Free Great Gatsby Essays: Philosophic and Political Contexts :: Great Gatsby Essays

The Great Gatsby  Philosophic and Political Contexts Attempting both a sustained windup reading of the novel, and the relocation of that reading in spite of appearance wider philosophical and political contexts, angiotensin converting enzyme must therefore consider the impact of a broad hugger-mugger strain of Western thought upon Fitzgeralds political analysis. For spot it is a universal 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 the set aside opens, the political uses of the ideal have largely flee notice. It seems hard to believe in our period, when a three-decade lurch to the political beneficial 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 adept hardly associates the charact eristic setting of Fitzgeralds novels, his chosen kingdom of the sybaritic fabulous, with all proletarian solidarity or priestly devotions, it is clear that a tension amid 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 1920s, 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, one must 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 the bo ok opens, the political uses of the ideal have largely escaped notice. Fitzgeralds excitably visionary sensibility, nourish in high school years by Catholic mysticism, fashioned him into a superbly perceptive critic of the appropriation of human choose of the ideal by developments in American capitalism in the 1920s. In response to economic crisis in the early years of this decade, the national publicize media developed and promoted a new cult of glamour, seeking through its cajole to create a mass consumer market and revivify the foundering civilize ethic. Fitzgeralds entrancement by the suggestive power of beauty sensitized him both