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Hi ElaineIt would be great if you could do this lesson next Monday. Focus on Chapter 7 (The Plaza Hotel) and use the two films (Jack Clayton and Baz L) and the critical quotes to answer one of the following Sec A even (debate) questions.1. Split into two groups. Hand each group one of the questions (see below)Gp 1What do you think about the view that there are no women in The Great Gatsby with whom the reader can sympathise?Gp 2What do you think of the view that obsession with money and the consumer culture of the 1920s dominates human thinking and behaviour in The Great Gatsby?2. Watch the two interpretations: what meanings do they bring to the text? Which one is more effective? How might you use this interpretation in a debate Q?3. Read the critical piece (on next page) relevant to your question (let them decide which is appropriate). What quote would you find most useful to apply and evaluate?4. Use the Essay scaffold to help you compose an essay (in pairs/group/independently)3.Leyland J Person “Herstory” and Daisy Buchanan’ in ‘American Literature’(1978/9)(116, 17, 119, 21)Person attempts to ‘win back’ focus on Daisy. As a Feminist reading, it takes the view that Daisy is demonised by Nick and disempowered by Gatsby , who takes her story and makes it his and then into history; creating a platonic ideal for her that no human could live up to. Nick does the same and Person suggests he makes her ‘stand for the corruption of the American dream’. Daisy’s tale has its own dream and desires, and Person views her as ultimately Gatsby’s ‘female double’. Persontakes a psychoanalytic approach much favoured inthe 1970s.Few (male) critics write about Daisy without entering the unofficial competition of maligning her character. Marius Bewley refers to her ‘vicious emptiness’.. Alfred Kazin judges her ‘vulgar and inhuman’… finally Leslie Fielder sees her as “a dark destroyer, a purveyor of ‘corruption and death’ and ‘the first notable anti-virgin of our fiction, the prototype of the blasphemous portraits of Fair Goddess as bitch in which C20th fiction abounds.’ (1967) Such an easy polarization into Good Boy/Bad Girl however, arises from a kind of critical double standard.. Daisy in fact is more victim than victimizer; she is victim first of Tom’s ‘cruel’ power, but then of Gatsby’s increasingly depersonalised vision of her. She becomes the unwitting ‘grail’ in Gatsby’s adolescent quest to remain faithful to his seventeen-year-old conception of self. Thus, Daisy’s reputed failure of Gatsby is inevitable; no woman, no human being, could ever replicate the platonic ideal he has invented.Daisy herself expresses the same desire to escape the temporal world. If Daisy fails to measure up to Gatsby’s fantasy, he for his part fails to match up to hers. At the same time that she exists as the ideal object of Gatsby’s quest, she becomes his female double. She is both anima and doppelganger and The Great Gatsby is finally the story of the failure of a mutual dream. The novel describes the death of a romantic vision of America and embodies that theme in the accelerated dissociation – the mutual alienation – of men and women before the materialistic values of modern society. Despite the tendency to view her as ‘a monster of bitchery’ (Hunt and Suarez 1973), Daisy has her own complex story, her own desires and needs. In choosing Tom over the absent Gatsby she has allowed herself to be shaped forever by the crude force of Tom’s money. Yet Daisy discovers as early as her honeymoon with Tom that his world is hopelessly corrupt; in fact, Daisy’s lyric energy (which so attracts Gatsby) must be (literally) frozen before she can marry Tom. .. She has been baptized by ice and with her romantic impulses effectively frozen, she becomes ‘paralysed’ with conventional happiness as Mrs Tom Buchannan. Her present ideal, transmitted to her daughter, is to be ‘a beautiful little fool’ because that is the ‘best thing a girl can be’ (Ch 1)Daisy is victimized by a male tendency to project a self-satisfying, yet ultimately dehumanising, image on woman. If Gatsby ‘wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy’; if Nick had nearly recovered a ‘fragment of lost words’ through the inspiring magic of her voice, then Daisy’s potential selfhood is finally betrayed by the world of the novel. Hers remains a ‘lost voice’ and its words and meaning seem ‘uncommunicable forever’. Ronald Berman ‘The Great Gatsby and Modern Times’ (1994)(151 - 5)From modern cultural studies, this is a Marxist /Cultural reading of the language of the marketplace in the book. Berman focuses on the desire for commodities in the book,and how characters draw their models of identity from the larger ‘cultural text’ around them, also relating this to film and popular culture of the time, and how images in the book areinformed by modernist art.The Great Gatsby devotes much of its narration to the description of industrial things and forms – the story takes place within a geometric grid of streets and avenues, and the text is alive with places to rent and sell and stay. There is also the reiterated presence of movie images in magazines, of movie selves imitated by personality. As for billboards and windows and luminous signs, they overlook much of the novel’s action and provide certain meanings.Although extremely visual, the novel is full of barriers to sight and insight. It may be that the dimness of perception of people and things corresponds to the ambiguity of human relationships.Fitzgerald’s intricate statement of time and place calls our attention to it. One way is realistic, locating the action in a given chronological sequence over the summer of 1922. We see events cultural issues and styles of this brief period and also of the quarter century in which it is set. The second kind of time is connected to the idea of imbalance so recently brought to consciousness by T.S.Eliot in The Wasteland of that year. One date in the novel, 5th July 1922, with its permutations of class and style and coming straight after independence day, links with the progression of names of those who went to Gatsby’s parties, suggesting social and personal change, mobility and the ‘blurring and loss of identity’ (Long, 1979) of American democracy. But time is connected not only to time but to space. The more Nick tries to locate himself in West Egg on Long Island in North America, the more he finds he is somewhere he scarcely knows at all. Confusions of time and place affect the co-ordinates of logic in the book as well as geography. We progress (finally) to the view from Queensboro Bridge where all of time is cancelled, and to a sidewalk in Louisville which becomes Jacob’s Ladder (chapter 6).(Much in the book) connects entertainment with consumerism, and consumerism with the acquisition of character (Myrtle gets her identity in part form the Town Tattle scandal magazine). Jordan baker’s name implies one kind of technology (according to Bruccoli ‘two automobile makers: the sporty Jordan, and the Baker electric. 1991) and her figure to ‘flattened impossibly elongated figures of Cubist painting’ The language of the marketplace infiltrates everywhere. Wilson can’t tell the difference between God and an advertisement; Nick sees Jordan for the last time, ‘thinking she looked like a good illustration’. Feelings and perceptions may even be provided by the marketplace. Myrtle buys her dog and Tom buys her. Nick rents, Gatsby buys, the Buchanans inherit. Commodities are definitions: …... Gatsby knows that his gorgeous car establishes his status.The characters in the book see ideal forms of themselves in film and magazines. The narrative uses language of ‘picture’ ‘illustration’ ‘advertisement’ and prepares us to understand that everything they do is theatrical. There is hardly a character in the novel that does not have an ideal self in mind, constructed or achieved….as the product of market enterprise, and specifically related to magazines and movies. We are accustomed to think of The Great Gatsby as a story of social mobility and change, but it is also a story of disguise. The characters absorb ideas and feelings from what is communicated to them. It might be said that their closest relationships are not with each other – and certainly not with family or community or tradition - but with published advertised and perceived images and print. As the narrative begins, Nick tells us how far we are away from family, tradition and clan; on the last page he states our irretrievable distance from historical beginnings. Much of the narrative in between registers the advent of ideas and values from other kinds of sources. ................
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