The Great Gatsby's New York

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Recommended Reading: The Great Gatsby

The Roaring Twenties was a period that saw many definitive novels set in and about New York. In 1921 Edith Wharton became the first female novelist to win the Nobel prize for her 1920 novel of old New York society The Age of Innocence, which has distinguished it in her oeuvre as the capstone of her old New York fiction. In the same year The Great Gatsby was published, 1925, fellow Lost Generation novelist John Dos Passos published his very different representation of New York: Manhattan Transfer. As I’ve mentioned previously, Nella Larsen’s novel Passing tells a different story of New York, and came out in 1928, while Claude McKay published his first novel Home to Harlem in the same year. Every novel offers a unique and different view of New York, and the Great Gatsby definitely has its own fingerprint.

The New York of The Great Gatsby is an outsider’s New York, something both Fitzgerald and his narrator Nick Carraway are aware of by the end of the novel.

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” (176)

Fitzgerald, an admirer of Edith Wharton’s writing, must have been well-aware that his own account of the Northeast could never aspire to Wharton’s insider knowledge of old and gilded-age New York and his novel is a tale—at its core—of various layers of outsiders.

In contrast, Dos Passos’s novel, another New York outsider, tells a vastly different story. As one of my students described it, Manhattan Transfer captures the experience of the city in all its jumbled noise and incoherence, where millions lead lives that might as well be hieroglyphs to them and us. Dos Passos’ tale of wealth inequality is more extreme than Fitzgerald’s and many of his characters have no time to worry about fitting in because they are simply too busy trying to survive, revealing by contrast that Fitzgerald’s tale is one of class-inequality rather than wealth disparity. In Fitzgerald’s small, insular New York there is plenty of money to go around if we exclude the Wilsons of the world, a brief nod of Fitzgerald’s to actual financial hardship.

In the above quote Fitzgerald distinguishes regionally between East and West rather than New York and anywhere else, a regional vagueness the fastidious Wharton would never have made (another hint at the outside status of Fitzgerald and his characters).

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio” (176)

Here there is no talk of the divide between Northeast and Southeast, or even more simply the divide between Boston and New York, between the Puritanical and the purely economic. There is only the division between the older, more developed East Coast and the still hazy, undefined, undeveloped West.

The New York of this Western set is an insular and limited one. On the one hand, Tom and Nick’s shared background as Yale alumni marks them as privileged and belonging to the Ivy League landscape as it is inscribed on New York City (Nick uses the Yale Club as a place to dine and quietly work, away from the “riot” of Jazz Age New York).

“I took dinner, usually at the Yale Club. . . and then I went upstairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. There were generally a few rioters around, but they never came into the library so It was a good place to work” (56)

Gatsby, the biggest outsider of the outsiders tries to pass himself off as an insider by claiming he’s an Oxford man, a University more prestigious but also safely distant.

Yet, in spite of having attended the correct schools, Tom and Nick remain disconnected from any sign of a deeper connection to New York and the Northeast. Similarly, unlike Caroline Beaufort, a southern belle with inroads to Whartonian society through bloodlines in The Age of Innocence, St. Louis debutante Daisy also shows no sign of connection to New York.

The narrative is, instead, confined to the small, tight world of the Western transplants whose elite geography nevertheless imitates that of New York. If Gatsby and Nick unfashionably live too far West on Long Island, New York geography similarly divides into Uptown Easy and West of Central Park. Tom keeps his mistress Myrtle Wilson on the UWS (Upper West Side), a deadline of midwestern outsiders in Wharton’s fiction. When Nick meets Jordan in New York it is on the fashionable UES (Upper East Side), but still in the Plaza, a potent symbol of wealth and privilege but also of being a visitor. Similarly, during the climax of the novel the cast returns to Uptown East. Having no house to retire to group takes a room in the Plaza, again. Tom keeps his wife on the UES and his mistress on the UWS, relying on the classic class-division between the two geographies and, thereby, illustrating a basic command of New York social geography without being able to penetrate any deeper than a hotel.

The New York of The Great Gatsby is one of public spaces and large landmarks. Characters criss-cross back and forth through Central Park, moving from East to West Side. They arrive at Penn Station, meet at the Plaza, study at the Yale Club, and drive across the Triborough Bridge. It is an obvious New York, one that, aside from the Yale Club, nearly every tourist experiences. Within these movements Fitzgerald captures a rhythm of the city that comprises some of his most memorable prose.

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life (35).

“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye (56).

The City seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world (68).

“I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.” (125)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004.

—-. “My Lost City.” Writing New York: A Literary Anthology. Editor Phillip Lopate. New York: Library of America, 2008. 569-579.