The American Dream: The Individual and Society
The House of Mirth and The Great Gatsby
This paper was written as an assignment for ENGL 501R: MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL, Dr. Craig Barrow, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 9 Feb. 1988.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Declaration of Independence)
"If they are poor, they begin first as Servants or Journeymen; and if they are sober, industrious, and frugal, they soon become Masters, establish themselves in Business, marry, raise Families, and become respectable Citizens." (Benjamin Franklin qtd. in Bellah, 33)
The American dream has always been one of self-reliance, of a belief in the rights of the individual to control his own destiny so long as that did not conflict with the rights of others. However, as Alexis de Tocqueville realized, this emphasis on the individual can lead to a social isolation, a division of life into public and private spheres, with Americans leaving the "greater society to look after itself" (Bellah 36,37). Tocqueville accurately predicted a conflict of values between the rights and privileges of the individual and the mores of an American society rooted in biblical and republican traditions (Bellah 27-35).
Lily Bart's difficulty in realizing the American dream in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth illustrates this conflict of values. Comparing herself with Gerty Farish, she says, "she likes being good, and I like being happy" (Wharton 7). For Lily, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of luxury; brought up to abhor dinginess (Wharton 29-34), she is unable to accept a plain lifestyle like Gerty's. She defines success as getting "as much as one can out of life" (Wharton 68). With no money of her own, her only alternative is to marry money (Wharton 25,26).
Unfortunately, Lily realizes money may not be enough to bring happiness. Attracted by the wealth of Percy Gryce and confident of the power her beauty has over him (Wharton 49), Lily rebels against the boredom of marriage to him (Wharton 57) and capsizes her plans by her dalliance with Selden (Wharton 61-76).
Her attraction for Selden lies in his having "as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met" (Wharton 65) coupled with her sense of his "social detatchment," his "having points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled for the mob to gape at" (Wharton 54). Lily is well aware of the "dreary and trivial" (Wharton 55), "brutal and self-engrossed" (Wharton 50) character of the society she longs to belong to, and it is this that results in her "difficulty of deciding" "because at heart, she despises the thing's she's trying for" (Wharton 189). However, Lily hasn't Selden's options. As she tells him early in the novel, "Your coat's a little shabby--but who cares?. . . . If I were shabby no one would have me" (Wharton 12).
Unable to free herself from her need for wealth in order to join Selden's republic of the spirit, Lily's path spirals down the social ladder. She is increaingly made aware of the costs of her attempts to realize the American dream. Clothes (Wharton 12), gambling debts (Wharton 26), the necessity to maintain her beauty (Wharton 28), the implications of her liasons with Trevor (Wharton 82-85, 140-149) and George Dorset (Wharton 200-209, 216-218), her relationship to Mrs. Hatch (Wharton 272-282) all push her farther and farther from high society.
By the end of the novel, Lily recognizes her inability to make a living for herself in the workaday world, but cannot pursue her own self-interests to the point of blackmailing Bertha Dorset and marrying Rosedale (Wharton 297-310). Her death remains ambiguous: the contrasting images of a culminating social isolation typified by suicide and the connection to a larger society typified by Nettie Struther's baby remain unresolved (Wharton 319-323).
For some, the difficulty of realizing the American dream of "rags to riches" was further complicated by the changing structure of the maturing nation. Prior to the Civil War, the United States was largely an agrarian economy composed of autonomous communities "dominated by the classic citizens of a free republic, men of middling condition who shared similar economic and social positions and whose ranks less affluent members of the population aspired to enter, often successfully" (Bellah 38,39). The shift to an industrial society with its divisions of working class and business class resulted in two monied classes: an old aristocracy rooted in a past associated with colonial times and the nouveau riche (c.f., Rosedale in The House of Mirth), men of industry and finance (Bellah 48-51). The effect of this gradiation of wealth was to further widen the gap between the working class and the very rich, making it difficult for a single individual to move from the lowest level of society to its highest level.
Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby typifies this difficulty. Unlike Lily, who belonged to upper class society while prevented from fully participating in it through lack of means, Gatsby is a member of the working class who creates for himself a high society persona. Born James Gatz in North Dakota of "shiftless and unsuccessful farm people," Gatsby, at the age of seventeen, was working odd jobs along the shore of Lake Superior (Fitzgerald 98-99). Gatsby's life at West Egg typifies his failure to realize the classic "rags to riches" American success story. Carraway describes his mansion as "some Hotel de Ville in Normandy" complete with tower, ivy, marble swimming pool, and "forty acres of lawn and garden" (Fitzgerald 5) where Gatsby holds wild parties for New York society. The contrast between Gatsby's lifestyle in West Egg to "the white palaces of fashionable East Egg" (Fitzgerald 5) becomes clear to him as he sees it through Daisy's eyes who is "offended" and "appalled" by the "raw vigor" of West Egg society she sees at his party (Fitzgerald 108, 113-114).
Unlike Abraham Lincoln or Ben Franklin (whom Gatsby apparently admires--the itinerary in Gatsby's copy of Hopalong Cassidy is highly reminiscent of Franklin's: compare Autobiography 136-137 with Fitzgerald 174) who never denied their earlier poverty, Gatsby shrouds his life in mystery. Rumors about his unexplained origins are frequent topics of conversation [he is Kaiser Wilhelm's nephew (Fitzgerald 33); a German spy; he has killed a man (Fitzgerald 44); he runs an underground pipeline to Canada (Fitzgerald 98); he's a bootlegger (Fitzgerald 61); or the more general rumor, "(t)here's something funny about (him). . . . He doesn't want trouble with anybody" (Fitzgerald 43)]. Gatsby's own version of his life is equally fictitious, if supported by his medal and photograph at Oxford (Fitzgerald 65-67). As Carraway eventually realizes, the truth is that Gatsby's rise to success is largely due to his criminal connections (Fitzgerald 70+, 91, 167).
The keystone to Gatsby's dream is his relationship to Daisy (Fitzgerald 148-149). His marriage and love affair assumes mythic and chivalric connotations in his own mind that suggest the founding of a dynasty. Their first kiss is colored by images of Jacob's ladder ascending into heaven (Fitzgerald 112). His need to turn back the clock to the romance in Louisville (Fitzgerald 111), his insistence that Daisy deny she ever loved Buchanan (Fitzgerald 132-133), and his reconciliation of her love for Buchanan by viewing it as merely personal [instead of mythic (Fitzgerald 152)] reveal his inability to live out his fantasy in the real world. For Gatsby, the great American dream would never be more than dream, and his death is as much the death of a dream as the death of a man.
Bellah, Robert N., et al. Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985.
The Declaration of Independence.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Rosylyn, N.Y.: Walter J. Black, Inc., 1969.
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969.