This essay is one of my favorite pieces of writing that I completed at VMI. I wrote this piece in MAJ Knepper’s American Modernism class. The core of the essay discusses the significance of cultural context in the interpretation of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Specifically, I focus on the influence of what R. W. B. Lewis calls the American Ademic Myth. This idea describes America’s mythology as the pursuit of a new Garden of Eden, separated from the cultural and economic ills of Europe. Yet, much like Jay Gatsby, America cannot separate itself from Europe or remake the past which defines its shared humanity. 

 

 

 

“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Every culture has a story; America is no different. R. W. B. Lewis describes this phenomenon in his book The American Adam. He writes, “Every culture seems, as it advances towards maturity, to produce its own determining debate over the ideas that preoccupy it: salvation, the order of nature, money power, sex, the machine, and the like” (2). For America, these debates have come to embody a specific myth, the American Dream. But what is this dream? We look to the American authors, those with their ears to the ground, to communicate this idea. In my essay, I will explain how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, communicates the American Dream as an Adamic myth. The Admic myth metaphorically compares the perceived innocence of the New World to the Garden of Eden, focusing on man’s desire to regain Eden and the futility of this pursuit.  Specifically, I will discuss how Fitzgerald presents this narrative through Jay Gatsby and participates in a Modernist iteration of tragic American mythology.

Before arriving at Fitzgerald’s iteration, we must first establish the American Dream as an Adamic Myth. From the beginning of European immigration, the Americas were called the New World. Although this labeling is worn and familiar, it is largely telling of the greater cultural hope. America was not a new land or providence; it was a New World, a region cut off from time and space, fertile with opportunity. America became the world’s second chance. It was a new beginning, a postlapsarian Garden of Eden. This is the basis of Lewis’ metaphor between the image of the American as Adam. If Adam was the first to occupy the Old World, the American was the first to occupy the New World. Lewis describes the “authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history” (1). This idea of renewal was a form of salvation from Europe. By traveling to the New World, one could severance himself from a broken past. American politician Edward Everett described the anecdote for national health as “separation from Europe” (qtd Lewis 5). The ingrained political and religious maladies of Europe could be abandoned across the Atlantic. The American Adamic mythology gravitated around the idea of a virgin land where humankind could regain paradise.

Jay Gatsby represents the American Adam in several different ways. First, he embodies the American desire to reinvent oneself. The 1839 Democratic Review wrote, “Our [America’s] national birth was the beginning of a new history…which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only” (qtd Lewis 5). As previously mentioned, the Adamic myth held the prospect of a new start, a separation from the past. This separation included the opportunity to reinvent oneself. Within the novel, Gatsby quite literally reinvents himself. He abandons his identity as James Gatz when he joins Dan Cody aboard theTuolomee. By sailing, James Gatz became Jay Gatsby. Similarly, by sailing, one traversed the Atlantic to the New World. They left a native and arrived an immigrant. In both cases, the people who board are not the same people who disembark. Sailing is the method for both Gatsby and the immigrant to reinvent themselves. Also, Gatsby’s reinvention is one that seeks to transcend social ranks. He leaves his quiet and modest Mid-West home, and more literally his small row-boat, to board Cody’s yaht, the image that “represented all the beauty and glamour in the world” (Fitzgerald 46). Gatsby wants to leave his native life to gain something foreign. It is important to note that Gatsby’s change is not merely a change in location. It is a desire to completely abandon his old self, to separate himself from his origin and heritage. This mirrors the American mythology that heralded separation from Europe. There is a duality in both Gatsby’s and Europe’s migration. Both simultaneously attempt physical and psychological separation. For the European immigrant, the physical separation was primarily concerned with political and economic movement, but was also inextricable from the psychological movement that focused on regained innocence. Similarly, Gatsby desires to physically abandon his economic status and psychologically achieve a new identity. From the beginning, the American myth has been one of future hope. Mirroring this hope, Gatsby’s image of “his future glory had led him” (45).

Another manner in which Gatsby represents the Adamic dream is his attempt to regain the past. Although this seems to be a contradiction with the previous paragraph, it is not. This is possible because the “past” has layers of connotation. Gatsby clearly wants to separate himself from his origin; however, he also wants to regain paradise. His desire to separate himself from his heritage is physical and social. His desire to regain the past is something deeper. It is spiritual. As Gatsby’s affair with Daisy substantiates, Nick and Gatsby have a conversation concerning the past:

“…‘you can’t repeat the past.’

‘Can’t repeat the past?’ He [Gatsby] cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house,   just out

of reach of his hand.

‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,’ he said, nodding his head   determinedly,

‘she’ll see.’(50)

Here, Gatsby expresses his desire and confidence in regaining the past. In his eyes, the brokenness of time can be mended with the right amount determination and effort. This desire is more than an aspiration to distance himself from his younger years. He wants to metaphysically alter the past. Nick mentions, “He [Gatsby] talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy” (51). Nick recognizes that Gatsby does not want to merely regain Daisy. He wants something else. Daisy becomes the image of this desire, not the end in herself. Gatsby’s true desire is revealed near the end of Chapter VI. This passage describes when Gatsby first kissed Daisy. As they walk together on an Autumn night, Gatsby envisions an accent “above the trees” where he “could suck the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder” (51). This aim is explicitly Adamic. The reference to the “pap of life” may allude to the Biblical tree of life in the book of Revelation. This tree represents the presence of eternal life in Christ’s regained kingdom, the second and final Eden. Gatsby, like every human, is faced with the consciousness of his mortality; he resultantly desires eternal life. Gatsby’s pursuit of eternal life is presented through dendritic metaphor, equating the branches of the tree of life with higher American society. Gatsby hopes to avoid humankind’s postlapsarian condition by creating his own paradise. Gatsby also wants to “gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.” This can be interpreted as an allusion to innocence. Babies drink milk and represent innocence. Gatsby’s desire to metaphysically alter past is a desire to regain paradise. This is tightly knit to the American Adamic myth. Like Gatsby, the American myth hopes for a recreated Eden in the New World. America was a second chance, imbued with limitless abundance and innocence. The New World became the image of life.

In a similar fashion, Gatsby’s desire for immortality and innocence are projected upon an image, Daisy. He “forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never again romp again like the mind of God” (51). Gatsby makes Daisy into an idol. Along with the long arch of the novel, Fitzgerald explicitly presents this idea when Nick describes Daisy and Jordan as “silver idols” (52). When Gatsby kisses her, making Daisy his hope for eternal life and fulfilment, he commits a type of idolatry. Similar to the Biblical Adam, Gatsby displaces God’s instruction for his own desire to create reality. Consequently, he too loses his ability to be “like the mind of God.” Humanity’s role as image bearers of the divine is a major theme of the creation narrative. In Genesis chapter 1, the narrator states that “…God created man in his own image” (1.27). Humanity was created to reflect the glory of God through sharing in his likeness. Interestingly, this idea of “likeness” is used in Satan’s temptation of Eve. The serpent encourages Eve to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and promises “…you will be like God” (3.5). This temptation implies that God is withholding good and that the couples’ “likeness” is not sufficient. However, the “likeness” Satan promises is not the “likeness” God bestowed. Rather, it is an empty promise of equality with God. Central to the first couples’ fall is the desire to exceed God-bestowed “likeness” and become gods themselves. They become their own idols. Ironically, their pursuit of complete “likeness” strips their edenic “likeness.” Gatsby, attempting to create his own reality with Daisy, also commits this personal idolatry. When Fitzgerald comments that Gatsby loses his ability to “romp again like the mind of God,” he makes a connects humanity’s first idolatry and Gatsby’s future. This brings us to the unavoidable aspect of the Ademic metaphor, the tragedy.

The idea of the American Adam is full of hope. The mythology that America could become a utopia was a real cultural belief and construct. However, the myth would undergo a new iteration during the twentieth century. As the continent developed, writers became more and more aware of the corruptibility of the New World. Although the land was new, the human nature living on it was as old as the Fall. Modernist writers challenged a wholly positive Adamic Mythology, adding the aspect of humankind’s tragic rebellion. The life that was once presented as the new origin story was discovered to be just as broken. Modernist authors like John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway challenged the incorruptibility of the American dream. Fitzgerald joined this tragic reiteration of the Adamic myth in The Great Gatsby.

This can be observed in numerous places within the novel. The most obvious aspect of the comparison is Gatsby’s death. The man who represented American ambition is murdered. This homicide in itself is compelling; nonetheless, the circumstances surrounding the death further support this reading. Gatsby is completely alone when he is shot. Daisy has forsaken him, Nick cannot help him, and his business partners do not want to be involved. What started as a hope to reinstate the past miserably failed. Additionally, Fitzgerald alludes to the frailty of the American Adam with the Valley of Ashes. When Adam is expelled from the garden, God curses humankind, stating “for you are dust, / And to dust you shall return” (3.19).  Symbolically, the pursuit of wealth and glory in New York results in a desolate “fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat” and “of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” (14). The American dream has not produced utopia, but a wasteland. All the while, the watchful eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg survey the grim result. These eyes could refer to the founding fathers. This is derived from the initials T. J. denoting Thomas Jefferson and the profession of optometry referencing Benjamin Franklin’s spectacles. Additionally, youthful Gatsby’s daily schedule shares similarities with Franklin’s daily virtue rubric. Both represent a desire for self-improvement and examination. In this reading of Eckleburg, the ghosts of the founding fathers morn over the product of their tremendous visons.

The final few paragraphs of the novel are among the most explicit passages displaying the tragic aspect of the Adamic myth. Nick, in the wake of Gatsby’s death, reflects on his time spent in the East. He describes a final guest visiting Gatsby’s house; Nick remarks that “the party was over” (80). The house that represented the zenith of Gatsby’s affluence ad success was now a mausoleum. The lights, drinks, and flamboyant characters that shared Gatsby’s dream of fulfillment vanished. Nick refers to the house as a “huge incoherent failure” (80). In pensive thought, he reflects on immigration to the New World.

I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailor’s eyes – a   fresh,

green breast of the new world. It’s vanished trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had

once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory

enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent…face to

face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. (80)

Nick’s reflection recalls the excitement and hope that the New World embodied. Yet, his description drips with sadness. It speaks of exploited land and dying dreams. It speaks finality to the human desire for wonder and laments the insatiability of the soul. Here, Gatsby’s failure is connected to the failure of the American dream. Fitzgerald’s iteration of the American myth is not a fulfilled paradise, but a self-created tragedy. A tragedy that is replayed again and again as we “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (80). This past is not the past that Gatsby hoped to recover. It the long chronology of human nature and mortality. It is a past that is continually reincarnated in the present. With this final line, Fitzgerald casts doubt on the idea of linear human progress. Instead, he indicates that humanity’s progress moves more like a tossed ship, always sailing but never breaking with human nature.

The tragic Modernist iteration of the Adamic myth obliterates the naïve perception of the New World as innocent. It reveals to the audience that the very idea of a New World is illusionary. When the first Europeans arrived, the Americas were not new. They were filled with generations of Native American culture and heritage. However, this reality was ignored. In order to maintain the myth of a New World and preserve tremendous ambitions, American immigrants relied on displacing or eradicating any evidence of previous civilization. This commitment to an imaginary world sounds a sad note in American history. Creating an actual New World required erasing the past, often literally. In addition, the visions of freedom which saturated the New World were built on a foundation of indentured servitude and later slavery. The land of boundless opportunity was not boundless. Although it did offer unique prospects for advancement, it relied heavily on the economic structures of Europe. The New World only truly existed in the imaginations of hopeful men and women. In reality, it was an old world, hidden behind the wide Atlantic curtain.

The Great Gatsby contains an elegant and compact Adamic anecdote: “the young hero follows the traditional career from bright expectancy to the destruction which, in American literature, has been its perennial reward” (Lewis 197). Fitzgerald’s depiction of Gatsby is a portrayal of the tragic American Adam. He follows a Modernist trend of defying the prestigious decadence, romanticism, and transcendentalism of nineteenth-century thought. Fitzgerald presents the American condition as a struggle for life and paradise. Although America sloughed its European heritage, it never escaped its human heritage. Despite attempts to reinvent the past and create the future, Americans made old mistakes in a new world. With the destruction of Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald pronounces the failure of the illusionary American Adam, creating the next iteration of American mythology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Piper, Henry David. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: The Novel, the Critics, the Background.

 

            New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970. Print

 

Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1964. Print.

 

The Bible. ESV. Web.