.

Boston: Hall, 1984. 201 - 13. Raleigh, John Henry. F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby.

Mizener 99 - 103. Sklar, Robert. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967. Spindlers, Michael.

American Literature and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983. Trilling, Lionel. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Critical Essays on Scott Fitzgeralds Great Gatsby.

Ed. Scott Donaldson. Boston: Hall, 1984. 13 - 20. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.

Zinn, Howard. A Peoples History of the United States. New York: Harper Colophon, 1980.


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