Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou Faculty of Letters and Humanities Department of English Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements For the Degree of Magister in English Speciality: English Option: Literature Presented by: Rafik LACEB Subject: The Other in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Examination Panel: M. BENDJEDDOU Mohamed Yazid; MCA; Université d’ Annaba; President M. RICHE Bouteldja ; Professeur ; U/Tizi-Ouzou ; Rapporteur. M. BOUREGBI Salah; MCA; Université d’Annaba; Examinateur. Academic Year: 2009/2010 Abstract The Great Gatsby is a canonical work of literature. It is found in most of the university curricula and high school programs. In sum, it is a classic of the 1920s. Gatsby is a reflection of that period of gendered, ethnic, and racial tensions. The main characters of the narrative are all from old white established Anglo‐Saxon backgrounds. It is described to be about the suppression of otherness and change required to maintain the illusion of identity. The novel has long been noted for its author’s regional obsession with the East and the West. My aim in the present dissertation is to realize a thematic study of the novel, by looking for the way women, Jews, and Blacks and Orientals are placed in the position of “Other (s)” in relation to the identity of the main characters; an identity the author identifies with, barricades, and tries to maintain its supremacy. As the United States ended the settlement of the West with the closing of the Frontier, the beginning of the twentieth century required Americans to look for a new sense of manifest destiny. The twenties are renowned for their intolerance and broad‐scale nativism. The Great Gatsby is said to be the perfect novel of the Jazz Age, which mirrors its immediate issues. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first one is an attempt to put the novel in the context of various tensions which reflect the conservative and nativist character of the decade. The chapter also informs the reader about the major literary orientations and current of the time. It ends with the way the novel is liable to be approached from the point of view of looking for the discourse of Orientalism within it. Chapter II is about the demonstration of Fitzgerald’s ideal notion of male identity which is to be a member of Tom Buchanan’s group. Tom is the stereotyped masculine character who is even “more of a man than” Nick. Nick refuses identification and/or associations with women. Women for Nick/Fitzgerald are weak, irresponsible, absurd, dishonest, and destroyer. Chapter III focuses on the overt and oblique expressions of Fitzgerald’s anti‐ Semitism and dislike of ethnic immigrants. Ethnic immigrants were often linked with the organized crime, and constituted‐by their half whiteness‐a threat to the purity of Anglo‐Saxon identity and the homogeneity of the Nordic element. Nordics for Fitzgerald are responsible for “all the things that go to make civilization”, and are set‐that is my argument‐ in opposition to the Semite or Jewish immigrant who is the anti‐thesis of development. Chapter IV pays attention to the Fitzgeraldian ideal of whiteness and its supremacy, domestic and foreign. The major threat to “civilization going to pieces” is to end by getting “intermarriage of blacks and whites”. This chapter explains the way Fitzgerald associates Gatsby with blackness, and how Gatsby reflects the “natural segregation” of the two races. However, the second half of this last chapter is a suggestion of the study of the novel in relation to the global Western myth of the superiority of whiteness. Blackness in the United States of the time was parallel to what the colonial subject meant to imperial powers. The focus is on references to the brotherhood with English imperialism and to the early imagined geographies of the rising imperial States. N.B: All what is between inverted commas is either a personal translation or someone else’s idea. However the ideas are all referred within the actual study. Contents: Abstract Acknowledgements Dedications Introduction………………………………………………………. ……………………………………………1 Chapter I: Historical Background ……………………………………………………………………..10 Chapter II: The Woman Other………………………………………………………………………….33 Chapter III: The Ethnic Other………………………………………………………………………….……56 Chapter IV: The Rising Tide of Worldwide White Supremacy…………….…………………83 End Notes: ………………………………………………………………………………………………………111 Selected Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………….116 Acknowledgements This thesis is not only the product of my sole individual effort, but the outcome of the guidance and contribution of many people. First I present my special thanks to Professor Bouteldja Riche for his guidance, instructions, and invaluable advice. I would like to thank the committee of examiners who have accepted to evaluate the project in spite of the requirements of time, pressure. I express my sincere gratitude to Mr. Arezki Khelifa for the enormous help he has suggested. I thank Mr. Mohammed Gariti and Mr. Mohand Ameziane Bia, respectively heads of the Scientific Committee and Department of English. I thank all the teachers and staff of the Department of English. Thanks are presented to Mr. Said, the head of the department library. My gratitude, thanks, and debt can never be enough in relation to my mother’s contribution in my carrying of the thesis. II To my family and friends III Introduction “Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.” (The Great Gatsby 65) Native status suggests more than legal equality or the assimilation of modes. “Being native” –or being accepted by others as native‐ is a sign of legitimacy and validity. “Being native” becomes an object of desire in early twentieth century America…Protectionist nativism, of which two incarnations are Anglo‐Saxon nativism and anti‐immigrant nativism, has a retrospective energy‐ it seeks to revive a past in order to define and strengthen the contours of the American “national people” in a present moment. Another form of retrogressive protectionist nativism is primitivst nativism; it seeks the ideal aborigine as an American ancestor who will serve as the origin and the root of the American people and culture. These protectionist nativisms are recognizable by their nostalgia for the past, their anxiety about origins, and their preoccupations in the present regarding the constitution of the American national people. (Julianne Newmark, 2004: 2) With many artists, writers, and philosophers living in Europe as expatriates and wealthy Americans consuming European culture as tourists and buying their artifacts and “history”, Americans were variously becoming imperial themselves. (Ymitri Jayasundera, 2001: 4) For the few recent years we see how news stories have engaged into serious debates to solve or rather to deal with issues related to ethnicity, immigration, national identity (ies) and even society that might evolve in multicultural urban areas. Parallel to these debates are issues about peoples fighting or more accurately fighting back the GIs and NATO forces. As had the European nations before, the United States has “pushed for and acquired an empire… and continues to exert its influence on other nations.” (Jenel Vindel, 2008: 8) According to Edward Said some prejudices and stereotypes may emanate from a will of self-definition through the denigration of the “hostile other”, foreign or domestic. (Said, 1991) American society of post World War I lived in a period of both transatlantic issues and social tensions. The 1920s in the United States are a decade liable to “image making and 1 stereotyping of historians, literary or otherwise.” (Frederick J Hoffman, 1962: 11) The decade represents years responsible for a variety of products in literature, which have raised interest of generations. It was during this period that writers, though they claimed religious and economic freedoms, “refused to allow any kind of conduct… [that was] not moral or socially acceptable.” (ibid: 41) Post World War I America was a world with so many “barriers between men and women, Protestants and Catholics and Jews, rich and poor, capital and labor, educated and half-literate.” (Roland Berman, 2006: 79) As Paul L Murphy put it, the national character of the period was affected by “broad-scale intolerance, prejudices, Nativism, and xenophobia…” (Murphy in The Journal of the American History, 1964: 60) Aram Veeser considers that the study of the past may help understand the present and better plan the future. (Veeser, 1989, vii) For this, literature may give “the subject of its time back to us in one or another form.” (Frederick J Hoffman, 1962: 13) Literature may be of importance to history because it serves as a social document for the revelation of the political and intellectual tendencies of its age, but it is of more significant importance, for it is a “culmination, a genuine means of realizing the major issues of its time.” (ibid: 12) The Twenties in the United States are referred to as the “Jazz Age”. This name was given to the decade by Francis Scott Fitzgerald who is considered as its chronicler. Scott Fitzgerald’s importance in the American literature and cultural history lies not only in his reputation as the “chronicler of the Jazz Age” but lies also in his contribution, among other writers, in “America’s Coming of Age”. (Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury, 1991: 248) Malcolm Cowley, one of the earliest biographers of Scott Fitzgerald, noted in his book A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation: 2 Fitzgerald never lost a quality that very few writers are able to acquire: a sense of living in history. Manners and morals were changing all through his life and he set himself the task of recording the changes. These were revealed to him, not in statistics or new reports, but in terms of living chara- cters. (Qtd in Sarah B Fryer, 1988: I) Scott Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century American literature and as a member of the Lost Generation.1 Fitzgerald wrote a number of short stories and novels which depicted the “waste and sterility” of the American society of his time.