The Great Gatsby occupies the cultural ground of America. It is this direct threat to the originality of Gatsby's subject matter, as opposed to questions of technique or narration, that makes it a source of anxiety for Fitzgerald (:1997). If 's work, for example, had some influence upon Fitzgerald, his subject was not upper-class New York society; Gatsby’s novel treats the corrupt and empty world of New York wealth, and it records the power of that world to destroy not a yearning boy from the Midwest, but a character of limited means, , who clings to romantic aspirations that short circuit the ruthless pragmatism she needs to survive. Though naturalism might seem far removed from Fitzgerald's interest in the cultural possibilities of belated and corrupt romanticism, the question of the possibilities of transcendence animates both novels (1997). are drawn together by the possibility that love might carry them beyond the operations of the culture that divides them; in fact the grey seal on 's stationery consists of "Beyond! " printed "beneath a flying ship". They might reach something like 's "republic of the spirit," defined in solely negative terms. His idea of success is freedom "[f]rom everything-from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents". It suggests such hopes are illusory, but in the meantime, the question of transcendence generates .After the tableaux vivants scene of the novel, for example, kiss in a scene similar to the scene of the first kiss between Gatsby and Daisy. This kiss occurs
The detachment of this voice from the corpse of Gatsby marks the novel's final defense against the homoeroticism of its own model of masculine literary creation and against homoeroticism in general. A disembodied masculinity exists as a target of identification only, not erotic desire. Meanwhile, erotic desire aims again at its conventional heterosexual target (:1997). The feminine is displaced safely into the past, removed from any role or place in culture and associated with a maternity lyrically naturalized. Nick's Gatsby inspired voice celebrates "a fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all American dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. . . . Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us (1997.) So the readers beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past". In the words the novel uses to describe Gatsby's death, "the holocaust was complete
Like that of The Great Gatsby, its desire for order seems situated in the perception of chaos spawned by the war, a chaos bound up, for modernist writers such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Eliot, with their experience of indeterminacies of sex and gender (1997). Like Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, Freud's solution is to author a fiction of dual drives that seems to put gender and sexuality--more or less--back in their proper bifurcated places: women are targets of reproductive desires and impossible regressive longings, but are not imagined as agents of cultural production; men are targets of identification but are not objects of desire, their relations to each other characterized by taken-for-granted norms of distance and violence that ought to be seen as the real symptoms of war (:1997). Taken together both texts suggest the collaboration of literature and psychoanalysis simultaneously to defend masculine authority from the fragmenting energies of same-sex eroticism, and to effect and obscure its appropriative relation to the ongoing cultural production of women.
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