East and West: For Americans the west has always been a powerful symbol of opportunity and freedom. Going west was always seen as following the path of the sun and therefore setting in the west is the end of the trail and the pioneers’ journeys, hopes and dreams. However life for the pioneers who’s pushed forward frontier of civilisation in the Wild West was heard, and the law was difficult to enforce. In Gatsby west remains the symbol of freedom. However in history after the war many Americans stayed in Europe or returned to the ‘Old World’ because they could not accept the ways of provincial life. For other Americans the financial and business world on the eastern seaboard came to symbolize the opportunity to make lots of money quickly. Fitzgerald’s main characters all grew up in Midwest; in the heart of the American continent therefore they could either go east or west. Gatsby and Nick go east first for the war then return to West, whilst although Tom and Daisy spent their honeymoon in France they now live in the west (Chicago) but escape to the east when Tom’s affair is broadcasted and seen as a ‘scandal’.
The symbolism of East and West emerged when Fitzgerald renamed Great Neck and Manhasset as West and East Egg. Nick describes the West Egg as an ‘unprecedented place that Broadway had begotten upon a long island fishing village’. Daisy was ‘appalled by its raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obstructive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing’. This shows that like the Wild West, it was a place for opportunists that had their money in entertainment or racketeering rather than by fighting or prospecting. In contract to this East Egg was the fashionable part of Long Island where wealthy descendants of people who had made their money the previous century lived.
For nick the Midwest represents old-fashioned family values as he belongs to an extended family that all participate in the decision-making and share a family business. Until he went to war the Midwest was the warm centre of Nick’s world, a place where ‘a sense of fundamental decencies’ is established, a safe place with no ‘riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart’. However when returning after the war to Midwest he states that the Midwest has expresses that it ‘seemed like the ragged end of the universe.
At the being of the story watching Daisy and Jordan chat idly, making only a polite a pleasant effort to entertain or be entertained, Nick realised that ‘they knew that presently dinner would be over a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away’. By contrast his description of the Midwest evening is that it ‘was hurried for phase to phase towards its close’, and that ‘instead of just accepting it, people either hoped for something and were ‘continually disappointed’, or they spent the whole evening dreading the moment it would come to an end. In the East, Nick perceived women as emancipated and in control, sophisticated and not dependent on the attention of men. Once Nick had enough to drink he admits to feeling ‘uncivilised’, and he implies that conversations back home are all about crops or something equally mundane. It is only later; when the phone rings and the tensions come to the surface, that he realises that their apparent coolness is merely an illusion.
East and West:
ReplyDeleteFor Americans the west has always been a powerful symbol of opportunity and freedom. Going west was always seen as following the path of the sun and therefore setting in the west is the end of the trail and the pioneers’ journeys, hopes and dreams. However life for the pioneers who’s pushed forward frontier of civilisation in the Wild West was heard, and the law was difficult to enforce. In Gatsby west remains the symbol of freedom. However in history after the war many Americans stayed in Europe or returned to the ‘Old World’ because they could not accept the ways of provincial life. For other Americans the financial and business world on the eastern seaboard came to symbolize the opportunity to make lots of money quickly. Fitzgerald’s main characters all grew up in Midwest; in the heart of the American continent therefore they could either go east or west. Gatsby and Nick go east first for the war then return to West, whilst although Tom and Daisy spent their honeymoon in France they now live in the west (Chicago) but escape to the east when Tom’s affair is broadcasted and seen as a ‘scandal’.
The symbolism of East and West emerged when Fitzgerald renamed Great Neck and Manhasset as West and East Egg. Nick describes the West Egg as an ‘unprecedented place that Broadway had begotten upon a long island fishing village’. Daisy was ‘appalled by its raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obstructive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing’. This shows that like the Wild West, it was a place for opportunists that had their money in entertainment or racketeering rather than by fighting or prospecting. In contract to this East Egg was the fashionable part of Long Island where wealthy descendants of people who had made their money the previous century lived.
For nick the Midwest represents old-fashioned family values as he belongs to an extended family that all participate in the decision-making and share a family business. Until he went to war the Midwest was the warm centre of Nick’s world, a place where ‘a sense of fundamental decencies’ is established, a safe place with no ‘riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart’. However when returning after the war to Midwest he states that the Midwest has expresses that it ‘seemed like the ragged end of the universe.
At the being of the story watching Daisy and Jordan chat idly, making only a polite a pleasant effort to entertain or be entertained, Nick realised that ‘they knew that presently dinner would be over a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away’. By contrast his description of the Midwest evening is that it ‘was hurried for phase to phase towards its close’, and that ‘instead of just accepting it, people either hoped for something and were ‘continually disappointed’, or they spent the whole evening dreading the moment it would come to an end. In the East, Nick perceived women as emancipated and in control, sophisticated and not dependent on the attention of men. Once Nick had enough to drink he admits to feeling ‘uncivilised’, and he implies that conversations back home are all about crops or something equally mundane. It is only later; when the phone rings and the tensions come to the surface, that he realises that their apparent coolness is merely an illusion.