Gatsby Melancholia

Against Melancholia: Contemporary Mourning Theory, Fitzgeralds
The Great Gatsby, and the Politics of Unfinished Grief

Forter, Greg.
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 14,
Number 2, Summer 2003, pp. 134-170 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
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Copyright 2003 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14: 2
greg forter
Against Melancholia:
Contemporary Mourning Theory, Fitzgeralds
The Great Gatsby, and the Politics of Unfinished Grief
Since at least the late 1960s, scholars seeking to understand
experiences of social or collective bereavement have drawn on Freuds
influential distinction between mourning and melancholia. The distinc-
tion is by now well known. Mourning designates, on Freuds account, a
psychic response to loss that reaches a definite end or conclusion, since
the mourner is able to work through grief in a relatively unambivalent
fashionand so to relinquish past attachments in the name of forming new
ones. Melancholia, by contrast, is mourning crippled by a hostility toward
what one has lost that prevents one from fully relinquishing it; it entails an
ambivalent incorporation of the object as a strategy for keeping ones argu-
ment with it going and results in a sense of inner desolation, an incapacity
to form new attachments, and a self-beratement whose unconscious target
is the internalized objectbut whose intensity can nonetheless culminate
in the melancholics suicide (Mourning 24353).
Early efforts to use this distinction for exploring collective
losses accepted uncritically Freuds understanding of melancholia as a
pathology, even as they offered important modifications to his theory.
Most significant among these efforts was Alexander and Margarete
d i f f e r e n c e s 135
Mitscherlichs The Inability to Mourn. The Mitscherlichs sought to explain
the widespread failure in postwar Germany to confront the nations Nazi
past. They argued that, in the wake of the Third Reichs humiliating defeat,
German society should have undergone a kind of melancholic crisis, a
collective plunge into depression at the enforced rupture of individual
egos from the Fhrer as ego-ideal. This melancholic reaction was for the
Mitscherlichs the condition of authentic mourning; that is, they thought of
melancholia not merely as a crippling psychic debility but also as a more
primitive or archaic moment in mourning: a state arising from the loss of
identifications so profound as to be constitutive of ones self, and a state
which must be worked through in order to establish the sense of separate-
ness that enables one to relinquish what one has lost. Only through this
process could the German people have overcome (rather than repress)
the narcissistic identifications that provided the psychosocial support for
the Holocaust. And only then could so many begin to mourn the genocidal
deaths in which they had psychically collaborated. The Mitscherlichs
described a number of strategies by which German people evaded this
labor, including a tendency to cast themselves as victims, an effort to
derealize the past, the desperately immediate transfer of allegiance to
the Allies, and the collective manic defenses embodied symptomatically
in the economic miracle.
The Inability to Mourn sparked an enormously fruitful contro-
versy in West Germany upon its publication in 1967. I raise it here, in a
quite different context, because it seems to me the product of a moment
that feels surprisingly remote from our owna moment when politically
committed intellectuals could still believe with some sanguinity that social
losses ought to be mourned, that successful mourning was both possible
and socially preferable to melancholia.
1
To put it this way is to simplify
slightly, since the Mitscherlichs trouble Freuds distinction by recasting
melancholia as the prerequisite for mourning; but they value the melan-
cholic state only as an unavoidable necessity. They see it as an affliction
caused by the loss of certain kinds of social bonds and insist that it has
to be worked through in the name of inventing a society that remembers,
rather than unconsciously repeats, a murderous and authoritarian past.
By the early 1990s, when Eric Santner extended the Mitscher-
lichs analysis in his Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in
Postwar Germany, a shift in critical attitudes toward melancholia had
placed new demands on the call for mourning. Santner devotes signifi-
cant portions of his first chapter to the posthumous discovery of Paul
136 Against Melancholia
de Mans collaborationist wartime writings. He engages especially the
defense mounted by various scholars (including Jacques Derrida) that de
Mans later emphasis on the elegiac character of language represented a
rigorous expiation for and displaced working through of his ideological
complicity with Nazism. Santner argues that such defenses elide a cru-
cial distinction. While it may be true that language entails an originary
decentering that cuts us off from the plenitude of Being, and while decon-
struction may insist we acknowledge this decentering in order to resist
the violence enabled by its disavowal (the subjugation of otherness and its
magisterial assimilation to the same), the loss to which language initiates
us is clearly not the same as the loss of actual loved ones, let alone the
loss of those who died as victims of an ideology to which one has (how-
ever temporarily) subscribed. Santner calls this the distinction between
structural and historical mourning. The error of Paul de Man, he
writes, was [. . .] that he sought to displace and disperse the particular,
historical tasks of mourning [. . .] with what might be called structural
mourning, that is, mourning for those catastrophes that are inseparable
from being-in-language (29). De Man thus avoided a confrontation with
history by displacing his mournful gaze onto the divestments incurred
by language. And since, Santner continues, so much recent critical
theory has followed de Mans lead in reducing historical suffering [. . .] to
a series of structural operations depleted of affect [. . .] the error of Paul de
Man [. . .] becomes exemplary (29). Not just de Man but poststructuralism
more generally has tended to lose sight of the psychosocial histories that
particularize contingent losses within the larger, more inescapable field
of bereavements that all of us share.
Santner himself continues to think of both structural and his-
torical grief-work as mourning. We might, however, recast his distinction
as one between mourning and melancholia and say that the emphasis
on structural loss as constitutive of human subjectivity marks the emer-
gence in critical discourse of a recuperated melancholia, according to
which surmounting bereavement becomes a kind of specious denial of
our predicament as linguistic beings. A subject constituted by alienation
into language is one that is ineradicably melancholy. Any effort to work
through this state can only be seen as a retreat into the mystifications of
self-presence or into the psychotic delusions of a linguistically unmediated
possession of the real. Subjective enlightenment consists, accordingly, in
acknowledging that one is disconsolately marooned in the symbolic: com-
pensated for the loss of Being by a language one must never mistake for a
medium of mastery or an instrument through which one might properly
name and even get an object that makes one whole.
Santners book could thus be said to elaborate the political lim-
its of a theory that makes subjectivity intrinsically melancholya theory
the political rationale of which has been a kind of antihumanist libertari-
anism suspicious of the kinds of closures and restitutions that normal
mourning implies. Without denying the poststructuralist insight, Santner
insists that historical losses exceed those induced by language
2
and that
for these more concrete losses, we might productively retain an emphasis
on the necessity of working through and the possibility of compensatory
investments. Implicit in such an account is the further recognition that
to absorb historical losseswhich are contingent and therefore resist-
ibleinto structural losseswhich are inevitable and irresistibleis to
vacate the field of ethical choice and political action altogether.
In the decade since the publication of Santners book, poststruc-
turalist descriptions of what I am calling a melancholic subjectivity have
given way to explicit attempts to rehabilitate melancholiaand to do so in
the context of historical rather than structural (linguistic) catastrophes.
Scholars, that is, have mounted spirited defenses of melancholia on political
grounds. Their broadest claims have been that the irresolution of melan-
cholia may be characteristic of grief more generally and that the effort to
pathologize such responses works to normalize restitutive mourning in the
name of a disciplinary social ideal. Jahan Ramazani thus finds in modern
elegy a melancholic mourning that challenges Freuds insidious distinc-
tion between normal and abnormal grief (140). Philip Novak makes this
challenge part of an antiracist politics, suggesting that melancholia may be
an appropriate and necessary response for African Americans trying to hold
on to a distinctive culture threatened by white racism (191). Michael Moon
contends that, because gay men and women are categorically excluded
from the normalcy that mourning restores, the Freudian model of
mourning may look fundamentally normalizing and [. . .] privative. He
therefore recommends that gay men respond to the catastrophes of aids
with what amounts to a melancholic fetishism, through which they might
extend (rather than relinquish) their erotic attachments to the dead (235,
239). And Jos Muoz synthesizes the kinds of arguments made by Moon
and Novak, suggesting that for blacks and queers [. . .] melancholia [is]
not a pathology or a self-absorbed mood that inhibits activism, but [. . .] a
mechanism that helps us (re)construct identity and take our dead to the
various battles we must wage in their names (35556).
Such politically sensitive revisions mark an advance over post-
structuralisms more globalizing descriptions of melancholy subjectivity.
By grounding their claims in specific experiences of loss, often those of
subcultural groups, these authors help remind us that to establish a uni-
versal pattern of mourning and enjoin all victims of loss to follow it is to
erase the particularities of lived experience, and often, to delegitimate
continued attachment to what a dominant culture deems unimportant or
pernicious. That psychoanalysis has historically abetted such delegitima-
tion makes caution an especially wise policy when addressing social ills
with psychic categories. And though mourning may seem a relatively
benign term in this contextcompared, say, with the more clearly vexed
psychoanalytic history of homosexualthe critics I have mentioned are
right to point out that the injunction to mourn is often used in astonish-
ingly normalizing ways, even by supposedly enlightened theorists and
analysts such as Julia Kristeva.
3
Nevertheless, I have reservations about this recent embrace
of melancholia.
4
My reasons for these are several and related. First, in
the arguments of Moon, Novak, and Muoz, the recourse to melancholia
seems to be motivated by a misunderstanding of what Freud means by
relinquishing objects through mourning. These authors assume that
mourning entails forgetting or ceasing to care about the object, so that
melancholia then becomes the only method of faithful preservation. Such
an assumption misconstrues, for one thing, the profoundly unconscious
character of melancholia: the melancholic cannot remember the lost object
because she or he does not even know what she or he has lost. The loss,
as Freud puts it, is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinc-
tion to mourning, in which there is nothing unconscious about the loss
(Mourning 245). The melancholics unconscious incorporation in this
sense prevents the object from being remembered, in part because it con-
fuses self and other and so makes it hard for the other to become an object
of memory or consciousness.
5
Mourning, in contrast, as Gregg Horowitz has argued, enables
remembering precisely through the process of letting go:
The mourner decathects the psychic traces of the lost object not
to forget them, but to detach them from the lost object and thus
render them memorable for the very first time. In this way, griev-
ing preserves the intimacy with the lost object despite its being
lost to us. The loss always shadows, but it does not swallow, the
mourners love. The lost object is permitted to go its way, the
decathected memory traces theirs, and thus the joy in having
suffered love is sustained. (153)
Mourning helps us to relinquish real objects by building psychic memori-
als to themthe memorials we call memories. The political corollary
of this is that it is only once we can consciously articulate, as fully as pos-
sible (though never of course completely), what racism or homophobia or
sexism has destroyed that we can build a collective memory of it and seek
to do battle in its name.
A second problem with these accounts is that the depathologiz-
ing of melancholia risks shading into a celebration of it, or risks at least
encouraging its collective cultivation. For those of us who have experi-
enced the bleak and joyless deadness of depression, it is hard to see how
this cultivation can be seen as politically liberating. It feels, at least, about
as far from freedom as it is possible to be, as it places one in the grip of a
darkness that negates all pleasure and interest in living. This is of course
to offer a phenomenology that might appear to retreat from the more social
analyses of Moon, Novak, and Muoz, in particular. But my point is that
those analyses are strangely out of touch with the affect of melancholia.
Freud is interested in this condition because it is characterized by numbed
disconnection and a self-loathing whose logical conclusion is suicide. To
make this condition a basis for political solidarity is to substitute elegant
theorizing for actual, lived experience in a way that encourages a collec-
tive self-hatred whose progressive implications are far from clear. Indeed,
as Douglas Crimp argued some years ago, the gay communitys reaction to
the aids crisis may already be hampered in some ways by an unacknowl-
edged melancholic self-destructiveness produced by the proscriptions
on gay mourninga self-destructiveness that Crimp finds expressed in
writings by the openly gay, antigay crusaders Marshall Kirk and Hunter
Madsen (1214, 1618). From this point of view, the melancholic inability
to mourn may be both personally and politically suicidal, and the virtual
erasure of ambivalence and self-aggression in these accounts is the con-
dition of melancholias political rehabilitation. (Muozs essay contains
the word ambivalence in its title, but his absorption of the concept into
disidentification robs it of affective specificity; see 35054.) Its surely
significant in this context that Ramazani, who does foreground rage and
ambivalence, makes the least explicitly political argument of the critics
I have mentioned. He is in any case far more persuasive on the aesthetic
and affective power of melancholia than on its political usefulness.
Once we reintroduce aggression and self-inflicted psychic
violence into these descriptions, the political implications or uses of
melancholia become considerably more complex. It is, of course, vital to
open a space within normal grief for acknowledging such aggression,
along with the processes of internalization and continued preoccupation
with loss that Moon, Muoz, Ramazani, and Novak describe. But it seems
to me equally urgent to distinguish between those forms of aggressive
internalization that are crippling and those that are not.
6
This is probably
not a question that can be answered in advance; it needs to be decided on
a case-by-case basis, through collective conversation, and in ways that
are as noncoercive and subject to revision as possible. This means keep-
ing open the possibility that what looks crippling from the outside may
mark a resistance to culturally prescribed temporalities of mourning,
or even a provisional moment in the discovery of socially interdicted yet
creative self- or community-constructions. We need, in short, to be aware
that particular instances of melancholic ambivalence may be the result
of a diseased or insufficiently empathic social order. But surely, then, the
appropriate response is to try to change that ordernot to embrace mel-
ancholia but to defuse the melancholics self-aggression by altering the
psychosocial conditions that make the lost object/identity hateful to her
or him in the first place.
Judith Butlers Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification
provides a productive starting point for this project. Butler here builds on
the revision Freud made to his account of mourning in 1923, according
to which ambivalent incorporation becomes the sole condition under
which the id can give up its objects (Freud, Ego 29). All mourning,
in other words, is now at heart melancholic, as objects can be relin-
quished only by being ambivalently internalized. Butler marshals this
modification in the service of an exhilarating rethinking of gender iden-
tity; she argues that the first melancholic incorporation is of the same-sex
parent, who must be renounced as an object of love and incorporated as an
identificatory object in the name of constructing normative sexualitya
process that founds conventional gender on unmournable homosexual
grief.
Such an argument in some ways repeats the problems with
structural melancholia described earlier: melancholia is here inescap-
able because constitutive of (gender) identity, and mourning lost objects is
indistinguishable from entombing them in a graveyard called the psyche.
But I also hear in Butlers account the stirrings of something more politi-
cally promising. The essay is less a prescription for melancholia than
a description of the psychosocial conditions under which its hegemony
flourishes. Although Butler posits unfinished grief as the selfs ineradi-
cable truth, that is, she insists that the kinds of loss thus entailed are far
from immutable, that a set of emphatically social prohibitions determine
that this structural grief will take homosexual love as its object:
[In] a largely heterosexual culture [. . .] the loss of homosexual
objects and aims [. . .] would appear to be foreclosed from the
start. I say foreclosed to suggest that this is a preemptive loss,
a mourning for unlived possibilities. If this love is from the start
out of the question, then it cannot happen, and if it does, it cer-
tainly did not. If it does, it happens only under the official sign of
its prohibition [. . .]. When certain kinds of losses are compelled
by a set of culturally prevalent prohibitions, we might expect a
culturally prevalent form of melancholia [. . .]. And where there
is no public recognition or discourse through which such a loss
might be named and mourned, then melancholia takes on cul-
tural dimensions of contemporary consequence. (139)
These are, for me, extremely powerful and moving formulations. They
suggest how the losses that found normative gender are in fact prohibi-
tions against same-sex love, so that within our sex/gender system such
love cannot but be internalized as both foundation and indigestible limit
to heterosexual identity. For straight men and women, to experience
such love is to be troubled by a prohibited possibility that is nonetheless
lodged at the heart of who one is and so to engage in a self-beratement
(for violating the prohibition) that is constitutive of the heterosexual self
(14043).
Once we acknowledge this, it becomes possible to work toward
undoing these social prohibitions as well as toward generating the public
recognition that would enable such [. . .] loss to be named and mourned.
The second of these projects is a poignant reminder of the deformations
intrinsic to heterosexuality: the proscription against homosexual grief
entails a foreclosure so constitutive of identity as to be insusceptible of
conscious articulation. The first, and to my mind more crucial, project is
one that Butlers essay initiates: it is the project of pluralizing subject and
gender formation, such that the ungrievable loss in the self need not be
that of a same-sex attachment, any more than it need be an attachment to
someone of the opposite sex. For on this last point Butler is clear: Within
the formation of gay and lesbian identity, there may be an effort to dis-
avow a constitutive relationship to heterosexuality [. . .]. [T]he refusal to
recognize this identification [with heterosexuality] [. . .] designates the
domain of a specifically gay melancholia, a loss which cannot be recog-
nized, and hence, cannot be mourned (14849). Gender melancholia is,
in short, the debility attendant upon a commitment to binarized identities.
Inasmuch as human beings begin their lives bisexually, rigid homosexual
identifications, no less than heterosexual ones, are symptomatic of the
way our culture deploys the fact of structural bereavement in the name of
limiting who one can be and whom one is allowed to love (though clearly,
processes that produce straight identity are socially preferred). The goal of
a progressive sexual politics is, then, to minimize melancholic responses
by freeing desire and identification as much as possible from prohibition,
keeping both of them more labile, more fluid, even more mixed up in each
otherand certainly more open to their own intrinsic waywardness and
polymorphous promiscuity.
Butlers essay thus helps us focus a final reservation about
rehabilitating melancholia. If that rehabilitation has elided the violence
and unconsciousness of melancholic responses, her analysis requires us
to consider as well how taking seriously that aggression may show us
the conservative uses to which melancholia is currently put: gender mel-
ancholy is the psychic effect of a cultural hostility toward homosexual
attachments, of a sex/gender system that requires each one of us to live
that hostility internally. Any effort to mobilize melancholia in the name
of a progressive politics, then, will have to confront its contemporary
production for emphatically conservative ends or else be correspond-
ingly impoverished. Such a project must also confront the fact that this
conservatism has a history, that melancholia has often historically been
cultivated for dubious political purposes. Walter Benjamin made this point
as early as 1931, though his temperamental affinity with melancholia led
to a persistently fruitful ambivalence about its political possibilities (see
Pensky, esp. 1819). More recently, Juliana Schiesaris The Gendering of
Melancholia has shown that melancholy has consistently been gendered
male in the history of Western culture and that this coding works at once
to render womens melancholia banal (as merely depression) and to
heroize the male melancholic for his capacity to speak the truth about
insurmountable loss, the withdrawal of God, the selfs bifurcation, and
the unviability of phallic manhoodall of which losses are recuperated
through the authoritative character of the discourse in which the melan-
cholic proclaims them irrecuperable.
I have been describing my sense of the problems with the
rehabilitation of melancholia, both in the implicit, descriptively general-
ized form that this recuperation has taken and in its more overt, political
form. Put most broadly, my argument is that the first of these accounts
absorbs social losses into a general and insurmountable predicament,
thereby making resistance to the forces impelling those losses impos-
sible. The more political versions of the argument have yoked melancholia
to progressive positions only by remaining inadequately sensitive to the
psychic and affective specificity of this condition as well as to its political
history.
In the rest of this essay I model a criticism intended to redress
these inadequacies. I do this through a detailed reading of a literary text,
not as a retreat from political concerns, but under the guiding assumption
that the kinds of literature we make and canonize matter in part because
they encode enabling or crippling responses to loss within their very
forms.
7
In reading The Great Gatsby, then, I will be suggesting that the
novel is representative of a dominant strand of American modernism that
has troubling affinities with the contemporary theories I have discussed.
The books exemplary status resides in the fact that it responds melancholi-
cally to a specifically social loss.
8
My essay traces this loss and its causes,
then shows that the novel marshals its melancholy for conservative class
and gender purposes, indeed, that melancholia is the aesthetic means by
which Fitzgerald transforms an incipient critique of modern capitalism
and misogyny into a resigned capitulation to them. As we shall see, this
melancholy capitulation is inseparable from the techniques that make
Gatsby canonically modernist. Those techniques enable an aesthetically
authoritative insistence that loss is irremediable and desire impossible to
fulfill, predicting the endorsement of structural melancholia in contempo-
rary theory. Since, moreover, this structural melancholy is yoked to con-
servative politics through the channeling of melancholic rage toward the
socially vulnerable, the novel exposes the political risks that we disavow
in our effort to defang melancholia for progressive ends.
9
I
What, then, is the social loss with which The Great Gatsby
is concerned? The simple answer is Gatsby, or rather, the possibilities
for male identity that the novel embodies in Gatsby: receptivity, lyrical
interiority, a belief in the colossal power of desire, the possibility of eco-
nomic and imaginative self-making. To say this is to be forced at once to
confront two complications, however. The first concerns what I would call
the disjunctive continuity between social history and expressive culture.
The loss that Gatsby figures is, indeed, grounded in a historical loss, but
Gatsby is also a fantasmatic projection that bears the marks of Fitzgeralds
own idiosyncratic engagement with that history.
As a range of scholars have argued, the historical loss at stake
here concerned the eclipse of a style of manhood that had been dominant
in the u.s. for much of the nineteenth century: a masculinity that combined
aggressiveness and competitive vigor with the gentler, more feminine
qualities of self-restraint, moral compassion, and the cultivation of interior
virtues.
10
This combination was an effect of the conflicting demands of
work and the civic sphere. The capitalist workplace required the cultiva-
tion of a competitive aggression considered innately male, an aggression
through which men could in principle achieve the economic autonomy
so crucial to this definition of manhood. Because that aggression was
viewed with suspicion for its threat to social cohesion, however, it had to
be balanced by the softer virtues culturally ascribed to womenindeed, by
virtues transmitted to men by women in the domestic sphere. The doctrine
of separate spheres in this way worked to civilize men by giving them a
place to cultivate the compassionate interior that could only inhibit their
successful self-making in the capitalist workplace.
This balance was disturbed at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury by transformations in the economic sphere. The shift to the second
stage of capitalist productionmonopoly capitalismvastly curtailed pos-
sibilities for self-making, transforming workers increasingly into salaried,
white-collar employees who were dwarfed by inscrutable bureaucratic
structures and rendered permanently dependent on their employers.
Many men experienced and described this shift as emasculation.
11
There
developed, in other words, a widespread consensus about the feminizing
effects of modernity, a consensus solidified by the growing economic and
political autonomy of women. It began to seem as if perhaps the feminine
virtues had overcivilized men in ways that enabled women to displace
them and even to gain ascendancy over them. And so there emerged a
new form of manhood that sought to root out the femininity that had once
served to balance male aggression. Manliness was now to be unambigu-
ously hard, aggressive, physically dominative, potentand this version
of manhood was then projected back into the past, imagined as a primal
essence eclipsed by a feminizing modernity that it was now the business
of men to combat.
This social history helps us clarify the first complication posed
by claiming that Gatsby crystallizes social loss in its protagonist. If the novel
figures Gatsby not merely as the agent of a lost capacity for self-making but
also as the embodiment of lost creativity and responsiveness, this in part
marks Fitzgeralds effort to rewrite and claim for his artistic identity the
interior, more affective qualities eclipsed by the emergent cult of virility. Or,
to put this another way: Fitzgerald grasped how the new regime of gender
conspired with capitalist modernity to disparage the realms of affective
experience and creative labor as feminine. He was therefore less inclined to
view modernity as a purely feminizing danger, or to think of virile manhood
as a viable solution to it. Indeed, he seems to have experienced modernity
as a doubly gendered danger, at once coercively masculinizing and degrad-
ingly feminizing.
12
It risked, on one hand, commodifying artistic labor,
emasculating the male or male-identified artist by making him subject
to market forces. Fitzgerald thus wrote of his popular magazine writing:
[T]he Post now pay the old whore $4000 a screw. But now its [sic] because
shes mastered the 40 positionsin her youth one was enough (Life 169).
Or again, from his Notebooks: My mind is the loose cunt of a whore, to
fit all genitals (no. 1390). Though the second statement lacks the explicit
reference to popular writing in the first, it is linked to the other by the
figure of the whore and in this way suggests that Fitzgerald experienced
such writing in terms of an abjectly feminizing receptivity through which
one conforms to the exploitative demands of the consumer marketplace.
The mind stretches and makes itself fit the genitals of the multitudes
who pay for the pleasure of making it do their penetrative bidding.
But on the other hand, Fitzgerald felt the increased instrumen-
talization and rationalization of life as an encroachment upon expressive
capacities that the new regime of gender devalued and coded feminine.
13

Thus, he wrote to Mencken that like most people whose stuff is creative
fiction there is a touch of the feminine in me (Correspondence 421). He
made a similar point in a letter to which Frances Kerr has recently called
attention: I dont know what it is in me or that comes to me when I start
to write. I am half feminineat least my mind is (qtd. in Kerr 406). Both
of these comments link the creativity that Fitzgerald valued above all else
with a feminine interiority. That he thought of this inner femininity as
endangered by capitalist modernity is clear from another letter:
That particular trick [the motif of the dying fall] [. . .] has been
the greatest credo in my life, ever since I decided that I would
rather be an artist than a careerist. I would rather impress my
image [. . .] upon the soul of a people than be known, except in
so far as I have my natural obligation to my familyto provide
for them. [. . .] [T]hat is no sentimental yapping about being
disinterested. It is simply that having once found the intensity
of art, nothing that can happen in life can ever again seem as
important as the creative process. ( Life 256)
Placed beside Fitzgeralds comments on the feminine character of the cre-
ative process, this passage suggests that the modern world entails a choice
between keeping faith with that process and submitting to the masculine
demands of conventional labor. It therefore stands in some tension with his
statements concerning the feminizing dangers of the modern marketplace.
Gatsby is himself, I suggest, an effect of this contradiction. He combines
economic self-making with lyrical expressivity, ruthless business sense
with romantic responsiveness, because he is an expression of Fitzgeralds
effort to preserve a residual softness toward which modernity and the
cult of virility had rendered him deeply ambivalent.
This leads to the second complication I have mentioned. It is,
this time, internal to the novel and takes the form of symmetrical para-
doxes. Tom Buchanan, representative of old money, is bearer in Gatsby
of the new style of manhood. Gatsby, conversely, while embodying new
money, encodes the qualities of residual masculinity. Both of these prob-
lems are complex enough to demand we treat each one in turn.
The first embodies Fitzgeralds intuition concerning the shape
the crisis in masculinity took among traditional, owning-class men. As
those men came increasingly to demonstrate their class power through
leisured display, that display threatened a gendered subversion against
which they sought to defend themselves by cultivating the signs of hard-
ness associated with the emergent form of manhood. Toms cruel body
is in this sense procured in order to stave off the dangers posed by the
effeminate swank of his riding clothes (Gatsby 11). Those clothes mark
his class superiority (swank) but suggest a decadent overindulgence in
the softening activity of leisure, and especially, in the feminine activi-
ties of consumption and bodily ornamentation. The pack of muscle that
strain[s] against clothing becomes in this context the perfect emblem
of a body swelling with phallic properties in order to explode and try to
shed the meaning of its commodified encasement (11).
Having claimed this prowess for defensive reasons, however,
owning-class manhood marshals it in the name of furthering its domi-
native ambitions. Tom directs his arrogant eyes outward at the world;
he uses his cruel body for the enormous leverage it gives him: for
the way it can be manipulated as an almost dispassionate instrument of
domination (11). This aspiration toward domination has both a class and a
gendered component. Its victims include the working-class couple, George
and Myrtle Wilson, each of whom is instrumentalized and exploited by
Tom, and each of whom is thereby depleted in explicitly gendered ways.
Myrtles femininity is coarsely vital and smouldering, yet lacking in
what the novel figures as the ethereality of feminine beauty and the refined
capacity for aesthetic taste (2930). The coarseness of her physical per-
son rhymes, indeed, with her immersion in the crudity of mass culture
(movie magazines, sentimental novels, popular photography), suggesting
an equation between debased femininity and an indiscriminate openness
to that cultures exuberant inauthenticity (34).
14
In contrast to Myrtle,
George appears deprived of any vitality whatever. Myrtles affair emascu-
lates him to the point of rendering him his wifes man, not his own (144),
and the novel couples this unmanning with a kind of physical/spiritual
enervation: George, Nick tells us, is spiritless and anaemic (29), lack-
ing both the immaterial animation (spirit) that distinguishes human from
nonhuman and the more physical, animal vitality (iron in the blood) that
would make him a male version of Myrtle.
Of course, these class and gender meanings in some sense
exceed Toms agency. The novel nowhere suggests that his fusion of old
money and new manhood literally causes Georges enervation or Myrtles
lack of authentic beauty. Instead, the meanings I have described are part
of a more systemic anatomy of beauty, vitality, gender, and class, which
links these figures to Tom in a structurally mediated fashion. Fitzgeralds
portrayal is meant to suggest that the cost of physically vital and invulner-
able men like Tom is the abject production of emasculated, enervated men
like George; these potent men require, as tokens of their power, ethereal
women like Daisy, whose cost is the production of crudely material and
unbeautiful ones like Myrtle. George and Myrtle are in this sense the
degraded and explicitly gendered refuse of an exploitative economy of
vitality and beauty, whose ultimate beneficiary and locus of enforcement is
owning-class manhood itself. Within that economy, the things of ultimate
social value (physical masculine potency, ethereal feminine beauty) not
only become monopolized by the rich but do so at the expense of being
extracted from those less fortunate, who then become the abject remain-
ders of dominant class and gender identities.
This brings us to the second paradoxthe fusion in Gatsby of
residual manhood and new money. The motivation for this fusion is in
some sense the opposite of Toms. Its purpose is to intensify rather than
cancel Gatsbys softer qualities, since Fitzgerald appears to think of new
wealth as feminine in crucial ways. When Nick discovers that Gatsbys
whole caravansary (120)house, car, parties, and so onwas conceived
with the purpose of winning back Daisy, he says: He came alive to me,
delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor (83). The
womb of new wealth and material splendor here becomes purposeful the
moment it is placed in the service of Gatsbys creative design. Fitzgerald
gives Gatsby new money, in other words, because by virtue of being new,
that wealth remains rooted in a longing to be and to possess what one is
not yet and does not yet have; it therefore enables one quite literally to give
birth to oneself, in order to pursue the grail of ones romantic desire and
longings (156). New wealth is in this sense the medium through which
Fitzgerald imagines he can preserve the creatively feminine masculinity
endangered by the alliance between old money and the emergently virile
manhood.
The mystifications entailed in this view of Gatsbys wealth
will emerge momentarily. For now, I want merely to stress that in pursu-
ing this view, Fitzgerald continually thinks of Gatsby through tropes of
a beneficent femininity. He writes at one point that before kissing Daisy,
Gatsby [. . .] could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable
milk of wonder. Both pap and milk are fluids he can only drink if
alone (117). Since, moreover, before kissing Daisy, Gatsby dwells in an
imaginative solipsism that ends when that kiss incarnat[es] him (117),
the image here can only refer to a kind of creatively maternal self-suck-
ling, in which he is at once the source and recipient of the breasts bounty.
Opening himself to this inner maternality seems even the condition of
Gatsbys responsiveness and of his capacity to give birth to himself. The
breast provides him with the pap of life and the incomparable milk of
wonder; it nurtures him and makes him drunk with a capacity for awed
surprise, rendering him receptive to those pleasurable shocks in which the
world reveals itself in new and unsuspected waysshocks like those of the
earthquakes Gatsby registers in the opening pages, which metaphorize
modernitys shattering of social landscapes and enable those sufficiently
intoxicated by the milk of wonder to dream themselves into being.
It is inasmuch as Fitzgerald sustains this positive view of creative
femininity, seeking indeed to imagine it as the defining trait of residual
manhood, that the novel is at once most socially trenchant and most
mournful (i.e., least melancholic). Gatsby, on this account, [breaks] up
like glass against Toms hard malice (155). He is destroyed by the histori-
cally specific conjuncture of old wealth and new masculinity, is shattered
and crushed precisely because, in a world ruled by owning-class men who
appropriate the emergent hardness for their ends, men committed to a
residual responsiveness and a lyrically feminine openness to experi-
ence will find it almost impossible to survive. To speak in this sense of
Toms careless[ness], of how he smash[es] up things and creatures and
then retreat[s] back into [his] money (18788), is to speak of something
socially profound. It is to locate in Tom an exemption from the suffer-
ing caused by modernity that comes from being that sufferings cause. It
is to suggest that this exemption is bought with old money and secured
with physical prowess, and that this process entails a kind of affective
impoverishmentan incapacity to care that makes it possible to destroy
the more responsive creatures and things of this world. Gatsbys defeat
at the hands of this carelessness marks Fitzgeralds effort to mourn the
loss of the form of manhood he embodies. The novel can then be thought
of provisionally as an attempt to confront the full social force of that loss,
enabling its author and readers to grasp exactly what was lost and how,
and so to keep faith with the possibility of making a world in which men
such as Gatsby might survive and even flourish.
II
This mournful process is thwarted, however, by Fitzgeralds
gendered ambivalence toward Gatsby. Because he had sufficiently inter-
nalized the gynophobia of the new gender order, Fitzgerald felt the need
to disparage the softness he tried to value in his hero, as we can see
from turning again to the novels opening pages. There Fitzgerald tries
to distinguish between Gatsbys responsiveness and an excessive recep-
tivity. He has Nick say that the intimate revelations of young men [. . .]
are usually plagiaristic, thereby raising the specter of an openness that
erases or obliterates the self, that turns ones innermost experiences
into inauthentic repetitions or reprisals of others peoples feelings. Such
an openness is just what the novel dismisses moments later as flabby
impressionability (6). It represents a relation to the world in which one
is overly and imprecisely (flabbily) impressionable, in which one lets in so
much exteriority, and does this so indiscriminately, that one loses a unique
interior self and cannot accordingly express anything except inauthentic
and sentimental clichs. (A spoken clich is, of course, a form of largely
unconscious plagiarism.)
The dangers of this excessive openness are evident in Fitzger-
alds effort to trace the materials out of which Gatsby makes himself.
These materials consist primarily in a variety of texts, which include,
as is well known, Ben Franklins Autobiography. But also among these
materials is a range of popular stories and mass-produced images, which
may be less explicitly present but are nonetheless decisive to Gatsbys self-
conception. In listening to Gatsby, Nick thus has the sense of skimming
hastily through a dozen magazines (71); Gatsbys phrases [are] worn so
threadbare that they evoke [. . .] no image except that of a turbaned char-
acter leaking sawdust from every pore as he pursue[s] a tiger through the
Bois de Boulogne (70). Both descriptions suggest that Gatzs conception
of Gatsby derives from what Fitzgerald codes as the inauthentic clichs of
mass culture, which he (Gatz) has indiscriminately and overeagerly inter-
nalized. And since the novel associates mass culture with femininity in the
ways I have described, the sort of Jay Gatsby that [Gatz] invent[s] (104)
is less an original, cohesive creation than a patchwork quilt of romantic
postures that mark him as aesthetically flawed because degradedly femi-
nine from the start.
This is one of the things Nick means when he speaks of Gats-
bys appalling sentimentality (118). The abject character of his creative
materials combine with his excessive openness to create a self that is
neither autonomous nor beneficently feminine at all. That self, instead,
is largely plagiarized, its feelings hyperbolic and imprecisely focused,
its receptive organs flabbily impressionable. Or, to put this in terms of a
later passage, this is a self that its maker consecrates to the service of a
vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty (104). Gatsbys creations, including
himself, are meretricious because vulgar, and vulgar here is the mark
at once of a class position and a tackiness of taste that the book associates
with a degradedly feminine propensity toward excessive and inauthentic
emotionas well as toward a deindividuating immersion in the influential
coarseness of mass art. There is no more apt symbol of this dual mean-
ing than Gatsbys gorgeous pink rag of a suit (162). Its color is clearly
meant to suggest something less than manly about its wearerreal men
dont wear pink. But it also stands as proof for Tom that Gatsby is not an
Oxford man, since no man schooled in that institution would make so
crass a sartorial error (129).
Two of my larger points emerge already from this analysis.
First, the recoding of a beneficently feminine creativity as a degradedly
excessive one marks the venting of a muted hostility toward Gatsbyhis
disparagement for the very thing Fitzgerald wants to value in him. Since
Gatsby is the central object of loss with which the book is concerned, we
can think of this hostility as the first sign of Fitzgeralds melancholic reac-
tion to that loss, a reaction whose origin resides in the gendered ambiva-
lence of his experience of modernity. Second, Fitzgerald actively pursues
this melancholia by mystifying the social factors he records. Gatsby is no
longer, on this account, destroyed by the historically specific conjunction
of new masculinity with old wealth. Instead, he is always already lost by
virtue of qualities intrinsic to him: because of a self-creative conception
marred by sentimental vulgarity. This move represents a willed uncon-
sciousness by which the author forgets his own more socially trenchant
critique in order to cultivate the metaphysical proposition of a beauty that
cannot but be sullied. Such a move protects Fitzgerald from a much more
difficult labor: the task of sustaining belief in male responsiveness as a
quality not constitutively entangled in its self-betrayal, but destroyed by
contingent social forces that one could in principle contest.
The novel does not submit to this melancholy impulse without
a struggle, however. It tries to dampen its hostility toward Gatsby by coun-
tering the feminine taint of his softnessby fusing that residual softness
to various kinds of masculine hardness. Nick thus compares Gatsby to
one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand
miles away (6). The intrica[cy] of this machine suggests a mechanical
rigor and precision by which Gatsby controls what he takes in, recording
it accurately as an external force before attempting to capitalize on it in
the name of his self-making. What makes this possible is the objectivity of
remaining ten thousand miles away. Gatsby never gets excessively close
to the stimuli he receives: he remains at a respectful remove and thereby
avoids being obliterated by it, or being transformed into an inauthentic
mimic whose expressive creations, including himself, are overly feminized
by the undiscriminating imprecision of his receptive organ.
The novel will further go on to rewrite creative responsive-
ness itself as male. The famous passage on Gatsbys self-invention is one
place where this happens. For if Gatsby [springs] from his Platonic con-
ception of himself, and if this makes him a son of God (104), then his
self-making turns out to entail a divinely masculine self-impregnation
(conception). Gatsby is a son of God because he is both Father and
son, at once Creator and created object, both of them emphatically male.
The feminine component of his identity may be retained in the resonances
of conception; but that component is both overwhelmed by and fully
subordinated to a fantasy of male parthenogenesis. Or again, there is the
passage in which Gatsby first kisses Daisy, the very passage that elaborates
creativity through the image of maternal self-suckling. Posed against this
maternal image, as if indeed to counter creative femininity at its source,
is an extension of the trope of Gatsbys masculine inventiveness. His mind
can romp like [that] of God if he refrains from kissing Daisy. It can enjoy
the playful exuberance (romp) of unconstrained creative plasticity. And
it can do this only because, in a realm of infinite imaginative potential
figured here as male, his mind can endow its fantastic creations with
any characteristics at all, precisely inasmuch as it has not yet empirically
incarnated them (11617).
These efforts to counter Gatsbys softness run into serious prob-
lems, however. Having moved to masculinize his hero, Fitzgerald finds
that he begins uncomfortably to resemble his moral antagonist, Tom. For
if the problem with Toms combination of old money and new manhood
is that it tends to instrumentalize others in a way that degrades and uses
them up, Gatsby is hardly free of these tendencies. He consolidates his
invented identity through an identification with Dan Cody. This identifi-
cation signals his internalization of the competitive, entrepreneurial, and
ruthless qualities that were components of the older manhoodqualities
that the new masculinity accentuated while purging manhood of softer
attributes. Cody brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence
of the frontier brothel and saloon (106); when his young protg identifies
with him, the vague contour of Jay Gatsby [fills] out to the substantiality
of a man (107). Gatsby thus becomes a man by internalizing a savage and
entrepreneurial violence, and this is what makes him into a contemporary
incarnation of Codya kind of outlaw monopoly capitalist who oversees
a criminal network of national proportions and who exploits the likes of
Walter Chase (significantly, a friend of Toms) before hanging them out
to dry (141).
It is hardly accidental in this context that Gatsbys parties result
in precisely the kinds of waste that the novel charges Tom with producing.
The crates of oranges and lemons that arrive at his door each weekend
become a pyramid of pulpless halves at the hands of a machine [. . .]
which could extract [their] juice [. . .] in half an hour (43)the machine
here literalizing, and exposing as destructive, the earlier metaphor of
Gatsby-as-machine. The car wrecks, marital squabbles, and damaged
objects resulting from the parties could equally be seen as the novels effort
to metaphorize the price exacted from people and things by Gatsbys class
ambitions. And though one strength of the novel is precisely this insight
into the continuities between Tom and Gatsbys wealth (old versus new
money becomes old equals new money), the parallelism also produces a
kind of moral instability. It is as though Fitzgerald had so fully internalized
the binaries of the new gender order that he could only counter Gatsbys
softness by making him hard to the point of destructiveness, sinking his
critique of capitalist modernity on the hard rock of his gender ambivalence.
Or, to put this differently: the deepest motivation for Gatsbys resemblance
to Tom is neither Fitzgeralds romance with capitalism nor his effort to
trace the continuities between old and new wealth. It is, rather, his need to
keep Gatsby just manly enough. That need leads him to try to extract lyrical
expressiveness from the capitalist entrepreneur, only to findmuch to his
creditthat these dont sit very well together, that Gatsbys entrepreneur-
ialism is creative only inasmuch as that creativity requires exploitation,
waste, and destruction.
III
I have been describing a representational impasse that results
from Fitzgeralds ambivalence toward Gatsbyand more particularly,
toward the feminine responsiveness and creativity he wants to preserve
in him. The result of this impasse, I now argue, is that Fitzgerald throws
his hands up in a kind of metaphorical despair. He not only gives in to the
melancholic impulse of aesthetically entombing and attacking the lost
object but insists that melancholic loss is the fate of all attachments. He
enacts the first of these impulses, moreover, by generalizing his effemina-
phobia into full-fledged misogyny, that is, by extending to actual women
his hostility toward the feminine in Gatsby.
A passage to which I referred earlier can help us see how this
happens. When Gatsby first incarnat[es] himself by kissing Daisy, this
incarnation is imagined in terms of loss and self-diminution. He wed[s]
his unutterable visions to [Daisys] perishable breath; he becomes for the
first time embodied as Gatsby through a kiss that shatters the solipsistic
grandeur of previously incommunicable imaginings. This embodiment
renders him mortal and subject to the ravages of time (perishable).
Given, moreover, the gendered strain already analyzed in this passage
maternal self-suckling versus Godlike inventionthis emphasis on loss
and mortality can be linked with the need to be incarnated as male. Such
an incarnation secures at least a minimal continuity between ones God-
like creative omnipotence and the embodied masculine self; the latter will
bear the stamp of the former, will be created in His image, so to speak.
But inasmuch as the creative origin is felt to be feminine and maternal, to
be incarnated as a man is to assume a disjunctive relation between ones
gendered self and its creative source. It is to face the quandary that to
remain identified with that source is to compromise the gendered identity
one must assume as male.
Fitzgerald responds to this social quandary by ontologizing loss
itself. He figures the coercions of gendered embodiment as the inevitable
contraction of possibility that comes from imaginations realization. And
he imagines the inevitability of that contraction in terms of contact with
the femininenot, now, as creative source, but as intimation of mortality.
The oral nurturance of sucking the breast is displaced onto kissing Daisy;
the lost inner object of oral wonder returns as object of erotic orality. But
far from enabling a sense of continuity with ones maternal source, this
recovery entails the disastrous inhalation of a radical otherness, the wed-
ding of mans unutterable visions to womans perishable breatha
union that both makes man real and marks his first intimation through
woman of limits that find their fulfillment in death.
Gatsbys incarnation is thus marked by a self-loss that the
novel blames on Daisy, signaling a first generalization of hostility from
male femininity to women. This hostility, as it turns out, renders explicit
a resentment shadowing the books idealization of Daisy from the start,
one perhaps most evident in its treatment of her voice. For that voice is
beautiful inasmuch as it promises a possession it cannot but betray. The
betrayal itself results from three factors: the insubstantiality of vocal
utterances, which can neither be seen nor physically possessed; the
lack of significatory content to Daisys speech, which Nick describes as
notesgorgeous melody bereft of words and so of appropriable meaning;
and the fact that each arrangement of notes will never be played again,
since the ephemeral character of vocal expression ensures its immediate
evaporation (13).
The result of these factors is that this voice enacts deferred
possession at its purest. It contains a promise that [Daisy] had done gay,
exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things
hovering in the next hour (14). Daisys beauty, in other words, may have
been recently possessed, and may be again soon, but it isnt by definition
possessed now. Satisfaction resides in an irrecoverable past or a perpetually
deferred future; the present becomes a temporal affliction defined by the
metaphysical unavailability of an object that is by definition lost.
The novels resentment toward this beauty is clear from a later
passage. Daisys voice, Gatsby famously tells Nick, is full of money (127),
its sound quite literally the jingle of coins. This means that her voice is
animated by what Marx has called the most ostentatious of commodities;
15

it is this, indeed, that gives it the structure of deferred possession I have
described. For of course, commodities provoke a yearning whose temporal
shape is marked by such deferral. Commodities are objects that promise
to bestow on their buyers a plenitude unscarred by lack. This is a promise
they must betray, in order to provoke the displacement of consumer desire
onto ever new objects. By embodying this betrayal in feminine beauty, the
novel once more engages in the misogynist association of commodities
with womennot, this time, by linking ones immersion in commodified
materials with a coarsely sentimental inventiveness, but by suggesting an
equation between the commodity as sublime object of desire and the most
ethereally unattainable of women.
The novel is at least dimly aware of the price women pay for
embodying this beauty.
16
It knows that Daisy, as one of the nice girls,
is reduced to a purely relative quantity, her value increased because
many men [have] loved her and she herself made somehow redolent
with this years shining motor cars (156, 155). Daisys corporeal particu-
larity in this way evaporates into the objectal substancelessness of her
beauty. Her value now resides not just in an always deferred and unpos-
sessed beauty but in what this deferral means to the many men who want
her: in the way it signals her abstract capacity for exchange in the system
of patriarchal capitalism. That system requires the decorporealization
and unsexing of femininity, in the name of representing a life of grace
and disembodied satisfaction, which the possession of iconic femininity
promises but never quite enables. Or, to put this more conceptually: the
novel intuits a crucial intersection between modern capitalism and the
sex/gender system, whereby the exchange of women serves not only gender
but also class hierarchy and does so precisely by rendering women com-
modities whose possession is meant to secure their male owners status
and class privilege.
But Fitzgerald is only dimly aware of the costs I have been
describing. He moves as well to denigrate Daisy for the very elusiveness
that makes her desirable.
17
He rewrites Gatsbys failure to (re)possess her
as an effect of her moral cowardice: she is unpossessable because unable
to live up to the magnitude of Gatsbys vision of her, incapable of truly
annulling time by telling Tom she never loved him. That this is a moral
failure is clear from the fact that Fitzgerald has Daisy drive the car that
mows down Myrtle and severs her left breast, thereby turning a competi-
tion between men into a homicidal catfight, the implicit cause of which is
the animal vitality that Daisy lacks and Myrtle palpably possesses. Being
unworthy of romantic investment thus bleeds into the carelessness that
makes Daisy just as guilty as Tom, instead of a woman imprisoned by the
exchange value of her bodiless beauty.
Perhaps worst of all, the novel directs animosity toward Daisy
for what it conceives of as Gatsbys unmanning. In sleeping with her for
the first time, Gatsby starts by seeking a kind of ruthlessly masculine pos-
session; he took her because he had no real right to touch her hand, and
intended (Nick speculates) to take what he could and go (156). Instead,
he finds himself castrated by the extent of her unavailability, which results
not just from her status as a commodity but from the fact that he cannot
afford her. Daisy vanishe[s] into her rich house, into her rich, full life,
leaving Gatsbynothing. He felt married to her, that was all. [. . .] When
they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was
somehow betrayed (15657). Gatsbys class exclusion here results in his
gender inadequacy, as Nicks way of saying it was Gatsby suggests that it
should have been Daisy who felt breathless and betrayed, that the two of
them have traded places in a way that transforms Gatsby into the blushing
no-longer-virgin. The palpable resentment in the passagea resentment
inseparable from romantic desire, as it is directed toward the elusiveness
(vanished) that makes the love-object valuableis a sign of the novels
effort to lay the blame for Gatsbys compromised manhood at Daisys
elusive door. That effort marks the degree to which Fitzgerald has come to
denigrate the softer, more feminine qualities he wants to value in Gatsby.
It suggests that he manages this denigration by displacing the hostile
component of his ambivalence from Gatsby onto Daisy, undercutting again
the books intuition concerning her victimization.
IV
But Daisys blameworthiness hardly saves Gatsby from the
novels censure. The charge of appalling sentimentality extends beyond
the feminine vulgarity of his self-invention to include his romantic love
as well. More precisely, it includes what the novel will code as his insuf-
ficiently melancholic response to losing Daisy. Nick first levels the charge
just pages after Gatsby exclaims: Cant repeat the past? [. . .] Why of course
you can! (116). Given this placement, and given that Gatsby wants to
repeat the past in order to recover Daisy, the novel asks us to equate his
sentimentality with a deluded belief in the possibility of possessionthe
belief that he truly had Daisy in the first place and that he can now
recover her.
The book can only enforce this equation by stacking the deck
against Gatsby; it makes him want not a historically new object to substi-
tute for the lost one, and not even Daisy as the woman she has become.
Instead, he wants the impossible recovery of the exact same Daisy he lost
(he wants her to wipe out her life with Tom by saying she never loved
him [116]). This means that she will not have been soiled by an existence
outside of his fantasy. Her recovery will accordingly be immaculate, per-
fect, without diminution or loss, the abolition of time thus signaling the
abolition of the others autonomous existence in a way that would miracu-
lously enable the fulfillment deferred by her commodified beauty.
Fitzgeralds response, in the books final passage, is to insist on
the opposite of this. He suggests that the manly response is to know that
no object can substitute for the lost one, that all new objects will be not
good enough, and that desire is therefore at once restless and strangely
frozen, melancholically fixated on a past that one can neither relinquish
nor recover:
[A]s the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt
away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that
flowered once for Dutch sailors eyesa fresh, green breast of
the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way
for Gatsbys house, had once pandered in whispers to the last
and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted
moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this
continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither
understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history
with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I
thought of Gatsbys wonder when he first picked out the green
light at the end of Daisys dock. [. . .] [H]is dream must have
seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not
know that it was already behind him, somewhere in that vast
obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic
rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that
year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but thats no
mattertomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms
farther. . . . And one fine morning
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back cease-
lessly into the past. (189)
The passage insists on the inevitable loss of Gatsbys lyrical manhood,
and it does so first through a series of equivalences that negate that
manhoods historical specificity. This negation happens at two levels: the
subject of creative vision, coded complexly masculine; and the object of
creative looking, coded feminine. These two levels work together to form
a sequence that goes like this: Gatsby looks with wonder at Daisys green
light; the Dutch sailors look with wonder at the green breast, which flow-
ers for them (like a daisy); and Nick looks at the houses in a way that
renders them inessential, revealing beneath them a primal encounter
with the feminized American continent. Gatsbys historically specific
experience is in this way generalized as the eternally recurrent truth of
an authentic American manhood. The passage equates him with other
American men at different moments in time, and what links these dif-
ferent men across time is a specific style of looking: a looking that is soft
and receptive rather than hard and dominative, that interacts creatively
with the feminine object rather than simply exploiting it, and that there-
fore seems to resist or counter Toms rapaciously destructive ocularity
(his aggressive eyes [11]).
This style of looking is thwarted, however, by Fitzgeralds
insistence that what it envisions cannot in fact be realized. The men are
therefore also linked by a general condition of unfulfillable longing, which
finds its clearest expression in the novels final sentence: So we beat on,
boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. The sen-
tence suggests that we are all boatsthe we here marking the final
generalization to a transhistorical (but still covertly masculine) condition,
while boats indicates that each of us is a vessel propelled forward in time
and space by the force of conscious will. We beat because this forward
motion is extraordinarily difficult to sustain. And the reason for this is that
theres a force that resists our forward motion, deflecting us away from the
place toward which we wish ourselves to head. That force Fitzgerald calls
the current; it is, I suggest, our memory of past satisfaction, a memory
that bears us back because it operates in opposition to our conscious will.
We try to move forward in time toward the object of our longingto reach
and so possess what we envision and projectbut because the origin of
that longing is a loss, the thing we actually desire is in the past. Desires
temporality is in this way deformed by remembrances that pull us away
from our object in the very journey toward it.
The unfulfillment described by this process is not, of course,
as the passage suggests, the truth of human desire. Though a sense of
the metaphysical unavailability of objects may be a relatively constant,
transhistorical modality of longing, it becomes the modality of it only with
the vast expansion of consumer capitalism in the early twentieth century,
with its almost universal colonization of desire by the commodity form.
What the current passage helps us see is the way this colonization props
itself on natural processes. We do indeed move forward in time, and this
indeed entails loss. The commodity transforms this predicament into
the promise of perfect recovery: an elimination of longing itself through
ecstatic and unblemishedbut deferredpossession.
Catastrophically, however, Fitzgerald responds to this disap-
pointed promise by insisting that loss is irremediable: that no object can
ever be good enough to give us a satisfaction worth having. He makes the
unfulfillment characteristic of commodified desire into a generalized,
transhistorical condition, whereby the act of visual redemptionof a look-
ing that dreams its object into beingis always and everywhere under-
mined by the nature of human temporality. In doing so, he protects himself
from Gatsbys sentimental error: his belie[f] in the orgastic future and
his failure to know that the object of longing is always already behind
[us]. Such a belief and failure betray what the book suggests are the
hard truths of existence. The passage secures this judgment, finally, by
equating the yearning for fulfillment with a longing to recover the most
psychically primary object of desirethe Motherfigured here as a fresh,
green breast of the new world.
For, of course, the equation of breast with continent natural-
izes historical loss.
18
Once the central object of bereavement becomes the
Mothers unspoiled breast, loss ceases to be an historically explicable
experiencethe effect, for example, of a conjunction between old wealth
and emergent masculinityto become instead a quasi-biological and
therefore irresistible condition. The need to separate from the mother
absorbs the socially induced bereavements recorded here and elsewhere
in the novel, reducing them to a loss that can neither be resisted nor sur-
mounted. All new objects can then be deemed unworthy to replace the
primordially lost one. The sailors, Gatsby, Nick, and we can become the
bearers of interminable longings arising from this necessary loss. And
the novel can figure these longings as beautiful for the way they aim at
recovered bliss, yet sentimentally deluded inasmuch as one believes that
bliss could be recovered.
Given this much, it is unsurprising that the Mother whose loss
produces our longings becomes here once more an object of hostility. A.
B. Paulson has shown how this specifically antimaternal hostility is in
part split off and directed at Myrtle, whose breast Fitzgerald rips off at
the moment of her death (32123). In the current passage, the aggression
is perhaps more muted but nonetheless palpable. The breast here seems
to solicit its violation, pander[ing] in whispers to the last and greatest of
human dreams. That is, it serves as a kind of erotic go-between or pander
for the sailors exploitative aspirations. If its beauty at first immobilizes
them, short-circuiting their mercantile interest in the name of an aes-
thetic contemplation they neither desired nor understood, that beauty
then inspires such interest in the form of rape and plunder. The breasts
very bounty in this sense solicits a dream that requires the sullying of its
beauty, the cutting down of the trees to make way for Gatsbys house. And
so the moment of wonder is at once enchanted and by definition transi-
torynot, now, because of the inevitable loss entailed in separation, but
because the mother requires that you violate her in realizing the dream
she inspires.
Fitzgeralds vaunted critique of America is thus inseparable
from his hostility toward a femininity he also wants to value, toward, pre-
cisely, a fresh green breast of the new world. The new regime of gender
had so thoroughly opposed that femininity to masculinity that he came to
feel he could celebrate it only while negating it, repudiating it, insisting
even on its internal self-destruction. The felt necessity of this destruction
led him to pose the options in terms of a highly gendered and Manichaean
despair. Either one indulges with Gatsby the sentimental fantasy that one
can recover the same object one has lost, without that object suffering
even the diminution attendant upon its being-in-timein which case
one is crushed by forces that will not bend to the ferocity of ones hope;
or else one submits to the manly proposition that loss is insurmountable
and desire impossible to fulfillto the fact that Gatsby, like America,
embodies a lyrically feminine beauty metaphysically lost yet impossible
to relinquish, and so cannot but produce in us the melancholy torment of
unfulfillment.
V
I suggested earlier that one reason for approaching the problem
of melancholia through literature is that expressive culture often encodes
responses to social loss within its very forms and so can provide us with
memorial strategies of a politically progressive or regressive kind. That this
is true of Gatsbythat the novels form plays a crucial part in the melan-
cholic tactics I have describedis clear from even an abbreviated consid-
eration of its method and style. I want to close with such a consideration as
a way of rejoining the theoretical concerns broached in my introduction.
The first thing to note in this regard is that critical discussions
of Gatsbys form have had a remarkable uniformity over the years. The
novels defenders have consistently argued that its most distinctive formal
feature, the one that distinguishes Gatsby from what Fitzgerald himself
called his two previous formless novels (Life 11011), is the degree to
which it successfully objectifies its artistic materials. Where Fitzgeralds
earlier books were marred, on this view, by a gushing sentimentalityan
insufficiently controlled and overly personal self-expressivenessGatsby
achieved the artistic ideal of detached and objective form, in which all
directly personal feeling is transmuted into the impersonal and therefore
significant emotion of art. The novels detractors, surprisingly enough,
criticize Fitzgerald in exactly these terms. For them, Gatsbys author
remains too mixed up with his characters, too directly present in the
novel, too romantically invested in the things he seeks to ironize, in ways
that make the book a sloppily sentimental effusion.
19
The terms of such aesthetic evaluations are those of the domi-
nant, Eliotic tradition in Anglo-American modernism (Eliot 40, 44); they
carry within them the masculinist bias recently analyzed by feminist
scholars of the movement (Huyssen; Clark; Kerr; Nicholls 19097). Both
camps of Gatsby critics, in other words, value impersonality and objec-
tive form for the way they enable an aesthetic cultivation of the emergent
masculine hardness I have described, purging Fitzgeralds art of an
expressiveness that these critics code as degradedly feminine: too directly
subjective, emotionally spurious, lacking in detachment, precision, and
rigor.
I want here to draw a conclusion that Gatsbys critics rarely
draw, however. The division over the books success in depersonalizing
emotion suggests an inner tension between masculine and feminine
formal impulses, a tension we can locate, with only slight injustice, in
the strain between two divergent uses to which the novel puts Nick. On
one hand, as an independent character whose primary role is to witness
rather than act in the novels events, he embodies a principle of distance
with respect to both Fitzgerald and Gatsby. He occupies an intermediary
space between main character and author, and it is precisely this inter-
mediate position that enables the impersonality the critics so value:
the double detachment makes it possible for the novel to judge Gatsby
without a directly authorial and therefore excessively subjective inter-
vention. On the other hand, Nick evinces an often covert identification
with Gatsbythe opening and closing passages set up explicit parallels
between them as wellthat finds voice in lyrically expressive flights of
a profoundly personal kind. Indeed, at various points in the novel, this
lyricism toward Gatsby overtakes Nicks detached posture and seems to
transcend his point of view altogether, suggesting an effusion of authorial
subjectivity that exemplifies what the critics find distasteful.
The tension between these modalities, I suggest, is the pri-
mary formal symptom of Fitzgeralds ambivalence toward the residual
masculinity the loss of which his novel explores. The books lyrically
expressive flights represent an authorial effort to preserve the kinds of
interiority that both the instrumentalization/administration of modern
society and the cult of virility threatened to eclipse. In this sense, those
flights very excess, their tendency to blur the distinction between nar-
rator and author, signals Fitzgeralds identification (through Nick) with
Gatsby as an instance of residual manhood, rewritten now as an explicitly
creative and affective responsiveness. But just as the author felt compelled
to counter this responsiveness in Gatsby by fusing it to various kinds of
hardness, so too, at the level of form, he sought to combat his more
lyrical impulses with the stylistic equivalent of the cult of virility. The
strategic use of Nick to impugn the manliness of Gatsbys response to loss
is the means by which he did so. Nick, in short, is the technical means for
rendering the impersonal judgment that Gatsby is sentimentally deluded
to believe that desire can conjure substitute objects, since longing is in
fact (objectively, impersonally, transhistorically) unfulfillable and loss
impossible to work through.
Two important theoretical points follow from this discussion.
First, the link between Gatsbys creative responsiveness and Fitzgeralds
(half-)feminine expressivity suggests that exploring Gatsbys destruction
was for Fitzgerald a way to explore a personal sense of loss. The residual
manhood figured by Gatsby represented for him an identificatory possi-
bility, a way of living ones masculine identity that felt at least potentially
viable; in destroying that possibility, capitalist modernity had severed
Fitzgerald from vitally expressive components of the self. The ambivalence
activated by that lossan ambivalence resulting from his having inter-
nalized the emergent hostility to femininitywas therefore also directed
inward. Gatsbys redirection of this ambivalence onto women can then
be seen as an aesthetic strategy for managing a potentially suicidal self-
aggression, but managing it in a fashion the misogyny of which should
now be clear.
Furthermore, inasmuch as the loss of residual manhood entailed
the loss of expressive intimacies between menFitzgerald wrote in his Note-
books that the fairies [had] spoiled such intimacies (no. 62)we can sup-
plement my reading so far by saying that the novels melancholic strategies
are also a historically specific enactment of the psychic processes described
by Butler. Fitzgerald aesthetically embalms Gatsby as an always already lost
possibility in part to defend against a homosocial love that he yearned to
express but felt could no longer be distinguished from homosexual desire.
His mystification of the sociohistorical causes of this loss (the fairies did
it) enables him in the novel itself to vent his hostility not just misogynisti-
cally but also homophobically: first at Gatsby as entombed and prohibited
object of male love, then at the pale, feminine figure of the sentimental
photographer, McKee (34).
My second and related point concerns the link between
Gatsbys melancholia and the work of those mourning theorists discussed
earlier. One implication of my claims so far is that Fitzgeralds book enacts,
and so enables us to reflect upon, the central problem with those theories:
it teaches the limits of a melancholy politics by showing us that the hostile
component of melancholic ambivalence is often displaced onto convenient
scapegoatsin Fitzgeralds case, onto women and effeminate men. The
theories of Moon, Novak, and Muoz fail to acknowledge these destructive
displacements. I suspect that Gatsby is able to reveal them partly because
of the experiential commitments of literary representation. Fitzgerald
may indeed want to proclaim unambivalently that desire is unfulfillable
and loss impossible to work through; he may insist that accepting these
truths is the condition of authentic manhood and that this acceptance
entails the sublation of expressive subjectivity into impersonal forms. But
by giving sensuous and imaginative particularity to the psychosocial pro-
cesses that concern him, he is led to figure the various costs of embracing
this social melancholy. His novel embodies those processes in a way the
theories can evade, enacting the displacements by which unacknowledged
rage is directed at the socially vulnerable.
The formal ambivalence I have traced in Gatsby is, in this
sense, among the books great virtues. Fitzgeralds unconsciousness about
that ambivalence, or more properly, his commitment to an impersonal
method that disavows one impulse within it (his positive feelings toward
Gatsby), has of course a central place in the books melancholic strategies.
But the very presence of such ambivalence is a symptom of that disavowals
incompleteness. The books ambivalence marks the fragility of its effort
to repudiate expressive manhood, since it registers Fitzgeralds struggle
against that repudiation. Gatsby in this way records not only the social
costs of melancholia but the utopian residue of expressive manhoods his-
torically unrealized promise. It can do this only because, in retaining a
fidelity to the conflicted character of the psychohistorical experience that
gave rise to it, the book tempers its most misogynist formal impulse with
the contrary movement of an empathically lyrical expressiveness.
I am in part suggesting that we should celebrate this second
impulse in Gatsby. It enables Fitzgerald to keep at least a minimal faith
with the male affectivity he had loved and lost, and we as critics have
things to learn about the value of such affectivity. But I am also propos-
ing, as should now be clear, that truly learning those lessons requires
surmounting the novels significant limitations. We shall have to try and
raise to consciousness the kinds of emotional yearning that Gatsby records
primarily in the symptomatic ambivalence of its form. These yearnings
include a range of desires that Fitzgeralds novel repudiates as feminine
and that the contemporary recuperation of melancholia has made it hard
to conceptualize: the desire for a collective naming of what we have lost
and what has destroyed it; the wish for a displaced, future recovery of
lost objects, rather than an unconscious preservation of their remains;
and the yearning to work through (rather than unconsciously enact) the
ambivalence entailed in such losses. Our politics can ill afford to ignore the
urgency of these longings; a greater self-consciousness about them would
at least contribute to the growing conversation begun by Butler, Santner,
and others about the social arrangements under which such yearnings
might be fulfilled. This, in turn, would mark a real step toward resisting
the allure of melancholia and thereby rehumanizing our mourning theo-
ries and our affective relations to literature.
Grateful thanks to Pamela Barnett, Kate Brown, Nina Levine, Meili Steele, Seth Moglen, and
Elizabeth Weed for their insightful comments on various versions of this essay.
greg forter is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.
He is the author of Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the Ameri-
can Crime Novel (New York University Press, 2000) and is currently engaged in a project
about gender, capitalist modernity, and strategies of mourning in American modernism.
1 My point here is not that intellec-
tuals no longer advocate mourn-
ing for socially induced losses,
but that the value of doing so has
been questioned in ways that
have led to a need for conceptual
justification. Figures who remain
committed to such mourning
include, besides Santner (whom
I discuss at some length), Crimp,
LaCapra, and Young.
2 One could here mount a paral-
lel critique of recent uses of
traumaa term that, in the
work of Cathy Caruth and others,
names at once the condition of
possibility of human subjectivity
and the basic shape of historical
experience. Such work conflates
the supposedly traumatic char-
acter of a real world that can
never be known directlythat
becomes accessible only through
the retroactive narrativization
of its (initially unassimilable)
impingement upon experience
with actual historical events and
traumas such as the Holocaust.
Caruths Unclaimed Experience
thus argues not that some histori-
cal events are traumatic enough
to be initially unassimilable, but
that all history is structured by a
latency that makes one unable
to assimilate it and requires
retrospective emplotment (11,
1518). Provided one does not call
this structural latency trauma,
it seems to me to have some pur-
chase on historical experience;
calling it trauma makes it hard to
distinguish between the purely
formal effect of a gap separating
living through and assimilating,
say, the period of Eisenhowers
presidency, and the traumatic
content of the experiences
involved in surviving internment
at Auschwitz. See LaCapra xii,
107, 18185, for a cogent critique
of Caruths position.
3 Kristevas Black Sun makes
mourning coextensive with the
normative process by which we
Notes
commit Oedipal matricide
(her word) in the name of forging
a separate identity. Women and
gay men are on this view almost
inescapably melancholic, since
they lack the strength of matri-
cidal drive that enables the req-
uisite murder (i.e., they incorpo-
rate the Mother as foundation of
identity rather than repudiating
her). See esp. 23, 2829.
4 Slavoj ieks Melancholy and
the Act voices a similar skepti-
cism toward this embrace of mel-
ancholy. In his view, however, the
problem with melancholia is that
it isnt melancholic enough. The
melancholic fails to acknowledge
that the self is structured not by
loss, but by lack, for which any
actual object is merely a mysti-
fied substitute. iek thus finds
the melancholic yearning for an
object that is by definition lost.
What she or he desires is less
the object than the fact of its loss
to distract him or her from the
insurmountable truth of lack,
and so she or he conflates an
actual, losable person with the
primordial and necessarily inac-
cessible object-cause of desire
(the unnamable Thing that
only retrospectively comes to be
called Mother). iek deduces
from this elaboration that the
goal of ethics is to embrace the
Thing as ones inmost (yet impos-
sible) identitythat is, to act in
blind obedience to an immutable
inner kernel of the self in a way
that transgresses even as it pre-
serves the dignity of the law.
The conservative implications
of this position are scattered
throughout the essay: iek cel-
ebrates as authentically ethical,
for example, the Popes continued
opposition to abortion even in
cases of rape, since this stubborn
clinging to old values reminds
us that there is a price to pay for a
proper ethical attitude. See esp.
67677.
5 The kind of conceptual unclar-
ity I am describing mars other
recent discussions of melancholia
in sociopolitical contexts. In her
analysis of Jamaica Kincaids My
Brother, for example, Sarah Bro-
phy conflates melancholia with
decentered [. . .] subjectivity,
then describes it as a mecha-
nism of memory through which
one might resist [. . .] the recu-
perative pressures that abound
when gender, sexual orientation,
race, and economic differences
cross over, reinforce, and illumi-
nate one another (26768, 266).
Such a description is so divorced
from the melancholic mecha-
nisms described in Freuds essay
(unconscious incorporation of
the object, displaced anger, etc.)
that it becomes hard to see why
we should call it melancholia
at all. Brophy borrows the term
mechanism of memory from
Anne Chengs The Melancholy of
Race. Cheng, too, describes mel-
ancholia in ways that seem to me
hard to justify. She suggests that it
entails the exclusion of the lost/
internalized object such that the
ego cannot tolerate its return,
and she extrapolates from this
that, since racism also entails
exclusion, it should be under-
stood as a melancholic formation.
Racialization in America may
be said to operate through the
institutional process of produc-
ing a dominant, standard, white
national ideal, which is sustained
by the exclusion-yet-retention of
racialized others, Cheng writes.
The national
topography of centrality and
marginality legitimizes itself by
retroactively positing the racial
other as [. . .] lost to the heart of
the nation. [. . .] The history of
American national idealism has
always been caught in this melan-
cholic bind between incorporation
and rejection. (10)
The dynamic thus described has,
in my view, more in common with
the mechanisms of projection
and disavowal than with those of
melancholia.
6 See on this point Woodward, who
finds in the later works of Freud
and Barthes a grief in between
mourning and melancholia
(92)one that sustains the pain
of loss rather than seeking to
overcome it, but in which this
pain ignites (instead of dampen-
ing) creative self-transformation.
A related view emerges in Youngs
discussion of the arts of coun-
termemory in postwar Germany.
He uses this term to describe
memorials that resist the ethical,
aesthetic, and cognitive clari-
ties of traditional monuments in
order to engage the difficult labor
of remembering the Holocaust
without pretending to a falsely
redemptive comprehension of
it. Young describes this kind of
memory several times as mourn-
ing; it seems to me commensu-
rate with the expanded notion of
mourning I describe.
7 I am arguing here against that
strand of cultural studies for
which it goes without saying that
attention to literary form is con-
servative. See Brenkman for an
urgent indictment of that position.
8 Seth Moglen was the first to
argue that American modernism
contains a recognizably melan-
cholic strand and to trace both
the narrative strategies of this
melancholia and its politically
troubling effects. My work has
been deeply influenced by his
arguments, which are, indeed,
the most persuasive to date about
the relation between modernist
form and modernitys losses. For
a sophisticated account of those
losses in relation to gender, see
Felski 3760 and 10114.
9 By placing Fitzgeralds losses in
the context of modernist gender
politics, my essay seeks to supple-
ment Breitwiesers groundbreak-
ing work on mourning in the
authors life and work.
10 On the social transformations
described in this and the follow-
ing paragraphs, see Gorn,
Kimmel, and Rotundo.
11 Kimmel offers many examples,
including an observer who wrote
that to put a man upon wages
is to put him in the position of a
dependent and so to make him
less of a man (84).
12 Though my terms differ mark-
edly from hers, I have found use-
ful Felskis analysis of a tension
between accounts of modernity
that figure it as masculine and
accounts that see it as feminine
(110).
13 On the specific problems posed
to artists by the crisis in mascu-
linity, see Izenberg 1213.
14 I am indebted here to Kerr 41214.
15 Marx argues that money becomes
in capitalist societies an Ur-com-
modityone raised to the status
of general equivalent for all
commodities. This process ties
value to an abstract essence
that all commodities then seem
to share, mystifying the material
genesis of goods in human labor
(22338). For a powerful discus-
sion of these matters in Gatsby,
see Godden 34849.
16 For a persuasive and moving
account of this price, see
Fetterley.
17 Bewley is one of many critics who
abet this misogyny. He claims
that Daisys vicious emptiness
curdl[es] into the viciousness of
a monstrous moral indifference
(44, 45).
18 See on this point Godden 367 and
Callahan 2123.
19 The list of critics who evaluate
Gatsby in these terms is a long
one. Some value the book for
what they figure as its softer,
more romantic components, but
most adhere to the hierarchy in
the binary I have described. For
positive assessments, see Bewley,
Long, Miller, and Mizener. The
novels most eloquent detractors
are Fiedler and Scrimgeour.
Bewley, Marius. Fitzgeralds Criticism of America. Lockridge 3753.
Breitwieser, Mitchell. Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and the Puzzle of Inherited Mourning. Homans
4361.
. The Great Gatsby: Grief, Jazz, and the Eye-Witness. Arizona Quarterly 47.3
(1991): 1770.
Brenkman, John. Extreme Criticism. Critical Inquiry 26 (1999): 10927.
Brophy, Sarah. Angels in Antigua: The Diasporic of Melancholy in Jamaica Kincaids My
Brother. PMLA 117 (2002): 26577.
Butler, Judith. Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification. The Psychic Life of Power:
Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. 13250.
Callahan, John F. The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1972.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1996.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word.
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Crimp, Douglas. Mourning and Militancy. October 51 (1989): 318.
Eliot, T. S. Tradition and the Individual Talent. 1919. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed.
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Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1995.
Fetterley, Judith. The Great Gatsby: Fitzgeralds Droit de Seigneur. Major Literary Char-
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Fiedler, Leslie A. Some Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald. An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture
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