28 Practicing New Historicism and Cultural Studies
For our New Historicism and cultural studies theoretical response, we will take a slightly different approach compared with previous chapters. Everyone will read an excerpt from The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald and review four film trailers and reviews below. You’ll then choose between two options to complete your theoretical response. Note that in both cases, your theoretical response will be slightly longer (750-1000 words) this week because you’ll need to integrate multiple sources.
Option One: New Historicism
Using the artifacts listed below, apply the techniques of New Historicism to explore how these texts exist and interact within their contexts. Here are the four required artifacts:
- Excerpt from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
- “Lament for Dark Peoples” by Langston Hughes (1926)
- The 1926 film trailer for The Great Gatsby (below)
- The 1926 New York Times film review for The Great Gatsby (note: you will need to use your free student account to access this article).
You may also want to do some brief research about the historical conditions of 1925-1926 in the United States. Focus on the artifacts as evidence of their historical contexts. Your response should be 750-1000 words and include a brief thesis statement that reflects your critical approach.
Here are some questions to consider as you write your response:
- What do we need to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald to understand The Great Gatsby as a cultural artifact? What do we need to know about Langston Hughes? And how does purely biographical criticism differ from a New Historicism approach?
- What are some of the main historical events that occurred in the period when the book, poem, and film were created? Do you see these historical events reflected in these three artifacts?
- How might this historical context shape the creation of these three cultural artifacts? How does the 1926 film review affect your understanding of this context?
- Do we see congruity in messaging around social norms in these three artifacts? What are those social norms? Are there any missing or excluded voices in these artifacts? If so, why?
- What other artifacts might you consider if you wanted to learn more or confirm your theories about the historical context for these three artifacts? For example, what kinds of advertisements would you expect to see in this issue of the New York Times?
- How do we view these artifacts and their societal/cultural norms from our modern perspective? In other words, have our cultural/societal norms remained stable in the 60 years since these cultural artifacts were published? If not, what significant changes have occurred?
Option Two: Cultural Studies
Film and media studies are common cultural studies approaches. For this option, you’ll have more choice over your artifacts, and you’ll be considering the text and the film artifacts as examples of the cultures that produced them. You’ll need to use the following artifact:
- Excerpt from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
Then choose any two film trailers and reviews from the 1949, 1974, and 2013 versions linked below.
In addition to considering the historical and cultural context of the novel, you should also do some brief historical research about the two film years that you choose. Focus on the artifacts as evidence of the culture that produced and received them, and consider how and why that reception has changed over time. Your response should be 750-1000 words and include a brief thesis statement that reflects your critical approach.
Here are some questions to consider as you write your response:
- What do we need to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald to understand The Great Gatsby as a cultural artifact? What did “popular culture” look like in the mid 1920s in the United States?
- What cultural norms do you see reflected in the two film adaptations you chose? How do the cultural norms when these movies were made compare with the cultural norms in the novel excerpt?
- How do the film reviews affect your understanding of this cultural context?
- How have social norms and the messaging around them changed in these three artifacts? What are those social norms? Are there any missing or excluded voices in these artifacts? If so, why?
- What other artifacts might you consider if you wanted to learn more or confirm your theories about societal and cultural norms in these three artifacts? For example, what kinds of advertisements would you expect to see in this issue of the New York Times?
- How do we view these artifacts and their societal/cultural norms from our modern perspective? Have our views changed since these cultural artifacts were published? (This may be an especially interesting question if you choose the 2013 version).
Post your short essay (using either option one or option two) to the New Historicism/Cultural Studies Theoretical Response discussion board. Please include the option you have chosen in your post title. I have included the theoretical response assignment instructions at the end of this chapter.
Excerpt from “The Great Gatsby” (1925)
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.
I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s-egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer: the honour would be entirely Gatsby’s, it said, if I would attend his “little party” that night. He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it—signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand.
Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven, and wandered around rather ill at ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn’t know—though here and there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.
I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down into the garden.
Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passersby.
“Hello!” I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden.
“I thought you might be here,” she responded absently as I came up. “I remembered you lived next door to—”
She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses, who stopped at the foot of the steps.
“Hello!” they cried together. “Sorry you didn’t win.”
That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before.
“You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow, “but we met you here about a month ago.”
“You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan, and I started, but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine, we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble.
“Do you come to these parties often?” inquired Jordan of the girl beside her.
“The last one was the one I met you at,” answered the girl, in an alert confident voice. She turned to her companion: “Wasn’t it for you, Lucille?”
It was for Lucille, too.
“I like to come,” Lucille said. “I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.”
“Did you keep it?” asked Jordan.
“Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.”
“There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with anybody.”
“Who doesn’t?” I inquired.
“Gatsby. Somebody told me—”
The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.
“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.
“I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille sceptically; “It’s more that he was a German spy during the war.”
One of the men nodded in confirmation.
“I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us positively.
“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.”
She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.
The first supper—there would be another one after midnight—was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party, who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were three married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside—East Egg condescending to West Egg and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gaiety.
“Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour; “this is much too polite for me.”
We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host: I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.
The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.
A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.
“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.
“About what?”
He waved his hand toward the bookshelves.
“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”
“The books?”
He nodded.
“Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.”
Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the Stoddard Lectures.
“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”
Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering.
“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
“Has it?”
“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—”
“You told us.”
We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.
There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners—and a great number of single girls dancing individually or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were doing “stunts” all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.
I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.
At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.
“Your face is familiar,” he said politely. “Weren’t you in the First Division during the war?”
“Why yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.”
“I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”
We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had just bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning.
“Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.”
“What time?”
“Any time that suits you best.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled.
“Having a gay time now?” she inquired.
“Much better.” I turned again to my new acquaintance. “This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there—” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”
For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.
“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.
“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”
“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”
He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of us in turn.
“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”
When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan—constrained to assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years.
“Who is he?” I demanded. “Do you know?”
“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”
“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”
“Now you’re started on the subject,” she answered with a wan smile. “Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.”
A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.
“However, I don’t believe it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went there.”
Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he killed a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.
“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladmir Tostoff’s latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: “Some sensation!” Whereupon everybody laughed.
“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as ‘Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World!’ ”
The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. When the “Jazz History of the World” was over, girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men’s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their falls—but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby’s shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s head for one link.
“I beg your pardon.”
Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us.
“Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.”
“With me?” she exclaimed in surprise.
“Yes, madame.”
She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.
I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan’s undergraduate, who was now engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who implored me to join him, I went inside.
The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky colour, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a deep vinous sleep.
“She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a girl at my elbow.
I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s party, the quartet from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks—at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed: “You promised!” into his ear.
The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised voices.
“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.”
“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”
“We’re always the first ones to leave.”
“So are we.”
“Well, we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men sheepishly. “The orchestra left half an hour ago.”
In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night.
As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into formality as several people approached him to say goodbye.
Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she lingered for a moment to shake hands.
“I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long were we in there?”
“Why, about an hour.”
“It was… simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” She yawned gracefully in my face. “Please come and see me… Phone book… Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard… My aunt…” She was hurrying off as she talked—her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.
Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the garden.
“Don’t mention it,” he enjoined me eagerly. “Don’t give it another thought, old sport.” The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. “And don’t forget we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine o’clock.”
Then the butler, behind his shoulder:
“Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.”
“All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there… Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.” He smiled—and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it all the time. “Good night, old sport… Good night.”
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Excerpt from Chapter Three” The Great Gatsby, 1925. https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64317/pg64317-images.html Public Domain.
Film Trailers and New York Times Reviews
After reading the excerpt from The Great Gatsby, watch these four film trailers. If you choose to take a New Historicism approach, you should use the 1926 version. For a cultural studies approach, please choose two trailers/reviews from the 1949, 1974, and 2013 versions.
1926 Version
Review: Hall, Mordaunt. “Gold and Cocktails.” The New York Times. November 22, 1926. https://www.nytimes.com/1926/11/22/archives/gold-and-cocktails.html
1949 Version
Review: Crowther, Bosley. “The Screen in Review: ‘The Great Gatsby,’ Based on the Novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Opens at the Paramount.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1949/07/14/archives/the-screen-in-review-the-great-gatsby-based-on-novel-of-f-scott.html
1974 Version
Review: Canby, Vincent. “A Lavish ‘Gatsby’ Loses the Book’s Spirit.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/28/archives/a-lavish-gatsby-loses-book-s-spirit.html%20%0d2013
2013 Version
Review: Scott, A.O. “Shimmying Off the Literary Mantle.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/movies/the-great-gatsby-interpreted-by-baz-luhrmann.html
Theoretical Response Assignment Instructions
Instructions
Grading
- 15 points: theoretical response
- 10 points: online discussion (5 points per response) OR class attendance.
