`the American Dream` In `the House Of Mirth` And `the Great Gatsby`

George Tindall and David Shi state that the 'United States in the 1900 was on the threshold of modernity.' It had been relentlessly transformed since 1800 from a largely rural and agrarian society into the 'highly industrialized, urban' and modern nation we recognize today. In The House of Mirth and The Great Gatsby, we can argue that Edith Wharton and Frances Scott Fitzgerald look at and largely criticize the state of this modern, urbanizing America at the turn-of-the-century and in the 1920s. However, in doing so we can argue that they also scrutinise the ideals on which this modern America was founded on including the American Dream. By exploring what the novels believe the American Dream to be and the means through which this Dream can be achieved, we can argue that Wharton and Fitzgerald critique not only modern America but the values on which America was founded on and continue to uphold.

In The Great Gatsby passage, Nick Carraway describes in detail one of Gatsby's many parties held at his house. The details of the scene are quickly related one after the other in short, economic phrases: 'cars [.] parked five deep in the drive [.] shawls beyond the dream of Castile', cocktails 'dump[ed]' down as though they are water. This abundance of detail and the luxury which these details convey overwhelm the reader with a sense of dizzying opulence and excess further emphasized by the repetition of 'and': 'the halls and salons and verandas' (lines 4-5). This passage is one of many in the novel which help build up a picture of the immense wealth Gatsby possesses. Importantly, this wealth is earned by Gatsby himself and not simply inherited.

The House of Mirth, however, is filled mainly with characters who have inherited their wealth. Indeed, we can argue that most of the characters in the novel value inherited wealth over self-made wealth. This is demonstrated during Gerty Farish and Lily Bart's survey of the wedding gifts at Evie Van Osburgh's wedding where Gerty comments that Simon Rosedale is a 'horrid man'. Rosedale has acquired his wealth from Wall Street and we can infer that Gerty's aversion to Rosedale springs primarily from her snobbish dislike, along with the rest of her class, of his self-made fortune. Although it can be argued that her dislike is occasioned instead from the vulgar ostentation of Rosedale's wedding gift, a 'diamond pendant [.] as big as a dinner-plate' (line 10), Rosedale's gift does not seem wholly disproportionate in value or decadence from the other gifts on display - 'perfectly matched pearls', 'rubies' and 'sapphires' (lines 2-3). Indeed Gerty's approval of 'the exquisite white sapphire' (line 21) and in turn the giver of this gift, Percy Gryce (a man whose fortune is 'passed' onto him and whose 'only occupation' is the 'management' of his wealth, 'of the Gryce estate' (HM, 21)) signal the wider respect for inherited wealth over self-made wealth in the elite echelons of early 1900s society.

The idea of the self-made fortune and the self-made man highlighted by both passages point to a wider theme in the novels and in American culture: the American Dream. The American Dream was a belief that one was able to create and build an ideal lifestyle and persona for one's self. This dream was founded on and believed to be made possible by another set of national collective values: equal opportunity and freedom for all (especially those of socially low and poor origins) to advance in career, society and wealth. As Thomas Jefferson stated in America's 'Declaration of Independence' in 1776, the 'pursuit of happiness', the creation of an ideal life, was something equally available to 'all men'. Rosedale and Gatsby therefore, who both become prosperous from socially inferior origins, exemplify the idea of equal opportunity and freedom, and become an embodiment, particularly in Gatsby's case, of the American Dream.

However, it has often been debated what the American Dream is and whether the lifestyle which has been commonly believed to constitute the American Dream is in fact an ideal. James Adams asserts that the American Dream is not 'a dream of merely material plenty' but one 'in which life should be better, and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity' for each man to 'be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable'. Adams however, significantly omits what a better, richer and fuller life actually consists of and how one could reach one's 'fullest stature'. This indicates the fact that Americans do not understand what the ultimate object of their dream is. Ronald Berman argues that material advancement 'offers one of the few [we can argue only] recognized ways in which the American can express his idealism'. Material possessions such as a house 'is a dream translated into effort, translated into money, translated into stone': in short material wealth could indicate the American Dream. In fact, we can argue that Fitzgerald shows that material advancement was the American dream.

In The Great Gatsby the American Dream is shown to be fundamentally measured and expressed in material terms. Gatsby, for example, surveys 'every arched door and square tower' of his house and remarks 'it took me just three years to earn the money that bought it' (GG, 58). This shows how Americans use what one materially owns and the time they have spent in gaining it as a measure of how far they have progressed towards the Dream. The ostentatious and conspicuously expensive nature of Gatsby's car, described as being 'a rich cream colour [.] swollen here and there in its monstrous length' and Nick's comment that 'I'd 'seen it. Everybody had seen it' further indicate that Gatsby uses material possessions to outwardly indicate that he has attained some sort of ideal status (GG, 41). It can be argued that Gatsby's dream is in fact to be with the woman he loves, Daisy Buchanan and wealth is just a means of winning her, suggesting that the American Dream is not about material advancement. However, Gatsby's attraction towards Daisy stems from the fact that she is rich. This is comparable to Rosedale's desire to marry Lily Bart in The House of Mirth because she is a 'superfine human merchandise' (HM, 223) in a society where women were valued as commodities to be bought and sold in a 'marital marketplace'. Similarly, Gatsby describes Daisy's voice 'as full of money' (GG, 76) and finds her 'excitingly desirable' because she 'gleam[s] like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor' (GG, 95) Gatsby's dream therefore is arguably purely material.

Fitzgerald indicates that this material American Dream is ultimately hollow, unsatisfying, and superficial by implying that Gatsby's 'dream' life is in fact a spiritually impoverished life. Gatsby's material possessions which express and embody the American Dream, his 'marble swimming pool', 'beautiful' shirts and gothic library with its books, only form a superficial façade of the 'ideal' life (GG, 5, 59). The pool, books and shirts may be 'real' (GG, 30) and thus give a sense of authenticity, but ultimately they are unused ('I've never used that pool all summer'), unread (signalled by the book's uncut pages) and unworn (the shirts are folded and stacked up like 'bricks') (GG, 97, 59). They are only props to signify an 'ideal' life, forming as Marilyn Chandler argues a 'decorative shell' which does not bring meaningful experience or happiness to Gatsby who remains untouched and unchanged beneath. Indeed, the wealthy Buchanans are described as having 'drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together' (GG, 6) and Daisy's asks 'What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?' (GG, 75) suggesting that wealth brings only spiritual emptiness, lack of energy, moral inertia and existential boredom.

The American Dream is furthermore suggested as bringing loneliness. In the Gatsby passage social groups 'change [.] swiftly' and 'dissolve and form in the same breath' (line 13) conveying not only a modern society of constant flux but relationships which are transient and thus empty. At one of Gatsby's parties there is also a filmic descri ption of figures silhouetted in the blinds of a window - 'an indefinite procession of shadows [.] rouged and powdered in an invisible glass' (GG, 69). The word 'shadows' suggest that even the guests take on a ghostly presence, emphasizing the 'conspicuous and peculiar quality of emptiness' of Gatsby's house and his life. Relationships in The House of Mirth are similarly superficial and conducted according to their likelihood of monetary return. Gus Trenor befriends Rosedale because 'he`s a chap it pays to be decent to' (HM, 83). Lily equally is described as having a 'talent for profiting' (HM, 18) from social interactions, gleaning information about Americana from Selden in order to attract the rich Percy Gryce. At the end of the novel, however, empty relationships make her feel 'a sense of deeper impoverishment' that her life is merely a 'whirling surface of existence' (HM, 279).

The House of Mirth differs from The Great Gatsby on the other hand in one part of its depiction of wealth and materialism. In the selected passage the descri ption of the effect the wedding jewels have on Lily is significant: 'the glow of stones warmed Lily's veins like wine' (lines 5-6). Lily seems to literally draw life from material possessions. This is also suggested later in the same chapter when the promise of more money from Gus Trenor is described as 'fill[ing] her with the glow that is produced by a sudden cessation of physical pain' (HM, 81). Wharton shows how at the turn-of-the-century, material wealth is essential for women of Lily's class in continuing life. This is because these women are brought up in an environment of easy wealth, a 'hot-house' (HM, 134) where one is a 'rare flower grown [for] exhibition' (HM, 278) or as Thorstein Veblen put it a 'chief ornament', undisturbed by the material concerns, the 'mud and sleet' (HM, 133) in which the lives of the rest of the population are mired. Wharton implies that to exclude Lily from or to expect her to leave this 'hot-house', this environment of material wealth is to leave her as ' helpless' (HM, 264) as a hot-house flower 'thrown out into the rubbish heap' (HM, 270) on a 'winter night' (HM, 133). At the end of the novel, forcibly removed from the material environment and possessions she draws life from, Lily's inevitable fate is death, indicating that for upper-class women in the novel's period, material life is the only life they can lead.

Guy Reynolds asserts that the 'diminution and eventual corruption' of the American Dream 'into a consumerist ideology', a mere pursuit of wealth, was a modern phenomenon brought about by the 'consumerist, leisure society' of twentieth-century America. Indeed, The Great Gatsby's references to 'pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars' (GG, 49), chauffeur driven limousines and apartments filled with the spoils of consumerism such as 'tapestried furniture' (GG, 20) all indicate the growing materiality and leisure which characterized the twentieth-century. However, Reynolds' comment suggests that some untainted American idealism existed before the materialism of twentieth-century corrupted it. Fitzgerald shows that this is an illusion. Nick's evocation of the Dutch sailors' wonder as they looked upon the 'fresh green breast of the new world' (GG, 115) does not signal, as some critics consider, Fitzgerald's belief in a heroic myth - that the European colonisers of America arrived in an Edenic land, with an uncorrupted and innocent ideal to build a nation of equality, freedom and prosperity. Stephen Matterson argues that the sailors' 'wonder' references Cortez's wonder at being the first European to see the Pacific in Keats' poem 'On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer'. Matterson asserts that this comparison indicates that the Dutch sailors like Cortez are invaders who have come to 'exploit' a nation's 'settled people and seize resources' suggesting that 'American itself was not founded on idealism, but the desire for resources and materials.' We can agree with Matterson's argument as pioneers such as Dan Cody are described as 'debauchee[s] who [.] brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon' (GG, 64) showing that the myth that America's founders possessed an innocent idealism is false. Fitzgerald therefore, does not indicate that the American ideal was corrupted in the twentieth century, but that it was corrupted and un-heroic in the first place.

In The Great Gatsby Wilson's garage and the billboard of Dr Eckleburg's eye practice symbolise the fact that the financial, moral and imaginative ideals of the nation are an illusion. In The House of Mirth the rigid class system of New York indicates that the ideal of equal opportunity and freedom does not exist and even through hard-work, upward mobility and prosperity is unattainable for most. By exposing the material and superficial values that America was founded on and which it continues to uphold, Wharton and Fitzgerald not only demonstrate how far the American Dream is from an ideal but also highlight, as Nick's evocation of Dutch sailors in The Great Gatsby confirms, 'the human tendency to mythologize and idealize the past' and the powerful seductiveness of these idealizations even when they bear scant relation to reality.

Bibliography Primary Fitzgerald, Frances Scott. The Great Gatsby. Ed. Guy Reynolds. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2001.

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. Ed. Janet Beer. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Secondary Adams, James T. Epic of America. London: George Routledge, 1938.

Beer, Janet, Knights, Pamela and Nolan Elizabeth. Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, London: Routledge, 2007.

Bell, Millicent, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Berman, Ronald. Modernity and Progress: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Orwell. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2005.

? The Great Gatsby and Modern Times. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994.

Chandler, Marilyn R. Dwelling in the Text. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. London: U of Chicago , 1988.

Matterson, Stephen. The Great Gatsby. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.

Mitchell, Jeremy and Maidment, Richard. The United States in the Twentieth Century. Sevenoaks: Hodder and Stoughton in association with the Open University, 1994.

Prigozy, Ruth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2002.

Stern, Milton R, Prigozy, Ruth and Bryer, Jackson R, eds. F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Twenty-first Century. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2003.

Tindall, George B. and Shi, David E., America: a Narrative History. London: Norton, 1999.

Extracts F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby extract

By seven o`clock the orchestra has arrived no thin five-piece affair but a whole pitful of 1 oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls 5 beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other`s names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is 10 playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group and then excited with 15 triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a 20 burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray`s understudy from the "Follies." The party has begun.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth extract

They had paused before the table on which the bride`s jewels were displayed, and Lily`s 1 heart gave an envious throb as she caught the refraction of light from their surfaces - the milky gleam of perfectly matched pearls, the flash of rubies relieved against contrasting velvet, the intense blue rays of sapphires kindled into light by surrounding diamonds: all these precious tints enhanced and deepened by the varied art of their setting. The glow of 5 the stones warmed Lily`s veins like wine. More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead, the life of fastidious aloofness and refinement in which every detail should have the finish of a jewel, and the whole form a harmonious setting to her own jewel-like rareness.

"Oh, Lily, do look at this diamond pendant - it`s as big as a dinner-plate! Who can have 10 given it?" Miss Farish bent short-sightedly over the accompanying card. "Mr. Simon Rosedale. What, that horrid man? Oh, yes - I remember he`s a friend of Jack`s, and I suppose cousin Grace had to ask him here today; but she must rather hate having to let Gwen accept such a present from him."

Lily smiled. She doubted Mrs. Van Osburgh`s reluctance, but was aware of Miss Farish`s 15 habit of ascribing her own delicacies of feeling to the persons least likely to be encumbered by them.

"Well, if Gwen doesn`t care to be seen wearing it she can always exchange it for something else," she remarked.

"Ah, here is something so much prettier," Miss Farish continued. "Do look at this 20 exquisite white sapphire. I`m sure the person who chose it must have taken particular pains. What is the name? Percy Gryce? Ah, then I`m not surprised!" She smiled significantly as she replaced the card. "Of course you`ve heard that he`s perfectly devoted to Evie Van Osburgh?