The UTC Graduate School is pleased to announce that Samuel Talley will present Master’s research titled, Bronze Monuments: The Terror of Death and its Role in The Great Gatsby on 03/02/2023 at 4:00 PM in Lupton 393. Everyone is invited to attend.
English
Chair: Aaron Shaheen
Co-Chair: Christ Stuart / Bryan Hampton
Abstract:
Exegit monumentum aere perennius. This phrase comes from the ancient Roman poet Horace and means, “He completed a monument more durable than bronze.” These words allow for powerful insights into the nature of human mortality and, more importantly, the desire to transcend it. And while it is true that the poets of ancient civilizations often exhibited an uncanny desire to mystify and ritualize death, it is important to note that these behaviors span across the timeline of human evolution. Freud, writing with his usual flair in the twentieth century, speculated that the ritualization of death provided for “the perfection that we may perhaps have missed here” (24). Thoughts of death and the ways in which humans attempt to cope with it seem uniquely applicable in understanding the work of another twentieth century stylist: F. Scott Fitzgerald Despite Fitzgerald’s insistence that he was not a “natural” writer (Bruccoli 34), the Great Gatsby, first published in 1925, is obviously the culmination of extraordinary talent and discipline. In its tightly woven narrative, running at just under 200 pages, Gatsby blazes to life with intensity and dimension, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph or even a sentence. The fact that the novel is a quick and pleasurable read, however, may obscure its complexity. Furthermore, one part of Fitzgerald lore adds to this emerging mythology. While it is false that Fitzgerald died while his works were out of print—the Scribner’s warehouse still had unsold copies of the novel’s first printing in 1940—it is certainly true that Gatsby vastly undersold its author’s expectations, and Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure (Bruccoli 27). But his sentiment proved itself premature. Like Horace’s durable monument, Gatsby outlived its creator and its historical moment as it achieved a kind of deathless reverence in the realm of American letters. That Fitzgerald’s novel escaped the void of obscurity is perhaps ironic for a book so obsessed with decadence, disposability, evanescence, and wastefulness. In his essay “Gatsby’s Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties” Jeffery Louis Decker conceptualizes the novel’s profligacy thoroughly a purely nativist lens: “Through the eyes of Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, Gatsby appears in the guise of the archetypal, if somewhat misguided, self-made man in America. Gatsby’s upward struggle is inspired by traditional purveyors of middle-class success, such as Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger Jr.… In this way, Gatsby stages a national anxiety about the loss of white Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the Twenties (52). In a similar vein, Roger L. Pearson contends that decadence in the novel functions as a religious motif. He writes of Gatsby’s mansion: “The beauty of this image of Gatsby’s house is that it is a dual one. It seems that Fitzgerald has created a twentieth-century replica—’a factual imitation’—of Milton’s Pandemonium. The image is further solidified in that Mammon was its chief architect and builder (640). And finally, Gregory S. Jay leans towards a Marxist interpretation of the novel stating that The Great Gatsby is “a work of cultural criticism that enacts . . . the intellectual analysis of how the social subject can never be conceived, even ab ovo, as the inhabitant of a world outside commodification, exchange, spectacle, and in speculation” (164-65). Critics’ emphases on decadence, disposability, and evanescence have at times obscured the novel’s preoccupation with durability and immortality. Until this century, academics rarely considered Gatsby as a product of World War I. Pearl James, in her book The New Death, makes it clear that this connection is critical to understanding the novel’s preoccupation with immortality. She states that “the novel signifies that the work of burying and mourning for the dead goes on long after the war is over” (27). I aim to build on this critical angle by examining how the novel’s characters create defense mechanisms against the horror of human mortality. Otherwise known as terror management theory, a concept initially developed by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker that tracks the unconscious mental process that protect humans from the dread of death, this lens injects new meaning into Gatsby’s themes of class, power, and status. Terror management provides a critical approach in which these themes become symbols for, and bulwarks against, existential dread Taken together, these attempts at death denial serve to reshape and satirize a modern United States, bringing with it new perspectives about the fragility of the human condition at the turn of the twentieth century.