Critical Quotes Flashcards
How does Helen Fisher describe the love presented in The Great Gatsby?
‘Romantic love is an obsession’
What does M.H. Abrams suggest the early Romantic poets do to explore emotional states?
He suggests they ‘turn the mirror inward to reflect the poet’s state of mind’
What does Tony Tanner suggest the green light represents to Gatsby to develop his characterisation?
He suggests that ‘the green light offers Gatsby a suitably inaccessible focus for his yearning’
What impression does Michelle McMechan suggest Daisy’s name invokes?
An impression of ‘sunshine, transience and vague unreality’
What does HL Mencken suggest Gatsby’s dream is at its core?
An ‘idiotic pursuit of sensation.. almost incredibly stupid’
How does William Troy describe Gatsby?
‘A symbol of America itself’
What does Lois Tyson suggest ‘The Great Gatsby’ is in ‘You Are What You Own: A Marxist Reading’?
It is a ‘scathing critique of American Capitalist culture and the ideology that promotes it’
How does Matthew J. Bruccoli suggest Gatsby is presented as ‘great’?
‘Gatsby is truly great by virtue of his capacity to commit himself to his aspirations’
What does Judith Fetterley suggest is Daisy’s appeal in ‘The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction’ in (terms of a feminist reading)?
‘Ownership of women is invoked as the index of power: He who possesses Daisy Fay is the most powerful boy’
How does Jay McInerney say Gatsby is promoted to hero status through Nick Carraway’s unreliable narration?
‘According to Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s passion and his devotion is magnificent and heroic’
How does Anne Margaret Daniel describe Nick’s status as an unreliable first person narrator?
‘Nick’s all we’ve got- and we cling to him’
How does Judith Fetterley suggest American literature, specifically The Great Gatsby, marginalise and objectify it’s female characters?
She argues that ‘the major works of American fiction constitute a series of designs on the female reader’
What does Judith Fetterley suggest of the representation of Daisy as the American Dream regarding the expectation placed on her and subsequent blame she receives for her failures?
‘Daisy’s failure of Gatsby is symbolic of the failure of America to live up to the expectations in the imagination of the men who “discovered” it. America is female; to be American is Male; and the quintessential American experience is betrayal by a woman’
What does Arthur Mizener suggest about Fitzgerald’s presentation of Gatsby as a Romantic in his existential belief in his dream despite its consistent status as unrealistic?
He suggests he expresses the feelings that ‘life is unendurable without a belief in the possibility of a meaningful existence’ and ‘the world conspires to make such a belief impossible’
What did French philosopher Jean Baudrillard say about society as a consumer product and how does this reflect in Gatsby?
“Our society thinks itself and speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything, it consumes itself as consumer society, as idea”
This supports the idea of Gatsby’s conception of his American society and of himself as a God in the notion of how he is consumed by his capitalist ambitions to a point of having to die once he realised ‘what a grotesque thing a rose is’: Is present in T. J. Eckleburg’s role as a god (‘God sees everything’.. ‘That’s an advertisement’) and plays into Gatsby’s downfall as a piece in the chess of capitalist ambition and post-war promises of the green light of American society
