America - The American dream

Percorso intertestuale

Materie coinvolte

• Inglese
• Italiano
• Storia dell’Arte
• Filosofia

Inglese

America in the Jazz Age: the American Dream.

• Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Gatsby as the representation of the American Dream.

Italiano

Nascita e declino del mito americano in Italia.

Gli intellettuali tra Americanismo e Regime:

• Cesare Pavese
• Il periodo delle traduzioni;
• I mari del Sud;
• La luna e i falò (cap. III; cap. XI).

Storia dell’Arte

La rappresentazione del mito

• La Pop Art, espressione artistica statunitense.
• Andy Warhol, pittore della vita americana
• I volti del mito: Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Jackie Kennedy;
• L’America come “supermercato artistico”;
• L’altro volto dell’America: Death and Disasters.

Filosofia

La Scuola di Francoforte

Herbert Marcuse e la critica alla moderna società dei consumi.

• Eros e civiltà;
• L’uomo a una dimensione.

Bibliografia

Inglese

• F.S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Oscar Mondadori

• M. Spiazzi - M. Tavella, Only Connect vol. 3. Zanichelli.
• R.M. Mingazzini – L. Salmoiraghi – R. Sadleir, A Mirror of the times American section

Morano editore

• www.sparknotes.com
• Motori di ricerca: www.google.com

Italiano

• G. Baldi – S. Giusto – M. Rametti – G. Zaccaria, Dal testo alla storia dalla storia al testo

Paravia

• C. Pavese, “Ieri e oggi”; “Ritorno all’uomo”; “Sherwood Anderson” in La letteratura americana e altri saggi

Einaudi

• C. Pavese, La luna e i falò

Einaudi

• C. Pavese, Poesie

Einaudi

• D. Lajolo, Il vizio assurdo. Storia di Cesare Pavese

Oscar Mondadori

• G. Finzi, Come leggere “La luna e i falò” di Cesare Pavese

Mursia

• Motore di ricerca: www.google.it

Storia dell’Arte

• M. Calvesi – A. Boatto, Pop Art art dossier

Giunti

• A. Boatto, Andy Warhol art dossier

Giunti

• Itinerario dell’arte

Zanichelli

• ARS dicembre 1999
• www.arte.it
• Motore di ricerca: www.google.it

Filosofia

• M. De Bartolomeo – V. Magni, Filosofia 3

Atlas

• N. Abbagnano, Storia della filosofia vol. 4 di Giovanni Foriero

Utet

• L. Geymonat, Storia del pensiero filosofico e scientifico vol. XI: il Novecento (5)

Garzanti

• Antologia filosofica vol. 3
• Motore di ricerca: www.google.it

Altri testi consultati

• A. De Bernardi – S. Guarracino, La conoscenza storica 3 manuale e fonti

Ed. Scolastiche Bruno Mondadori

• M.A. Jones, Storia degli Stati Uniti dalle prime colonie ai giorni nostri (1607-1980)

Bompiani editore

• L’Enciclopedia vol. 31 Atlante storico

La Biblioteca di Repubblica

• Il Milione: enciclopedia di tutti i paesi del mondo vol. XII

Americhe

Istituto Geografico De Agostini alla “Guerra Fredda”

Contesto storico: gli Stati Uniti dal primo dopoguerra

Inglese: italiano

L’influenza dell’American Dream in Italia e la nascita del mito.

F.S. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

C. Pavese: Il periodo delle traduzioni

I mari del Sud

Gli intellettuali tra Americanismo e Regime

America in the Jazz Age

La luna e i falò (cap. III; cap. XI)

The American Dream

Il mito si trasforma

Arte: A. Warhol, pittore della vita americana. I volti dell’American Dream

Filosofia: H. Marcuse: Eros e civiltà e L’uomo a una dimensione.

L’America vista secondo l’analisi della moderna società dei consumi e della tecnologia.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: America in the Jazz Age

Life and Works

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in Minnesota. His father was a Southern gentleman and his mother was of Irish descendent. He studied in a Catholic boarding school in New Jersey and, in 1913, he went to Princeton University to complete his education. There he begun to write and had the opportunity to meet some rich young men. When the United States entered the First World War, he joined the army in the romantic hope of fighting to defend democracy, but, to his disappointment, he was sent to a training camp in Alabama. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald was working at his first novel, which he published in 1920 with the title of This Side of Paradise. The book gave a forceful picture of the lifestyle of young people in the “roaring Twenties”, and also captured the sense of loss and emptiness hidden behind the cult of money and materialism. The novel was an extraordinary success; it gave him fame and money.

Fitzgerald was accepted as a spokesman for the prosperous and permissive post-war era, when the United States was going through an unprecedentent economic boom and immense fortunes were being made.

In 1921 he married Zelda Sayre. They settled in New York, where they led a glamorous life spending a lot of money on entertaining, parties, alcohol and drugs. Their only daughter, “Scottie”, was born in the same year. Fitzgerald worked hard to keep their sophisticated and expensive lifestyle.

In 1922 he published Tales of the Jazz Age and the novel The Beautiful and the Damned where he portrayed the hedonism, corruption and loss of ideals of the “Lost generation”. In the same year the Fitzgeralds went to Europe and spent some time in Paris and on the French Riviera, where Scott finished writing The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Though regarded at his finest work, the novel was not a commercial success and marked the beginning of the decline of the author’s popularity. Back in the United States, Fitzgerald started to write film scripts to pay his debts. He was by now an alcoholic and his wife was suffering from mental instability. She spent the rest of her life in a sanatorium until her death in a fire in 1947. In 1934 Fitzgerald published another novel, Tender in the Night. The novel tells the story of the tormented marriage of an American psychiatrist and his schizophrenic wife. The title is taken from a line in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. It was cooly received because the tastes of the reading public had changed with the Great Depression.

He died of a heart attack in 1940; in 1941 and in 1945 two works of his were published: The Last Tycoon, an unfinished novel about wealth and his role in Americal life, and The Crack-Up, a collection of essays and notes.

The Great Gatsby and the American Dream

With the expression American Dream we intend the belief that the US is a land of unlimited opportunities for material progress. America represents a world of money, corruption, pleasure-hunting and social power.

Fitzgerald is critical of this dream of “success”, aware of its illusionary nature and its disregard for the complexities of real life.

The Great Gatsby provides a study of the recurrent theme of wealth and its role in American life. Gatsby is an enigmatic figure, a mysterious “self-made man” who appears to have achieved the American dream of immense wealth, and holds extravagant parties, open to virtually everyone. He is successful for his naivety and illusions which are too fragile a basis for any lasting relationship. Gatsby’s illusion is a symbol of the life of America in the 1920s.

The Americaness of the novel is emphasized by such themes as the move from West to East; the comparison between the romantic ideals of courage, honour and beauty and the real world; the relationship of Gatsby’s material achievements to the myth of “rags to riches”; the tremendous growth of the car industry; the corrupting effects of Prohibition; the poverty of spiritual life in America during its most hedonistic decade. Jay Gatsby has the stature of a romantic hero who dies for his dream, but he also embodies the self-made man who tries to recreate the past through the power of money and is finally destroyed. Gatsby retains the original innocence of the American Dream that reader can’t help but admire.

The description of society during the Jazz Age is extremely detailed and it is scattered with symbolic images, like the car, which stands for the destructive power of modern society and money. The most impressive description is perhaps the one of “the valley of ashes”, a stretch of land full of rubbish, waste and ashes, lying between the city and the suburb where Gatsby lives. Gatsby’s house too is at the same time real and symbolic: carefully described, in its various rooms and acres of garden, it celebrates Gatsby’s luck and success during the parties, but embodies his melancholy and loneliness when it is empty.

The most important themes of the novel are the decline of the American Dream in the 1920s and the hollowness of the upper class.

The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on the 1920s in America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedent prosperity and material excess. Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American dream, as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassing more noble goals. When World War I ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the war became intensely disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had just faced made the Victorian social morality of early-twentieth-century America seem like stuffy, empty hypocrisy. The dizzying rise of the stock market sustained increase in the national wealth and a new found materialism, as people began to spend and consume at unprecedented levels. A person from any social background could, potentially, make a fortune, but the American aristocracy scorned the newly rich industrialists and speculators. The Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the sale of alcohol, created a thriving underworld designed to satisfy the massive demand for bootleg liquor among rich and poor alike. Nick and Gatsby, both of whom fought in World War I, exhibit the new found cosmopolitanism and cynicism that resulted from the war. The clash between “old money” and “new money” manifests itself in the novel’s symbolic geography: East Egg represents the established old aristocracy, West Egg the heavily rich self-made rich. Meyer Wolfshiem and Gatsby’s fortune symbolize the rise of organized crime and bootlegging. As Fitzgerald saw it (and as Nick explains in Chapter IX), the American dream was originally about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. In the 1920s depicted in the novel, however, easy money and relaxed social values have corrupted this dream, especially on the East Coast. The main plotline of the novel reflects this assessment, as Gatsby’s dream of loving Daisy is ruined by the difference in their respective social statuses, his resorting to crime to make enough money to impress her, and the rampant materialism that characterizes her lifestyle.

Places and objects in The Great Gatsby have meaning only because characters instill them with meaning: the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg best exemplify this idea. In Nick’s mind, the ability to create meaningful symbols constitutes a central component of the American dream, as early Americans invested their new nation with their own ideals and values. Nick compares the green bulk of America rising from the ocean to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Just as Americans have given America meaning through their dreams for their own lives, Gatsby instills Daisy with a kind of idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor possesses. Gatsby’s dream is ruined by the unworthiness of its object, just as the American dream in the 1920s is ruined by the unworthiness of its object—money and pleasure. Gatsby longs to re-create a vanished past, but is incapable of doing so. When his dream crumbles, all that is left for Gatsby to do is die; all Nick can do is move back to Minnesota, where American values have not decayed.

The other theme, the hollowness of the upper class, represents the sociology of wealth, how the newly minted millionaires of the 1920s differ from and relate to the old aristocracy of the country’s richest families. The newly rich are vulgar, gaudy, ostentatious, and lacking in social graces and taste. Gatsby lives in a monstrously ornate mansion, wears a pink suit, drives a Rolls-Royce, and does not pick up on subtle social signals, such as the insincerity of the Sloanes’ invitation to lunch. The old aristocracy possesses grace, taste, subtlety, and elegance, epitomized by the Buchanans’ tasteful home and the flowing white dresses of Daisy and Jordan Baker. What the old aristocracy possesses in taste seems to lack in heart, they are so used to money’s ability to ease their minds that they never worry about hurting others. The Buchanans exemplify this stereotype when, at the end of the novel, they simply move to a new house far away rather than condescend to attend Gatsby’s funeral. Gatsby, on the other hand, whose recent wealth derives from criminal activity, has a sincere and loyal heart, remaining outside Daisy’s window until four in the morning in Chapter VII simply to make sure that Tom does not hurt her.

Gatsby’s good qualities (loyalty and love) lead to his death and the Buchanans’ bad qualities (fickleness and selfishness) allow them to remove themselves from the tragedy not only physically but psychologically.

In the novel there are also a lot of symbols, but the most important are the green light, the valley of ashes and the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg.

The Green Light, situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg lawn, represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, and in Chapter I he reaches towards it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal. Because Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream, the green light also symbolizes that more generalized ideal. In Chapter IX, Nick compares the green light to how America, rising out of the ocean, must have looked to early settlers of the new nation.

First introduced in Chapter II, the Valley of Ashes, the valley’s between West Egg and New York City, it consists of a long stretch of desolate land created by the dumping of industrial ashes. It represents the moral and social decay that results from the uninhibited pursuit of wealth, as the rich indulge themselves with regard for nothing but their own pleasure. The valley of ashes also symbolizes the plight of the poor, like George Wilson, who live among the dirty ashes and which lose their vitality as a result.