Outline Ch.3 Hoffman's "The Twenties"

I. Vanity Fair:
a. The Literary Magazine: "Vanity Fair was filled with pertinent references to the customs of the time, parodies of its pretensions, serious discussions of its intellectual interests (or the lack of them), and, in the advertisements, appeals to the wealthy and the snobbish." (Hoff 108) Great novelists such as: Pound, Huxley, Bell, Woolcott, Lewis, Lawrence, among others contributed to Vanity Fair. "The subscribers were introduced to the latest in the arts: there were discussions of futurism, of modern music, or vers libre, of the symbolists, of Joyce's new ‘Work in Progress,' of Apollinaire, of The Waste Land. "Among the issues most frequently debated in Vanity Fair was the overwhelming stupidity of Prohibition . Perhaps its most successful offerings were the parodies, the cartoons, the sophisticated treatment of customs and pretensions." (Hoff 109). "The magazine skillfully combined a spirit of mockery with a proper attention to its publisher's worries about what ‘that old lady in Dubuque would think.'" "They (the younger generation) lived all over Manhattan, at both ends of Fifth Avenue, and disported themselves in a manner that amused Vanity Fair's humorists, impressed its book reviewers, and provoked replies and analyses from sophisticated journalists." (Hoff 110).
b. The New Generation: "The age of the ‘new generation' ranged from twelve to thirty; it was best that the flapper from seventeen to twenty-one; the young man should be in his twenties. The most precocious member of the younger generation, was Elizabeth Benson, who at twelve and thirteen alleged to have written three essays for Vanity Fair. In her second essay Benson speaks about the younger generation: "When boys and girls of the adolescent and post-adolescent age are granted an audience with their elders, they deliberately manufacture evidence of their wildness merely to hold attention to their elders. And all of these authorities warned us of the danger of repressing our normal instincts and desires...Nature and war, and prohibition, and feminism, and psychoanalysis, and the new fashions in dress; a tottering religion, imitation of our elders, automobiles, radios and free money, the industrial era, and a new physical education-these forces have had their hand in baking the pie out of which, like the four and twenty blackbirds, has sprung the younger generation of today." (Hoff 112). The new generation was rebelling against the elders, they easily dismissed conventions, and began their new styles of life.
c. Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis began in the twenties, was founded by Freud. But Jung, Ellis, and Adler also became popular for their teachings.
d. Fitzgerald's writings: Fitzgerald's writings were meant to be a social criticism of 1920's society. He makes obvious the superficialities of materialism and "the party lifestyle".
II. The Young Cynic and the Moon-Calf
a. Existentialism: The belief that life is meaningless and disorderly, but we can give our life meaning by doing something that gives our life purpose, became widely popular in literature, especially in Ben Hecht's novels. The Moon Calf is about the younger generation rebelling against the older one, and about rejecting religion.
b. Fitzgerald: "The strains and pressures of that life yielded more and more to the understanding and the integrity of the artist who sincerely wanted to find its meaning. Fitzgerald is representative of the decade, but not, certainly, in having clowned for its amazement. He was able, when he felt comparatively free, to see his experience as both symbolic and symptomatic. The young men and the flappers in his stories grew perceptively older, hardened, and eventually became representative images of a class." (Hoff 112). "In its freedom from any too systematic or imperious moral scruple and in view of a most remarkable succession of national absurdities, the decade offered Fitzgerald one of the greatest literary chances a good writer has ever had. In his best work he judged and defined with the utmost clarity the decade's worst errors of taste as well as its most sincere moral gestures." (Hoff 123)
III. Her Sweet Face and My New Clothes:
a. Fitzgerald's influences: Fitzgerald was a voracious reader, and his writing was widely influenced by Youth's Encounter and Sinister Street. There are also parallels and similarities to those works in his own writing.
b. Fitzgerald's work:"In every subsequent book Fitzgerald was to revalue what he had said here, to tighten his saying of it and to penetrate beneath the surface of life here presented, to clear the modern scene if trash that cluttered the formulations of attitude in This Side of Paradise." (Hoff 130) "For Fitzgerald, the flapper was a genuine center of young life; she helped him to pose a major question and served as its evidence and text." (Hoff 131). "For Fitzgerald's young the moment of beauty and serene self-confidence was short indeed. For Fitzgerald, there was always a touch of disaster, or of the fear of it, in his bright young women with their pretty faces." (Hoff 132)
IV. The Rich are Different:
a. Money and Wealth in Fitzgerald's Work: "The problem of wealth was a major concern of Fitzgerald's work for other reasons as well. He hated the poor for their helplessness. Nevertheless he could not see that the wealthy quite deserved their privileges. Wealth seemed to him not infrequently associated with a lack of taste, a coarseness and raw ostentation, a sense of advantage existing beyond the reach of moral responsibility. (Hoff 132) "The tragedy of the 1920s-or one of them-for Fitzgerald was the need of money in order to keep the moment of beauty and illusion alive, to keep it for oneself."(Hoff 133). Gatsby, as a writer, was struggling economically, he despised the rich and believed they could use their wealth for greater purposes. He also hated the idea that money will "buy the girl" and he criticizes this belief in "The Great Gatsby". "Throughout the 1920s there was in Fitzgerald's work a feeling that money after all does not buy anything but tragedy and remorse." (Hoff 134).The wealthy lack morality, and it is their greed for material possessions and money itself that leads to each character's tragic downfall.
V. The Text: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:
a. The Great Gatsby: Gatsby can be viewed as a tragic figure. He has the right motive, and is a wonderful guy on the surface, but his greed is what leads him to his end, and is essentially what destroys most characters in the novel. "The tragedy of Gatsby's career is not his death, which is after all the result of an accident brought about by Tom Buchanan's belligerent carelessness. From being the younger generations' most brilliant and charming spokesman, Fitzgerald in a few short years became its most perceptive and incisive judge."(Hoff 142). "Fitzgerald's effort to point to the ‘disaster' implicit in the behavior of the very young led him to an excess of admiration for Gatsby in untenable and almost intolerable terms. The Great Gatsby was a sentimental novel, with several fatal lapses of taste and judgment. Gatsby, his most remarkable creation, is judged only in terms of himself; and Gatsby's indiscretions, which are enormous, are first forgiven, then sanctified and romantified."(Hoff 143)