The Four Words You Missed

Inside our authorized text of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald the dedication read, “Once again to Zelda”. The narrative begins here. Forget the first chapter or first sentence of the first chapter, the takeoff has already happened. By the time you get to the first word of The Great Gatsby the story is already in full swing, the only question is, “Did you miss it?” According to the Cultural Poetics lens, this part of writing, before the fiction begins, is where the true soul and meaning of the work can be found. From this perspective, Fitzgerald’s dedication is the doorway to discovering the meaning of his work as we analyze The Great Gatsby and try to understand Fitzgerald’s societal concerns.

Remembering that any text is a social document that responds and reflects a social and historical situation I took it a step further and assumed that the author through his writing both consciously and subconsciously reflects not only the big picture of society before him, but also the diminutive details of his personal life story. The dedication obviously suggests that Zelda, whoever she may be is an important part of Fitzgerald’s personal story and thus he couldn’t help but write her into the novel. This led me to study Fitzgerald’s personal life and specifically his love story with Zelda, in the effort to answer the question of what type of behavior and lifestyle is being promoted and supported in the pages of The Great Gatsby, as well as who is being blamed or praised as the story of the roaring twenties unfolds. Understanding the biographical facts that are relevant to the text is my in to correctly interpreting The Great Gatsby’s message.  

After a lot of research I realized that the relationship and then the marriage of Fitzgerald and Zelda was very complicated, much more complex than I expected it to be. Be that as it may, I also came to realize that all I was looking for where the overlying themes pronounced in their relationship and major events that I could find projections of in The Great Gatsby, for seeing Fitzgerald’s attitude to those themes and incidents in his life would clue me in on the things he was promoting or condemning in his writing.

Using the broadest of strokes, Zelda was the wife and muse of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He first met her in 1918, and was so enamored by her that he redrafted one of his female characters after her in This Side of Paradise. Furthermore, it is said that their first encounter was recorded by Fitzgerald in his description of when Jay Gatsby first met Daisy Buchanan. However, this proves to be just one of many instances in The Great Gatsby when Fitzgerald used semi-autobiographical content in constructing the tragic love story.

In 1920, by sending his mother’s ring to Zelda in the mail, the couple got engaged. Nevertheless in the time following that, Fitzgerald failed at convincing Zelda that he would be able to support her and their lifestyle, leading in turn to her breaking off the engagement. After months of work and struggling to keep himself afloat, which even including repairing car roofs, Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise, which became an immediate financial success and led to the reengagement of the couple, as Zelda took this for proof of a financial stable future in marriage.

I have to say that reading The Great Gatsby for the first time, I didn’t care or wasn’t interested enough to google who Zelda was or why the book was dedicated to her. Yet when I discovered who Zelda was and learned these details of Fitzgerald’s and Zelda’s lives, my interpretation changed completely. The message I began receiving at second glance warped into something opposite. After my first time through the story, I believed that Fitzgerald was condemning the sort of lifestyle he portrayed in Jay Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s lives. How could he possibly stand behind Gatsby who spent all of his life trying to earn a fortune to be with the woman he loves, and behind Gatsby’s attitude towards Daisy, if in the end Gatsby loses everything? How could Fitzgerald possibly justify or sympathize or even understand a woman like Daisy, who welcomes her daughter into the world with, “I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” and who is tossed from one man to another by the winds of financial gain?

He couldn’t. Thus The Great Gatsby couldn’t be reinforcing or even condoning this sort of stance on life. It must be meant to break the illusions the readers would have had of the roaring twenties, to show the lives of the wealthy when they are stripped of the glitz and the bling, to present a descriptive lesson to its audience about the value of life. The tragic undertones are ever present in Gatsby and how anyone could ever make different conclusions, astounded me.

In this analysis of The Great Gatsby, guided by some of the assumptions and methodologies of Cultural Poetics, informed of the complex story of Scott and Zelda, I have come to believe something entirely different about this novel. Learning that Fitzgerald, like Gatsby, had to slave away and wait for the love of his life gave me a perspective on what the author was communicating through his fictional character. Realizing that Fitzgerald, like a combination of Gatsby and Buchanan, was in love and married to a “Daisy” (for the infamous words about the baby girl were a direct quote from Zelda upon the birth of her daughter) affected how harshly I judged Daisy, her relationships and her choices. Understanding that Fitzgerald, like Nick Caraway, was documenting in his writing not only the society around him, but also his own partaking in it, added meaning and made me question my concluding thoughts of what the work was trying to convey, what it was supporting and who it was blaming.

I have come to believe that Fitzgerald is condemning neither Gatsby nor Daisy, not even Tom Buchanan really, but is rather putting to paper the odds he and Zelda had beat by ending up together. It does not reinforce or endorse the models practiced by Gatsby or the Buchanans, because their consequences often follow the tragic pattern described, yet they are not clearly condemned either because they are projections of Fitzgerald’s own life and sort of worked out for him. Although no character is constantly praised throughout the pages of The Great Gatsby, not a single one is condemned either. This is obvious in the amount of passivity and aloofness in the author’s treatment of both Myrtle’s and Gatsby’s death, as well as the Buchanans’ move to Europe and Daisy’s estrangement to Gatsby even in his death.

These are of course are only the shallows of the interpretations of The Great Gatsby. There are many more layers to the story of Zelda and Fitzgerald. There are innumerable nuances and controversies that could add to the analysis of this great literary work. However those described in the pages above are those that have helped me take a fresh view at what I was reading and these are the historical details that morphed my understanding of what and how F. Scott Fitzgerald was communicating in the pages of The Great Gatsby. For this reason, I did not and will not go more in depth into Scott’s and Zelda’s relationship. Thus I believe this conclusion and my current understanding of the literary work is appropriate when taking into account the tools and materials I have been working with.