This is one of your stronger essays of late -- the sort of stuff I subscribed to you for.
I'm from a new-money and very complicated family (7/8 biological great-grandparents were working class or grew up in poverty, mother was the result of a teen pregnancy by my working-class Irish grandmother and my grandfather, who was born into poverty in Calabria and raised in poverty in a small town in Canada, and most certainly treated as "other", not white -- and my father's mother, the half-WASP, turned out to not be fully white either via her working-class father -- which was phenotypically apparent).
My mom's adoptive parents were a WASP mother from a downwardly mobile family and another poor Southern Italian immigrant, who eloped against her racist and classist parents wishes and were disowned by them. My adoptive grandfather started a business and by the time they adopted my mom they were well-off. My dad worked for my grandfather and turned the business from a small one into a 8-figure one over my childhood (edit: actually I think it's low 9 figures now, but I'm in my thirties -- and no, I don't have a trust fund, never did).
No one in my family really fits in with WASP culture, rich-people culture, whatever you want to call it. My adoptive grandfather didn't finish high school, and wasn't seen as white in a very white affluent neighbourhood. My mom was acutely aware of and insecure of her differences. My dad was a university drop-out.
I don't think you can ever fit in, even after a few generations. Anyway, I'm downwardly mobile, my husband grew up poor with a single mom and while he has a good job, he's nothing like my workaholic father (I'm much more comfortable with working and middle-class folks and other ethnics so this works for me). I had the grades for an Ivy league, but honestly thought it seemed terrible and I had the privilege to opt out.
The world depicted The Great Gatsby always seemed like pure hell to me. Fitzgerald was a genius.
I went to an affluent high school. I was one of the only kids not wearing designer clothes or driving a new car (still had a car!). I was teased for being "poor" (and after Jersey Shore came out, Italian lol) even though I clearly wasn't.
It's all a load of crap. Seriously, if you came from nothing and have the smarts to be successful, go get yours, but why would you want to be like old money?
Anyway, my caution to you is, because I've seen this in new money -- if you marry and become a parent, do not resent or show contempt to your own child(ren) for growing up with privileges and connections you didn't have. Your kids will not have the same opportunity to be "self-made" in the same way you did, even if they choose an entirely different field and prove themselves in it. But they also won't ever be "old money" in the same way as many Ivy league attendees.
I loved reading this essay especially because I fell into the category of “required reading” and glossed over the finer points you expounded upon. My idiot teenage brain was just upset that Gatsby and Daisy weren’t end game.
If you decide to do these in the future, let us know the book in advance. I would love to read a book and then hear your thoughts on it. Sort of like a book club.
This is a very timely and well written essay, you do a masterful job of teasing out the complications of Gatsby's story, it is one that is too often repeated.
For almost 5 decades I worked on Wall Street. I am the son of a career military officer and came from a solid and respectable middle class background. I went to a state university of middle rank and did not do graduate school due to my own military service.
When I started in the investment world it was through a firm catering to middle class investors and the industry was divided into the white shoe firms, the wire houses and the bucket shops. Later due to a particular set of knowledge I had developed, I moved from the wire house to one of the white shoe firms, I thought it meant a permanent change in status.
While I made more money and believed my work ethic would allow me to reach the upper strata of the firm it did not. I would find later that the path to the top at that firm was closed to me due to my lack of credentials from the right schools but even more by the lack of blood credentials.
I then decamped to a firm that was dominated by a different ethic- religion- and was again blocked from progress due to factors outside my own efforts.
It took me years to recognize that I was never going to be allowed to succeed as I defined it, and if I did it would be conditional, I would be tolerated for what I could do but never accepted as what I was. It caused years of stress frustration and anger.
Now in my dotage I understand that in the United States we have moved from our ideal of each person being judged by their efforts to a class based society every bit as rigid and exclusionary as the UK or other countries with an aristocratic structure.
High School students are too young to realize the message of Gatsby it is only when one is frustrated in love or business that the lessons can find a way to be understood.
I wonder if Gatsby had fallen into new money, embraced the material gratifications afforded him, but was self-secure and utterly apathetic about others' opinions of him, how he might have been esteemed by the "community". I suspect with some intrigue and probably less disdain.
I think you are on to something. As a matter of fact, this is no theory, you see that new big money can go everywhere with confidence, feeling deserving because of what they have accomplished, even proud of coming from 'nowhere'. The dinner example from the Wire is relevant here, because D’Angelo is uncomfortable with his own people and station to start with. The pull of that community is his tragedy. The restaurant reaffirms his sense of not fitting in, and I don't think his date cares. How would Gatsby's sense of belonging in the US in a period of expansion have been had he not been a career criminal? That takes away the shine of any legitimate accomplishment, and that is no tragedy.
This is not to say that the upper echelon isn't trying to create gatekeeping signals of status, but I think those signals are more frequently refreshed in our time, as Rob has pointed out. I also think they can be ways of avoiding opportunity costs. When time is of the essence, you want a quick take on if someone can be of potential use to you, so what you can bring to the table matters. Try being funny in a group of comedians.
Thank you for a comprehensive and insightful analysis. I spent 32 years as an English teacher, with, among other books, The Great Gatsby. I spent a lot of time telling students to reread books when they were older, as a great book has lessons for every phase of life. The benefit of introducing students to books that are “bigger” than they are, is that they can begin the understand the heights literature can reach. The alternative is a steady diet of young adult books, Judy Blume, comes to mind. Nothing wrong with a book read for entertainment, but those won’t be the books you return to several times for the rest of your life. I like to think I worked very hard to give my students a hand hold on the books, even if they were to spend time on the foothills, rather than at the summits. I really liked this essay, and I hope you do more like it, to encourage your readers to look again at the great classics. BTW, I just read in my local London, Ontario, Canada newspaper, the some barbarian at the local school board dumpstered 10,000 books from one of the oldest schools in the city, including some rare military history books no longer in print. Among the trashed books, The Great Gatsby. These are dark times we are living in. Your writing and thinking is a bright light in the darkness.
Excellent essay - hauntingly accurate. Brought back memories of my freshman year at college, as a kid from a blue collar New England mill town, feeling like a foreign visitor at Princeton U. The reality is, people can speak the same formal verbal language, while speaking utterly different and mutually incomprehensible social dialects.
One of the questions that I have found particularly useful in analysis is "what is missing?" Having not read the book, I can't help but notice a distinct lack of religion. Religion is well known to increase the likelihood of friendship between social classes. How status is understood in religion's absence is quite interesting.
Interesting analysis and conclusions! I read "The Great Gatsby" as a requirement, probably in high school and was bored out of my mind - I had a tenuous grasp on some of the social class issues but was bored silly at the time (late '70's). As someone who was interested in both STEM (and software, such as it was back then) as well as both art and music - but not business, finance nor law, I though then I was "above" class. Ha!! Definitely deluded, but hopefully somewhat wiser now.
Do you have any thoughts about social class has been upended via Big Tech, as well as other persistent tech industries (such as defense)? Big Tech has changed different status signals (hoodies -- but they are cashmere!) through having the power to change government plans (SpaceX moving in to NASA territory).
Assigned reading in school is a way of defanging it. Leslie Fiedler figured that assigning Whitman's "O Captain My Captain" in school was a way of distracting from other more dangerous elements in his work. And George Bernard Shaw wrote: "I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me as hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture." I had to read "Androcles and the Lion" in high school but always figured it was more for the introductory discussion about the Gospels than the play itself.
I'm always impressed that you're able to distance yourself from a story and comment as an outsider. This one must have been hard; your backstory is so similar to that of Jimmy Gatz. However it doesn't appear that you have his aspirations. Where do you see yourself in the American cultural landscape?
This is one of your stronger essays of late -- the sort of stuff I subscribed to you for.
I'm from a new-money and very complicated family (7/8 biological great-grandparents were working class or grew up in poverty, mother was the result of a teen pregnancy by my working-class Irish grandmother and my grandfather, who was born into poverty in Calabria and raised in poverty in a small town in Canada, and most certainly treated as "other", not white -- and my father's mother, the half-WASP, turned out to not be fully white either via her working-class father -- which was phenotypically apparent).
My mom's adoptive parents were a WASP mother from a downwardly mobile family and another poor Southern Italian immigrant, who eloped against her racist and classist parents wishes and were disowned by them. My adoptive grandfather started a business and by the time they adopted my mom they were well-off. My dad worked for my grandfather and turned the business from a small one into a 8-figure one over my childhood (edit: actually I think it's low 9 figures now, but I'm in my thirties -- and no, I don't have a trust fund, never did).
No one in my family really fits in with WASP culture, rich-people culture, whatever you want to call it. My adoptive grandfather didn't finish high school, and wasn't seen as white in a very white affluent neighbourhood. My mom was acutely aware of and insecure of her differences. My dad was a university drop-out.
I don't think you can ever fit in, even after a few generations. Anyway, I'm downwardly mobile, my husband grew up poor with a single mom and while he has a good job, he's nothing like my workaholic father (I'm much more comfortable with working and middle-class folks and other ethnics so this works for me). I had the grades for an Ivy league, but honestly thought it seemed terrible and I had the privilege to opt out.
The world depicted The Great Gatsby always seemed like pure hell to me. Fitzgerald was a genius.
I went to an affluent high school. I was one of the only kids not wearing designer clothes or driving a new car (still had a car!). I was teased for being "poor" (and after Jersey Shore came out, Italian lol) even though I clearly wasn't.
It's all a load of crap. Seriously, if you came from nothing and have the smarts to be successful, go get yours, but why would you want to be like old money?
Anyway, my caution to you is, because I've seen this in new money -- if you marry and become a parent, do not resent or show contempt to your own child(ren) for growing up with privileges and connections you didn't have. Your kids will not have the same opportunity to be "self-made" in the same way you did, even if they choose an entirely different field and prove themselves in it. But they also won't ever be "old money" in the same way as many Ivy league attendees.
And that's okay.
You are so wise! Thank you, there is so much good advice in this comment.
I loved reading this essay especially because I fell into the category of “required reading” and glossed over the finer points you expounded upon. My idiot teenage brain was just upset that Gatsby and Daisy weren’t end game.
If you decide to do these in the future, let us know the book in advance. I would love to read a book and then hear your thoughts on it. Sort of like a book club.
I personally struggled with the soap opera nature of the book and frankly how bland most of the characters were.
Maybe it’s worth a reread but I recall being more interested in other high school required reading.
This is a very timely and well written essay, you do a masterful job of teasing out the complications of Gatsby's story, it is one that is too often repeated.
For almost 5 decades I worked on Wall Street. I am the son of a career military officer and came from a solid and respectable middle class background. I went to a state university of middle rank and did not do graduate school due to my own military service.
When I started in the investment world it was through a firm catering to middle class investors and the industry was divided into the white shoe firms, the wire houses and the bucket shops. Later due to a particular set of knowledge I had developed, I moved from the wire house to one of the white shoe firms, I thought it meant a permanent change in status.
While I made more money and believed my work ethic would allow me to reach the upper strata of the firm it did not. I would find later that the path to the top at that firm was closed to me due to my lack of credentials from the right schools but even more by the lack of blood credentials.
I then decamped to a firm that was dominated by a different ethic- religion- and was again blocked from progress due to factors outside my own efforts.
It took me years to recognize that I was never going to be allowed to succeed as I defined it, and if I did it would be conditional, I would be tolerated for what I could do but never accepted as what I was. It caused years of stress frustration and anger.
Now in my dotage I understand that in the United States we have moved from our ideal of each person being judged by their efforts to a class based society every bit as rigid and exclusionary as the UK or other countries with an aristocratic structure.
High School students are too young to realize the message of Gatsby it is only when one is frustrated in love or business that the lessons can find a way to be understood.
I wonder if Gatsby had fallen into new money, embraced the material gratifications afforded him, but was self-secure and utterly apathetic about others' opinions of him, how he might have been esteemed by the "community". I suspect with some intrigue and probably less disdain.
I think you are on to something. As a matter of fact, this is no theory, you see that new big money can go everywhere with confidence, feeling deserving because of what they have accomplished, even proud of coming from 'nowhere'. The dinner example from the Wire is relevant here, because D’Angelo is uncomfortable with his own people and station to start with. The pull of that community is his tragedy. The restaurant reaffirms his sense of not fitting in, and I don't think his date cares. How would Gatsby's sense of belonging in the US in a period of expansion have been had he not been a career criminal? That takes away the shine of any legitimate accomplishment, and that is no tragedy.
This is not to say that the upper echelon isn't trying to create gatekeeping signals of status, but I think those signals are more frequently refreshed in our time, as Rob has pointed out. I also think they can be ways of avoiding opportunity costs. When time is of the essence, you want a quick take on if someone can be of potential use to you, so what you can bring to the table matters. Try being funny in a group of comedians.
Thank you for a comprehensive and insightful analysis. I spent 32 years as an English teacher, with, among other books, The Great Gatsby. I spent a lot of time telling students to reread books when they were older, as a great book has lessons for every phase of life. The benefit of introducing students to books that are “bigger” than they are, is that they can begin the understand the heights literature can reach. The alternative is a steady diet of young adult books, Judy Blume, comes to mind. Nothing wrong with a book read for entertainment, but those won’t be the books you return to several times for the rest of your life. I like to think I worked very hard to give my students a hand hold on the books, even if they were to spend time on the foothills, rather than at the summits. I really liked this essay, and I hope you do more like it, to encourage your readers to look again at the great classics. BTW, I just read in my local London, Ontario, Canada newspaper, the some barbarian at the local school board dumpstered 10,000 books from one of the oldest schools in the city, including some rare military history books no longer in print. Among the trashed books, The Great Gatsby. These are dark times we are living in. Your writing and thinking is a bright light in the darkness.
Excellent essay - hauntingly accurate. Brought back memories of my freshman year at college, as a kid from a blue collar New England mill town, feeling like a foreign visitor at Princeton U. The reality is, people can speak the same formal verbal language, while speaking utterly different and mutually incomprehensible social dialects.
One of the questions that I have found particularly useful in analysis is "what is missing?" Having not read the book, I can't help but notice a distinct lack of religion. Religion is well known to increase the likelihood of friendship between social classes. How status is understood in religion's absence is quite interesting.
Interesting analysis and conclusions! I read "The Great Gatsby" as a requirement, probably in high school and was bored out of my mind - I had a tenuous grasp on some of the social class issues but was bored silly at the time (late '70's). As someone who was interested in both STEM (and software, such as it was back then) as well as both art and music - but not business, finance nor law, I though then I was "above" class. Ha!! Definitely deluded, but hopefully somewhat wiser now.
Do you have any thoughts about social class has been upended via Big Tech, as well as other persistent tech industries (such as defense)? Big Tech has changed different status signals (hoodies -- but they are cashmere!) through having the power to change government plans (SpaceX moving in to NASA territory).
When I read this article in the Financial Times ( https://www.ft.com/content/69e347aa-ab2e-4d52-8f4d-267b803500ba ), I had the impression that the interviewed aristocracy may have valid points, but they are bringing a Scrabble board to an F1 race.
Assigned reading in school is a way of defanging it. Leslie Fiedler figured that assigning Whitman's "O Captain My Captain" in school was a way of distracting from other more dangerous elements in his work. And George Bernard Shaw wrote: "I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me as hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture." I had to read "Androcles and the Lion" in high school but always figured it was more for the introductory discussion about the Gospels than the play itself.
I'm always impressed that you're able to distance yourself from a story and comment as an outsider. This one must have been hard; your backstory is so similar to that of Jimmy Gatz. However it doesn't appear that you have his aspirations. Where do you see yourself in the American cultural landscape?