Gatsby’s Waste Land
by SWSydneytutor
Examining Modernist texts for their author’s views of society, with particular emphasis on the social commentaries of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land on Western society in the 1920s.
Modernism has transcended decades, nations, mediums and cultures, and though we may never arrive at a universally accepted definition of Modernism, most Modernist texts seem to have one common feature. Acutely aware of their surroundings, Modernist writers produced their texts in response to the grand scale of change in the early 20th century. Some expressed their delight while others severely criticised their country’s modernisation. Some marvelled at the sight of cities rising from towns before their eyes, while some saw overwhelming social and or economic changes coincide with the moral corrosion of society.
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Eliot’s The Waste Land are prime examples of the latter, their creators focusing on the moral decay of 1920s Western society. They reflect their artists’ view in response to social and economic factors of society, all of which heavily influence their composition – after all, how could these texts exist or hold the same meaning if we removed their social context? Once read with the social context in mind, we can relate the dominant forces of society – such as the growth of consumerism and industrialisation to what both Fitzgerald and Eliot saw as the moral disintegration of society during the 1920s.
Both texts refer to the period where the world was recovering from the devastating impacts of World War One. For Fitzgerald and Eliot, and indeed many other Modernists, the post-war period represented a period of significant social changes, and where the affluence that Western society had enjoyed before the War blossomed once more. Fitzgerald and Eliot saw how such focus on material possessions and social changes could compromise the moral integrity of people living in Western society. Bradbury, in his essay F. Scott Fitzgerald Captured the Spirit of His Generation describes The Great Gatsby as “a story of a gross, materialistic, careless society of coarse wealth spread on top of a sterile world.” (Bradbury, p 37) We can draw parallels between The Great Gatsby and Eliot’s The Waste Land, where this “sterile world” can also describe the bleak atmosphere in which the poem is set.
Though The Great Gatsby appears as a story of a man’s unrequited love for a woman, it deals one of the harshest criticisms of American society in all of 20th century literature. Set primarily set in New York City, a centre of economic boom in the 1920s, there are two major settings: West Egg and East Egg, where their inhabitants show a mutual dislike of each other, but represent classes which have reached the upper echelons of wealth. Gatsby is described as having an own private beach, a Rolls-Royce and other luxuries, highlighting the prosperity that many Americans enjoyed in the post-war period. However, Fitzgerald’s criticism of America, and in particular, the retrogression of the American Dream – the belief early settlers had that through hard work and determination, one could prosper – remains a recurring theme. We are led to believe that Gatsby did not earn his wealth through “hard work and courage” per se, and rather, his association with shady characters such as Meyer Wolfshiem, makes it easy to infer that Gatsby obtained his riches through illegal means. Such a social phenomena highlights the realities of 1920s America, where though the outcome of the American dream held true, the means by which people used to acquire wealth changed dramatically, with many turning to criminal activities to earn their wealth. Many people acquired their fortune by participating in the bootlegging industry which arose in lieu of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol and could be only one of the many factors which spurred Fitzgerald to produce such a scathing criticism of American society.
Fitzgerald and Eliot question society’s moral philosophies is through symbolism. Fitzgerald highlights the corruption of the American dream through its society’s endless pursuit of wealth with the image of God, while the image of a polluted river permeates through The Waste Land. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald places the Valley of the Ashes in the background, yet it holds more significance than its literal presence in the text suggests. Geographically, the Valley of the Ashes is between West Egg and New York; it is desolate and grey, where the poor live. Furthermore, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg “brood on over the solemn dumping ground” and though it is never explicitly stated in the novel, many perceive the eyes of God who looks over the moral decay the Valley of the Ashes represents. The Valley of the Ashes and its presence encapsulates the unpleasant realities underneath the lavish facades of the Eggs, where corruption and immoral activities take place.
Eliot, in The Waste Land, on the other hand, calls upon traditional meanings of rivers and manipulates its meanings to highlight the negative impacts of industrialisation. In the poem, the river is seen as polluted, most prominent in the following two excerpts:
While I was fishing in the dull canal 189
and
The river sweats 266
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide 270
Though rivers are traditionally regarded as symbols for life and renewal, they are described as dirty and contaminated. “River” here has been reduced to a “dull canal”. While on the surface, the pollution of the river is a side effect of industrialisation, the way the river is described underscores the way Eliot feels about his society: industrialisation has polluted much more than the river - morals have been polluted too. In Radeljkovic’s essay Our presence In, he suggests that a major reasons why The Waste Land was written was to provide a commentary on society’s strongest selfish desires and that the reader is also living in a world with lost moral and religious principles. The atmosphere which clouds The Waste Land is described as self-destructive, that somehow 1920s society had themselves created this stark, desolate waste land, a metaphor for their own absent moral cores. A study of early 1920s Western society sheds light on what Radeljkovic points out. As America boomed in its economy, Europe’s economy took longer to repair. Though their economies suffered, the post-war era is marked by society’s return to their high living standards which had been enjoyed before the war. In this case, when The Waste Land is applied to Europe, the rise of industrialisation and the moral corrosion of society do not coincide. The wealth Europeans had enjoyed during their industrial years and the thought of this kind of luxury, however, means that we can trace the degradation of Europe’s morals to its industrialisation. From the wealth of symbolic devices present in both The Great Gatsby and The Waste Land, it is clear that we can examine both for their creators’ views about Western society and their belief that though industrialisation of the modern world has contributed greatly to the economic freedoms of the time, they also marred society’s code of conduct.
Both Fitzgerald and Eliot explore the impacts of modernisation, and place special emphasis on the idea of disillusionment, the feeling where the text’s characters come to the realisation that all is not as they seemed. Bewley recognises that The Great Gatsby “is an attempt to determine that concealed boundary that divides the reality from the illusions.” (Bewley, p 38). Bewley argues that Gatsby’s society is one where boundless pursuits of material possession, with the rise of industry has deluded its people into believing that wealth will achieve both financial and personal goals. One example Bewley uses in his essay is Gatsby’s longing for Daisy and the means by which he sets out to win her affections. Placing the immorality of courting a married woman aside, Gatsby hosts lavish parties in the hope Daisy will come, to rekindle their romantic history. Bradbury describes Gatsby as a “dandy of desire, a desire that has been redirected from its human or material object into a fantasy a dream of retaining a past moment in an endless instant of contemplation.” (Bradbury, p 107). He is referring to the past love between Gatsby and Daisy that Gatsby wishes to reignite, something that is simply impossible. It is clear that Fitzgerald has emphasised the degree to which money has taken over 1920s society, even clouding their own moral judgements.
In The Waste Land, the disillusionment of society is created by the post-war sentiment, one of the dominant forces in the 1920s, and not by the financial pursuits of characters in The Great Gatsby. The poem has a bleak tone, which contributes to Eliot’s representation of the Waste Land – as a barren, dispirited world where society has experienced a “moral death”. The Waste Land’s people are described in the following lines:
A crowd flowed over London bridge, so many (62)
I had not thought death had undone so many.
This “death” as Eliot calls it, refers to the spiritual disintegration of 1920s society. This is also apparent in the joyless sexual encounters some of his characters experience. One example of this is the couple who prefer to play chess than have sex, and another is a man who satisfies his lust and leaves the woman, who does not notice “her departed lover”. Eliot singles out intercourse – traditionally an act of intimacy and connection between a couple, and suggests that the intimacy people once had with each other is based on pleasure rather than love, and that relations between people – not necessarily sexual – are no longer present. Eliot therefore presents 1920s society as a spiritless, morally debased society.
Modernist writers differed in style and content which broke away from traditional forms of prose and poetry. However, we find that many share similar characteristics and similar themes. In this case, through Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, we can see that many Modernist writers wrote about the world around them and the world they struggled to make sense of. One primary concern both artists had in common was this idea that many of the forces which dominated 1920s Western society, such as the industrialisation and the disillusionment caused by post World War One affected the lives of people living in the 1920s, affecting their morals, values and their spiritual connection with those around them.
