Great Gatsby and The Obscene Word, The

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Will, Barbara

As Michaels suggests, the specter of a beleaguered whiteness in The Great Gatsby needs to be understood in light of the historical moment in which Gatsby was written, the early 1920s. This is a moment in which American isolationist fervor is at its peak, a moment in which fears over "the expanded power of the alien" are being openly expressed in political, intellectual, and literary forums. It is a moment marked by the social movement of nativism, with its support of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 and its battle cry "America for the Americans." It is also a moment in which the discourse of "Americanism"-the nativists' privileged term-is linked indubitably to the discourse of whiteness: "Americanism is actually the racial thought of the Nordic race, evolved after a thousand years of experience," writes Clinton Stoddard Burr, author of America's Race Heritage (1922).9 "The great hope of the future here in America lies in the realization that competition of the Nordic with the alien is fatal," warns nativist writer Madison Grant in his 1920 introduction to Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color,". . . In this country we must look to such of our people-our farmers and artisans-as are still of American blood to recognize and meet this danger" (Stoddard 1920, xxxi). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author and agitator for women's rights, simply worried in 1923, "Is America Too Hospitable?" (Higham 1973, 386, n. 25). For these and other nativists, keeping "American blood" pure-i.e., purely white-in the face of alien expansion was a predominant concern; and one that contributed its ideological part to a host of post-War social measures, from quotas to IQ tests, that were meant to establish and affirm the whiteness or "Nordicism" of the nation.

In The Great Gatsby (composed between 1922-24), nativist feeling is clearly exemplified by the views of Tom Buchanan, but also, though more subtly, by the discourse of Nick Carraway, with his "scorn" for the working classes, his stereotyping of immigrants, Jews, and blacks, and his claim to be "descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch"-an aristocratic lineage that, however fictional, is meant to appease any nativist fears about the non-whiteness of the Scottish. Yet while Fitzgerald presents such attempts to shore up whiteness against "alien elements" as "impassioned gibberish," external, biographical evidence suggests that the nativist ideas of Tom and Nick may not be so far from Fitzgerald's own. "Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo Saxons Celts to enter," Fitzgerald writes in an infamous 1921 letter to Edmund Wilson after a disappointing tourist trip in France and Italy: ". . . My reactions [are] all philistine, antisocialistic, provincial racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man's burden" (1994, 47).10 Some fifteen years later, in an undated letter from the 1930s to his daughter Scottie lamenting her choice of friends, Fitzgerald reiterates these views: