working class in great gatsby

A detailed Summary of working class in great gatsby

The Working Class in Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby"

The first half of the twentieth century saw dramatic changes in the social structure of the United States. In the nineteenth century, it was relatively unusual in many parts of the country to meet a Roman Catholic -- similarly odd to meet someone whose native tongue was not English. Anyone who fit these descriptions was likely to be unabashedly working class. Suddenly, however, the country saw an enormous influx of people whose backgrounds were very unlike those of the founding fathers: Italians, Poles, Russians, Hispanics, Greeks, Slovaks. Some were Roman Catholic, some Orthodox, some Jewish. But their languages and their customs made them suspect to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had come to consider themselves indigenous to the continent, and, taken together with the freed blacks who were steadily making their way into the Northern cities, they reveal a different face from the one the wealthier side of America was used to.

We can see the degree to which this makes people like Tom Buchanan nervous from the context of his discussion of Goddard's The Rise of the Colored Empires. According to Judie Newman and Douglas Tallack, this book did not really exist, but was intend

On the ethnic issue, there is no doubt that Fitzgerald is mocking Tom's xenophobia. But on the issue of the working class, Fitzgerald almost seems on his side. It is significant that Myrtle Wilson's husband is not an Italian or a Pole; his name is as English as Jordan Baker's. But he is nonetheless a member of a class which by the 1920s was being increasingly monopolized by minorities -- a class whose encroachment men like Wilson fear.

But we recognize that the glitz of the upper class' lives rests on the toil and sweat of labor; at one party, for example, Nick observes that "I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced it was theirs for a few words in the right key" (Fitzgerald, 41).

Fitzgerald's novel does not make the world of the wealthy attractive as much as it reveals its moral emptiness. And much of this emptiness is the direct result of a "let them eat cake" philosophy on the part of the characters at the top of the social scale. Fitzgerald's characters seem completely oblivious of the real lives of working people. We could argue that the same is true today, but there would seem to be more mobility between classes than there was in Fitzgerald's time, and more respect on the part of the general public for the working class.

When he says "white", we need to realize that he means something completely different than we do when we use that term. He might not, for example, consider Jews "white", or Italians "white." White to Tom means people who are just like him. He is therefore expressing fear -- fear that those people who have so far been confined to the working class will move up from the ghettoes and displace him socially. Newman and Tallack add that "The phase of mass immigration from south-eastern Europe which had begin in the 1890s [was] superseded by the Great Migration of blacks from the South which had begun in 1914 with the war boom so that [Fitzgerald's] reference to 'short upper lips' and 'the yolks of their eyeballs' does not necessarily sig

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Approximate Word count = 1542
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English