Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A family and community affair gone wrong
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Date
2022
Authors
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Publisher
Université Mouloud Mammeri
Abstract
The romantic mode of writing in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a particular focus emphasis on three aspects of the family: family romance, national romance and literary romance. Hopefully this research illustrates and sheds light on the cultural wars that bedeviled the American society today and all societies around the world in general and explores romances of the new world, how it developed and how it impacted the family institution in its own way. In the purpose of determining the issue behind, this dysfunctionment that took place both at the individual as well as the community in general in the United States of America. To this end, the approach has been inspired by Bloom’s psychoanalytical approach developed in The anxiety of influence (1973), Ellison’s theory of influence in The world and the jug and Freud’s essay Family romances (1909). This research reached the following findings: First, various individual families in the 1920s, as in the case of the novel, are all found to be disintegrating both at the emotional and material levels. on an emotional level, in the way that members of the family did not maintain a good family bond or a means that would enable them to coexist together. Thing that led each individual to pave a path different than his family's, searching for a substitution elsewhere. As for the material, it’s the disappointment by the material dream, or in a Freudian sense, an instrument of oppression, that causes the individual to feel the desire to belong to a family other than this own. The case of Gatsby substituting his family of farmers for the gangster one, or the Wilsons and Carraway changing the Western family for that of the East, highlighting in their way the theme of belonging and identity in doing so, characters lost sight of their true identities and became mere instruments of their social hierarchy. Ultimately, Fitzgerald's portrayal of the theme of belonging serves as a cautionary tale about the sacrifice of one's individuality for the sake of fitting in with a particular group or society. Second, the shift in national and regional patriotism and the urge to wage a battle against the old generation to maintain power and impose the existing and desired ideology This is seen in the different displacements that took place in the nation: puritanism, yeomanry, frontier, industry, war intervention, reconversion, etc. Finally, the affirmation of the intellectual identity and the anxiety of authorship through the persecution of the mentor or the tormentor. Fitzgerald did not state “no mentor but myself’ as London did, he instead claimed his father-artist Conrad as an “ancestor” from whom he inherited his art, as we demonstrated in the analyses of The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness as war novels in disguise or war novels that do not say their name. Contrary to his relation with his ancestor Conrad, Fitzgerald did not maintain the same relation with his relatives, the writers of the “lost generation”. namely Faulkner, Hemingway, and Eliot, with whom we found trace of the anxiety of authorship
Description
71 p. ; 30 cm. (+ CD-Rom)
Keywords
Anxiety, Cultural war, Dysfunction, Family, Romance, Identity
Citation
Literature and Civilization