Everyone should have a novel they read every year. Mine is The Great Gatsby. It’s the perfect summer ritual. As the first summer of our new ‘20s draws to a close, it’s worth revisiting the book now, before the flood of ham-fisted retrospectives arrive when it turns 100 in 2025. Can this classic still say anything about America? Does it hold up? F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece endures because it does something surprising for the great American novel. It critiques equality.
“Equality” is a God-term barnacled with such positive connotations that anything other than hysterical reverence sounds un-American. (Curiously, the symbolic importance of equality did not slow our descent into a new Gilded Age.) A novel as allusive as The Great Gatsby can’t be reduced to a blithe summary of what it’s “really about.” Yet the novel helps explain why the most insufferable elitists are often devoted egalitarians. Equality in America creates a peculiarly insecure upper class.
The triumph of The Great Gatsby is associated with inequality, while the tragedy at its heart is equated with equality. Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick, begins the story claiming to be nonjudgmental, but his character arc ends with him making a firm judgment: He tells Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire, that he’s better than Tom and Daisy, the novel’s old-money aristocrats. They are not equal. Meanwhile, the most tragic scene works in the opposite direction. Gatsby wants Daisy, a former lover with whom he is still enamored, to tell her husband, Tom, that she never loved him. In a heartbreaking line, she refuses and claims to have loved both. “‘You loved me too?’ [Gatsby] repeated.” When it comes to love, equality is tragedy. How should we interpret these strange details?
In the novel’s opening lines, Nick’s father reminds him that people are not born with the same advantages. This is not simply an observation about material wealth, a point made explicit when Nick says that “fundamental decencies [are] parceled out unequally at birth.” Nick adds a self-deprecating remark about being snobbish, but that shouldn’t obscure the fundamental truth. People are born with various advantages. Sometimes that advantage is wealth, but just as often it’s virtue or talent. Some people are virtuous. Others suck.
Benjamin Franklin made the worst edit in history when he replaced “sacred and undeniable” with “self-evident” in the Declaration of Independence, stranding generations with a Christian conviction that they can only articulate through incredulous assertion. A deracinated conception of equality always collapses into the absurd idea that people are interchangeable. This idea haunts Americans, who fear being another cog in the machine. The Great Gatsby is like the missing link between Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. It shows the insecurity of the American elite, who have no fixed standard proving they are upper class. They must constantly affirm their status by appealing to the symbols and values of a democratic society. Gatsby explores what happens when these elites no longer have a common set of symbols/values.
The main characters in The Great Gatsby are Midwestern transplants who appeal to East Coast values — a detached cosmopolitan glamour rather than a moralizing provincialism — to signal status. The new versus old money distinction obscures the fact that they are all pretending to be easterners. Most readers remember that Gatsby, the bootlegger, has fashioned a new name and reputation for himself, but Daisy and Tom also engage in an act of self-creation. They left Chicago because Tom’s affairs caused a scandal. In the Midwest, they were trashy. In New York, they’re cosmopolitan. When Nick dines with the couple, he jokes that Daisy’s time in the east has made her too sophisticated for him and that he’d rather discuss crops. Immediately, Tom mentions a “scientific” book about the global threat to the white race. Tom is trying to prove he’s an East Coast sophisticate: He doesn’t need to discuss crops. He reads books! Later, Daisy gives a cynical speech about how “everything’s terrible … Everybody thinks so — the most advanced people.” Nick says that she’s being insincere. They are performing their East Coast personas. Tom develops class anxiety when he encounters Gatsby, who he doesn’t realize is also a Midwest pretender.
Tom and Gatsby are mirror images of one another: wealthy Midwesterners who moved east to pursue an “acute limited excellence” experienced in their youth. They try to compete against each other, but through different hierarchies. Gatsby cares only for Daisy’s love, and all his other accomplishments are a means to that end. From the outside, he looks like the type of person Tom is pretending to be. Tom attempts bohemianism by throwing a party with amateur artists but becomes sentimental about his wife and boorishly smacks his mistress. Gatsby’s libertine parties are filled with movie stars. When Tom develops class anxiety about Gatsby, he reverts to Midwest values to prove his superiority. Tom dismisses the East Coast glamour of Gatsby’s party by calling it a low-class “menagerie.” When Tom learns that Gatsby really did go to Oxford and so has real East Coast credentials, he responds by confronting Gatsby over his affair with Daisy, jettisoning his East Coast “libertine” persona in favor of the posture of the Midwestern “prig.” Tom then learns that Gatsby isn’t just cavalierly sleeping with his wife but is actually a romantic. Gatsby needs his status affirmed through true love. Tom responds like a true East Coast cynic and dismisses his wife’s affair as a “presumptuous little flirtation.”
Such insecurities define our contemporary elite. Members of the upper class are torn over the different ways they can signal status. Most of the “East Coast elitists” who mock the rubes in flyover country were born and raised in the suburbs they look down on. They have inherited both the aristocratic pretensions of East Egg and the social-climbing triumphalism of West Egg, and they don’t know which one makes them upper class. They love symbols of exclusivity but abjure anything too stuffy. They signal status with ostentatious displays of wealth and tacky references to their alma mater but punish proles who have not mastered the ever-shifting rules of corporate decorum. Commitment to equality becomes the easiest way to affirm superiority. Above this, Gatsby stands as the image of an American aristocrat.
Though aristocracy sounds absurd in America, there will always be people who strive for greatness. The public doesn’t reread The Great Gatsby because it celebrates wealth. We’re drawn to Gatsby’s quest for love, and this “incorruptible dream” is something more than just class striving. Gatsby embodies the forgotten values of aristocratic societies and shows us an American version of what philosopher Soren Kierkegaard called a “knight of faith,” one who can navigate the breakdown of value systems to pursue a transcendent goal. John Adams argued that an American aristocrat is anyone who can use their wealth, talents, or virtues to influence another person’s vote. Yet votes can be swayed in negative directions. The American aristocrat needs a clarity of vision that allows he or she to pursue a Gatsby-like quest. The Great Gatsby is the “great American novel” because it looks past our insecurity to give the republic a vision of a truly noble greatness.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
