SOURCE: Washington, Bryan R. “The Daisy Chain: The Great Gatsby and Daisy Miller or the Politics of Privacy.” In The Politics of Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin, pp. 35-54. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Washington compares Henry James's Daisy Miller and Gatsby, emphasizing the themes of racism, white cultural conservatism, and repressed homosexuality.]

Beginning with the premise that The Great Gatsby revises Daisy Miller, the readings that I undertake in this chapter are concerned with various states of panic: sexual, racial, and social. Eve Sedgwick's theory of “homosexual panic,” in other words, points toward a dense interpretive terrain extending far beyond, although always implicating, desire. As I have indicated, a repressed homosexuality undergirds “Going to Meet the Man.” Moreover, it is associated with (or presented within the context of) racial discord. The idea that homosexuality and race are important for The Great Gatsby is hardly startling. Nick's fixation with Gatsby easily suggests flirtation, and his obsession with ethnic origins punctuates the text. But the notion that either homosexuality or race bears any relevance to James's novella may at first seem a critical anachronism.

Winterbourne, who frames the narrative, is a genteel conservator, even an enforcer. But in disciplining Daisy he responds to more than the defiant transgression of class boundaries that the time she spends with Eugenio (a courier) and Giovanelli (a questionable gentleman) represents. Published in 1878, Daisy Miller is not only the product of Reconstruction but also a commentary on the social (textual) implications of that era. Disembarking from the City of Richmond, Daisy arrives in Europe the incarnation of America after the Civil War, the unsuspecting emblem of “[c]ivilization … go[ne] to pieces.”¹ The many references to her whiteness invite the speculation that whiteness is in serious jeopardy. But the insistence on whiteness prods blackness, in effect, into the text. Indeed, neither Winterbourne nor finally James can decide whether this new America, this Daisy, is educable, capable of understanding that, if blackness were to penetrate its discourse, James's narrative enterprise would cease to exist. Ignorant of the old textual rules, Daisy is dangerous. The threat she poses to the community of white American exiles imagined does not implicate only the potential assault of race. It also suggests the possible exposure of the homosexual underpinnings bracing not simply Daisy Miller but arguably all of James's texts. The effete Winterbourne, the suggestively asexual custodian of haute bourgeois conventions, is as necessary for the survival of James's genteel endeavor as the denial of blackness (or, for that matter, as Daisy herself). She, however, refuses to listen to him, refuses to be allegorized. Daisy prefers the company of comparatively manly men, who—by ushering her out of the drawing room (privileged in the text because it is so private) and through the streets to the public forum of the Roman Colosseum—quite literally put her at physical and social risk. His own narrative legitimacy in question, Winterbourne is almost desperate.

Equally (if less ambiguously) panicked, Nick Carraway valorizes the “Middle West”—

not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name.

(177)

Ethnic cohesiveness and familial continuity are exactly the values James assigns to Europe. But the most persuasive indications of The Great Gatsby's Jamesianisms are realized in the figuration of Daisy Buchanan, a woman of apparently irreconcilable dualities. Fitzgerald's Daisy is both a flower of innocence with the power to rescue Nick (and by implication Gatsby as well) from a commodified world and a kind of cultural monster who betrays her creator's Romantic female ideal. As Nina Auerbach argues, “if the American Girl did not exist, James would have had to invent her as a personification of the United States. …”² Auerbach is concerned to show, and justifiably, that James's female subjects do not result from a steadfast feminism, but rather from the anticipation of a “coming ‘common deluge’ that threatened to drown the private and fastidious perceptions of art,” thereby making it preferable to pay lip service to the rhetoric of the “new woman” rather than endure “the garbage of mass lower-class culture that surged below her.”³

James's American girl is an invention of narrative conceived to serve a particular cultural end: to halt the displacement of the rarefied, refined, and therefore feminine aesthetic world on which his vision depended by the aggressive, anti-aesthetic, and therefore masculine world of commerce. In the sociohistorical sense, then, the female he portrays may have existed, but she by no means speaks for the whole of America—unless, of course, one assumes that the Americans who matter are white and rich. By contrast, the archetypal female whom Fitzgerald would reclaim did exist: she is the preoccupying force in James's most ambitious writing. The “fragment of lost words … uncommunicable forever” (112) is the textual past that Fitzgerald aims to recapture. Indeed, it will become clear that the critical work I draw upon, particularly in my discussion of Daisy Miller, is similarly invested. Lionel Trilling, William Wasserstrom, F. W. Dupee—all of whom were at their most influential in the 1950s—practiced a conservative readerly politics that contemporary critics generally revalorize.

In Heiress of All the Ages, William Wasserstrom sees James as the central figure in the genteel tradition, a tradition he defines as that group of texts concerned to “establish order within the human spirit and in the life of the society.”⁴ If, as Wasserstrom maintains, the genteel tradition strove to overcome the “vast distances of wilderness, religious disorganization, political disorder, slavery, Civil War, tenements, strikes,”⁵ then the texts associated with it did so by attempting to remove themselves from them. Paradoxically, however, when the narrative scene shifts from America as such to Europe (imagined as stable) James's international fictions resonate with the tensions that made America the enemy of his narrative project. The genteel tradition saw democracy as antithetical to art. But, when it appropriated the novel—always new, always in process—as the primary vehicle of its message, it ultimately defeated itself: for the novel constitutes a democracy in and of itself. Few readers of Daisy Miller, however, have found solace in the dynamics of democracy animating it. F. W. Dupee, for example, considers Daisy's failure to listen to the voice of Europe intolerable, arguing that she is “a social being without a frame” who “does what she likes because she hardly knows what else to do. Her will is at once strong and weak by reason of the very indistinctness of general claims.”⁶ Similarly, Wasserstrom sees Daisy as “infantile,” “ignorant”—a misguided innocent who “childishly throws away her life.”⁷

To the extent that Daisy emblematizes the tension between America's impulse to democratize and Europe's compulsion to create hierarchies, the conflict is resolved only in her death. When Daisy sickens and dies, she is both silenced and, to invoke Bakhtin, “ennobled.”⁸ Wasserstrom argues that James saw the American girl as the symbol of the “dream of history,” as the heiress of a society that is the “heir of all the ages. It became therefore her duty to resolve and transcend all antitheses. When she failed, the result in literature was tragic. But when she brought off the victory, she paid the nation's debt to history.”⁹ Ideally, then, James's American girl permits the desired union between America and Europe. Her cultural assignment: to “achieve a great marriage in which two great civilizations would be joined.”¹⁰

“Daisy and her mama,” Winterbourne insists, “haven't yet risen to that stage of—what shall I call it—culture, at which the idea of catching a count or a marchese begins. I believe them intellectually incapable of that conception.”¹¹ Though in the final analysis Winterbourne dismisses Daisy as an indecipherable text (“he soon went back to live at Geneva, whence there continue to come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn: a report that he's ‘studying’ hard … —much interested in a very clever foreign lady” [74]), his investment in shielding her from the scrutiny of other, potentially more invasive readers (suitors) is considerable. Daisy's conduct with her courier, Eugenio, suggests that she regards him as more than a servant. Indeed, Mrs. Costello pronounces their relationship an “intimacy,” arguing that

there's no other name for such a relation. They treat the courier as a family friend—as a gentleman and a scholar. I shouldn't wonder if he dines with them. Very likely they've never seen a man with such good manners, such fine clothes, so like a gentleman—or a scholar. … He probably sits with them in the garden of an evening.

(17-18)

What is at risk here? The obvious response is that Daisy's crossing the conventional line between “mistress” and “servant” attests to her ineligibility as a genteel heroine. Which would explain Winterbourne's outrage at her ambiguously ardent relationship with Giovanelli, who on Winterbourne's terms is “a music-master or a penny-a-liner or a third-rate artist” (45). Were Giovanelli a member of the Italian nobility, were he for example Prince Amerigo of The Golden Bowl, then presumably he would be an appropriate suitor and a potential mate for Daisy, for America. But Daisy's transgressions implicate more than class. The emphasis on her whiteness, as I have suggested, is almost obsessive. At the beginning of the narrative she is “dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces and knots of pale-coloured ribbon” (5). Indeed, references to her white dresses, white shoulders, white teeth crowd the text. This iterative whiteness, traditionally read as an affirmation of her virtue, is also simply—complicatedly—whiteness.

We know from The American Scene that James was greatly concerned that the country would never recover from the sociocultural split of the Civil War, but he also romanticized the antebellum South, which perhaps accounts for the name of the ship transporting the Millers abroad. Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, is on the move, in transit. Why? Because white women and children must be evacuated? Implicitly, Daisy's archetypal whiteness is defined against its archetypal opposite, blackness. In short, since she blithely ignores class boundaries, would Daisy be capable of venturing further? Or, in the aftermath of the war, in the aftermath of the Emancipation, had America changed so irrevocably that anything could happen? As her conduct with Eugenio and Giovanelli invites us to speculate, Daisy would conceivably risk her own racial destruction were she permitted to pursue the implications of the social freedoms she embodies. This is what democracy does: it precipitates chaos. In James's tale, race is of course unspeakable. In The Great Gatsby, however, it dominates the discourse.

If Nick Carraway is Winterbourne unambiguously panicked, Daisy Buchanan is Daisy Miller fully recontextualized:

“You see I think everything's terrible anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything. … Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!”

(18)

Assuming, then, that she is to reenact the drama of American innocence, it is Daisy Buchanan's sophistication that prevents her from fulfilling, as Wasserstrom would argue, her destiny. In The Great Gatsby the figuration of women in general suggests an attempt to produce a suitable “heiress”—not of the ages, but to the Jamesian legacy. Daisy (murderous cosmopolite) and Jordan (innocent miller's daughter transcribed to dishonest baker's) are genteel conspirators. But Myrtle, the potentially relentless force in this gendered cultural garden, is expeditiously weeded out because she places male (textual) authority in even greater peril.

Like her namesake, Daisy Buchanan is defined by her whiteness. So is Jordan Baker:

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.

(8)

If these women can fly, then for Nick they are either angels or witches, saints or sinners. In short, Nick is the prisoner of his own classifications, desperately hoping that these privileged white women are the female archetypes he needs them to be and hopelessly disenchanted when they prove to be more complicated than his allegories of gender would allow.

Richard Godden suggests that Daisy has “repressed her body and cashed in her voice, … described as ‘full of money.’”¹² For Godden, then, “the structure of Daisy's desire is economic.”¹³ Myrtle, on the other hand, “is described most frequently in terms of ‘blood,’ ‘flesh,’ and ‘vitality.’”¹⁴ (Her husband, Wilson, is represented as “blond,” “spiritless,” and “anaemic,” as though his wife has drained him of his vital fluids.) But that Myrtle, in contrast to Daisy, is a woman who is entirely physical is not, as Godden maintains, a function of her lack of commitment to “the production of manners” or to the trappings of the leisure class. Her New York apartment, for example—“crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles” (29)—strives to achieve the elegance of Daisy's house on Long Island. Like everyone else in the novel, Myrtle is a bracketed figure whom Nick “reveals” to us. The woman he presents is literally Daisy in-the-flesh, ominous because of her social aspirations and because of her almost manly sexuality.

Myrtle's purchases, made en route to the apartment that Tom has procured for her, point up her ambition and her ignorance: “a copy of Town Tattle and a moving-picture magazine, … some cold cream and a small flask of perfume,” and, finally, a puppy of an “indeterminate breed” (27). This, then, is a woman who has yet to learn the difference between mongrels and Airedales, between gossip magazines and the social register. In a text preoccupied with and intolerant of the racial and social hybridization of America, Myrtle's most unforgivable sin is perhaps her inability to distinguish a hybrid from a thoroughbred. Her lack of judgment applies not only to dogs but also, apparently, to men. Nick reports that Myrtle married her husband because she thought “he knew something about breeding, but,” she adds, “he wasn't fit to lick my shoe” (35). But Myrtle, of course, knows nothing of breeding. The testimony of her narrow escape immediately follows her sister's narrative about an abortive affair with a Jew: “I almost married a little kike who'd been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Lucille, that man's way below you!’ But if I hadn't met Chester, he'd of got me sure” (34).

And yet, always conscious of the boundaries he transgresses, Nick too is a nativist:

As we crossed [my emphasis] Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes [sic], two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

(69)

His conclusion: “Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge, … anything at all …” (69). Nick's is the laughter of terror, for the black men he depicts have literally passed him by. The encounter, it seems, is so disconcerting that the overtaking passengers are denied voice.

In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Houston Baker laments Fitzgerald's failure to place “his ‘pale well-dressed negro’ [the black man who identifies the car that kills Myrtle] in the limousine,”¹⁵ suggesting that had Fitzgerald done so he would have acknowledged the legitimacy of the Harlem Renaissance—the black writers of the 1920s, many of whom were indeed “pale.” He would, in short, have overturned the racial stereotype of black inarticulacy upheld in the text. Moreover, the presence of “pale-skinned” blacks confirms the worst fears of those who foresee the dissolution of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. For to be pale-skinned and African American is to be—like Myrtle's dog—a mongrel.

Nick's reaction to the blacks in the limousine recalls Tom Buchanan's unabashed racism:

Civilization's going to pieces. … I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard? … Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved. … It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.

(13)

Though Tom misidentifies the author (the reference is to Lothrop Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy, prominently displayed in Gatsby's library), his views are corroborated in the novel as a whole. Camouflaged in the discourse of the fall of civilization or of a remembered but unattainable past, Fitzgerald's subtext, to which Tom points, encodes a darker message. As Baker argues, Tom might be “a more honestly self-conscious representation of the threat that some artists whom we call ‘modern’ felt in the face of a new world of science, war, technology, and imperialism. … What really seems under threat are not towers of civilization but rather an assumed supremacy of boorishly racist, indisputably sexist, and unbelievably wealthy Anglo-Saxon males.”¹⁶

Myrtle's ineptitude when it comes to identifying the breed of dogs or men equates with Nick's inability to determine who Gatsby is. Nick says of his mysterious neighbor: “I knew I had discovered a man of fine breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to myself: ‘There's the kind of man you'd like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister’” (73). As I shall demonstrate, this is an intricate textual moment. Arguably, it is at this point that Nick's readiness to welcome Gatsby to the nativist family, to extend a fraternal embrace, is at its most pronounced. Given his earlier reservations about his background, Nick's renewed conviction that Gatsby is indeed a “man of fine breeding” can be read as an ethnological sigh of relief:

I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn't—at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn't—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.

(49)

And thus when it is finally disclosed that Jay Gatsby is Jimmy Gatz and possibly more than merely casually connected with Meyer Wolfsheim (“a small, flat-nosed Jew” with tufts of hair in his nostrils and “tiny eyes” [69-70]), why Gatsby's ambiguous ancestry, his questionable past, is intolerable to Nick begins to make sense. To say that “Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (99) is to confirm that he is the worst kind of outsider. Gatsby, unlike Daisy and Tom (Nick's distant cousins), is of no relation. He is as much a threat to the “family”—to the “Middle West,” to the white cultural center—as Myrtle, the “black bucks” in the limousine, or Wolfsheim.

But complicating the deliberation over bringing Gatsby home is desire itself. Does Nick speak as a man, a woman, or both? Like Eliot's Tiresias, Nick is “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (36)—capable, that is, of being both male and female, Jew and gentile, black and white. Insofar as The Great Gatsby is indebted to The Waste Land, its commitment to salvaging whatever is left of “civilization” (as with poem) is articulated by one “in whom the two sexes meet.”¹⁷ The androgynous Tiresias bears witness to a culture in decline. He attests to the imminent demise not only of Europe (as text) but also of its institutions (implicitly the Church) and the strictly enforced hierarchies that fostered them. The “typist home at tea time” is an outrage and a devastation precisely because she is a typist—reductio ad absurdum of Philomel.

If Nick is like Tiresias, he is also like the sexually neutral Winterbourne. When he looks at Daisy, when he “stud[ies]” her, Winterbourne's gaze is not that of a potential suitor, but instead that of a decorous cultural chaperone searching for a charge who will behave. Fitzgerald's revision of James's tale foregrounds the deeper narrative implications of her misconduct. As I have pointed out, Myrtle is Daisy's déclassé double. Just as she is socially presumptuous, she is also physically overwhelming: her clothing “stretche[s] tight over her rather wide hips,” and her figure is “thickish,” “faintly stout.” Nick observes that “she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face … contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering” (25-26). As Nick conceives it, Myrtle's sexuality is aggressive, masculine; her body authoritative. She is a match for Tom and thus a threat to Tom, who breaks her nose. Indeed, her “smouldering” presence is so disruptive that she has to be contained, locked up in Wilson's house. And when she breaks free, shouting “Beat me! … Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!” she runs to her death. But killing her is not enough. Her “left breast … swinging loose like a flap [and her] mouth … wide open and ripped at the corners” (138), she is also mutilated, and her sexual power (in effect) neutralized.

There is an element of misogyny at work here that further problematizes the figuration of Nick. What values are assigned to him? Does the bald revulsion at female sexuality suggest homosexual panic? If it does, then The Great Gatsby affirms the cliché that for homosexuals women, appetitive and predatory, are terrifying. On these homophobic terms, Myrtle is loathsome because, defined only by body, she makes it impossible for Nick to romanticize male-female relationships, to see them as anything other than base, physical exchange. On the other hand, Nick's disgust with Myrtle is conceivably Winterbourne's frustration with Daisy laid bare. The stereotypical homosexual sensibility we confront, which James's work authorizes, is one repelled by a female figure whose gross ignorance and unfailing disobedience are the enemy of manners. Myrtle (desire incarnate) and Daisy (desire disembodied) are “monstrous doubles,” and thus one of them must be sacrificed. In other words, René Girard's theory of myth and ritual is in this context quite useful. For Myrtle can be read as a “surrogate victim” whose death results (or is meant to result) in the restoration of order to the community.¹⁸

The Great Gatsby co-opts James's figure of the hotel as a “synonym” for America's social disintegration. As James said of the Waldorf Astoria, “one is verily tempted to ask if the hotel-spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and most finding itself.”¹⁹ Indeed, in Daisy Miller the social critique of the hotel, which “represents the abolition of privacy and decency,”²⁰ is buried in the discourse of the aesthetic. Describing the rooms the Millers have taken in Rome, Daisy defers to Eugenio, who considers them the best in the city. But the aesthetic judgments of an Italian courier are in James's hierarchicized world less than worthless. “Splendid” though they may be, these rooms are nevertheless public accommodation. Giving voice to the “mysterious land of dollars and six-shooters,” Daisy's brother Randolph makes it clear that the Millers are accustomed to a superabundance of gilded space: “We've got a bigger place than this. … It's all gold on the walls” (37). Indeed, Daisy's mother's imagination is the captive of the hostelry: “‘I guess we'll go right back to the hotel,’ she remarked with a confessed failure of the larger [my emphasis] imagination” (41). The cultural vision of Americans like these, then, is truncated. And yet the imaginative capability privileged in the text is smaller, not larger. The Millers are reproved for their attraction to the gigantic, the overstuffed, the overgilded, and the distinctly public. They are exhorted to narrow their scope, to exclude themselves from mass society—to be small.

When Daisy Buchanan decamps to her lover's house, Gatsby essentially shuts down the inn: “the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes” (114). In penetrating Gatsby's territory, then, Daisy is a potentially civilizing (privatizing) force:

She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village—appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing.

(108)

Gatsby's sprawling house (and by extension all that occurs there) repels because it is a phenomenon rather than a “place,” an augury of things to come. It is a luxurious “roadhouse” to which all are admitted, a “factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, … and more than forty acres of lawn and garden” (5). The owner of this “colossal affair” is a kind of aesthetic criminal whose “art” Nick condemns—a reaction immediately undermining the reliability of a narrator who announces in the ninth line of the text that he is “inclined to reserve all judgments” (1). For, if nothing else, The Great Gatsby is a litany of judgments of the most reactionary sort.

In contrast to Gatsby's ersatz residence, Nick's “small eyesore” of a house is the ideologically privileged trysting place for Daisy and Gatsby. It is a model of privacy. Though, as Gatsby deduces, Nick “doesn't make much money,” he is nevertheless perfectly capable of producing an afternoon tea that certifies his pedigree. Replete with lemons and lemon cakes and prepared by a female servant (unnamed, dismissed as “my Finn” [113]), the haute bourgeois tea that Nick serves to friends suggests that his house is a “home.” The parvenu Gatsby, on the other hand, is host to endless caravans of visitors whom he does not know. Klipspringer, for example, is a permanent but unidentified guest—a visible indication of the social phantasmagoria Gatsby's way of life represents, as are the nightly parties themselves. Gatsby's guests are “swimmers,” “wanderers,” anonymous “groups [that] change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, [and] dissolve and form in the same breath,” “confident girls who … glide on through the seachange of … men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles” (41, 46). Gatsby's parties play out the “Jazz History of the World,” the music Nick remembers from the first party he attends. Jazz is, in Nick's eyes, the music of commerce, its syncopations and rhythms, as Theodor Adorno argues, defined by the demands of the marketplace.²¹ Indiscriminate, catering to the masses, jazz, in other words, speaks for Gatsby.

Matthew Bruccoli insists that “The Great Gatsby provides little in the way of sociological or anthropological data,”²² which is another way of saying that its meanings transcend their historical context. Why dehistoricize the text? To safeguard its status as a “classic”? Consider, for example, the names of some of Gatsby's guests: Blackbuck, the Poles, Da Fontano, Don S. Schwartze, Horace O'Donovan, and the Kellehers. These clearly attest to Fitzgeraldian outrage at the new America, one in which so-called ethnics are ubiquitous—in which the citizens of East Egg, who form a “dignified homogeneity” in the midst of the “many-colored, many-keyed commotion” (45, 105), must contend not only with the inhabitants of West Egg but with all of New York.

“On week-ends … [Gatsby's] Rolls-Royce [later characterized as “swollen … in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shield that mirrored a dozen suns” (54)] became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered … to meet all [my emphasis] trains” (39). And ready to welcome the masses stands Gatsby—a fraudulent feudal lord in command of a serfdom of household staff charged with keeping the whole thing going: “on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and … garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before” (39). And “every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons … left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb” (39).

The details of Gatsby's household evoke James's Newport “white elephants,” the enormous “cottages” of the summering rich that in The American Scene have replaced the quaint abodes James knew in his youth:

[I]t was all so beautiful, so solitary and so “sympathetic.” And that indeed has been, thanks to the “pilers-on-of gold,” the fortune, the history of its beauty: that it now bristles with the villas and palaces into which the cottages have all turned, and that those monuments of pecuniary power rise thick and close, precisely, in order that their occupants may constantly remark to each other, from the windows to the “ground,” and from house to house, that it is beautiful, it is solitary and sympathetic.²³

The edifices that “rise thick and close” in Newport are in Gatsby faithfully reproduced: Nick's house is “squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season” (5).

In Slouching towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion, also horrified by the crumbling of traditional values (although she attributes the erosion to the social upheaval of the 1960s), returns to James's Newport to report, quoting The American Scene almost verbatim, that “no aesthetic judgment could conceivably apply to the Newport of Bellevue Avenue,” where “the air proclaims only the sources of money” and where “the houses [like Gatsby's] are men's houses, factories, undermined by tunnels and service railways, shot through with plumbing to collect salt water, tanks to store it, devices to collect rain water, vaults for table silver, equipment inventories of china and crystal and ‘Tray cloths—fine’ and ‘Tray cloths—ordinary.’”²⁴ On these elitist terms, Gatsby's house is the quintessential male (public) bastion that presumably could be gentrified under the supervision of a woman like Daisy, whose taste Nick both endorses and replicates. The contrast, in fact, between Daisy's house and her lover's is striking: it is an architectonic utopia,

a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon.

(6-7)

Daisy's house is not only a model of tasteful (though conspicuous) consumption, effortlessly marrying the best of Europe with the best of America, and subtly enshrining a woman who has “been everywhere and done everything.” It also embodies the natural elegance associated with Daisy Miller—as though she has finally forsaken the hotel. The Buchanan mansion is an extension of the landscape surrounding it: “The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea” (8).

Gatsby's house, by contrast, is “unnatural,” not simply because of the way it imposes itself on the landscape or because of who is invited there but also because of its interior. Rather than achieving a sanctified marriage with Europe, equated in East Egg with nature itself, Gatsby's “palace” is represented as the product of a cultural rape, as a kind of bastardized museum in which visitors wander through “Marie Antoinette music-rooms and Restoration salons” (92) unable to detect an organizing logic beneath the labyrinth of exhibits. The house is so clearly designed to accommodate the public that, during a private tour with Gatsby as guide, Nick suspects that there are “guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through” (92). The most significant room, given what it says about Gatsby, is the “Merton College Library” (92)—de rigueur for a self-invented Oxford man: “we [Nick and Jordan] tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas” (45). Here a “middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles,” exclaims that the books are “absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard” (45-46). They are not. The pages, however, are uncut. Gatsby, as untutored as Daisy Miller, does not read: his books are merely part of the inventory.

The novel's climactic scene unfolds in the Plaza Hotel. As though guests at one of Gatsby's parties, the principal players in the text are “herded” into a single “stifling” room—their private drama acted out in what is effectively a theater. Tom and Daisy's marriage is a corporate merger. Gatsby (the Arrow Shirt man) and Daisy (whose voice itself sounds like money) are equally commodified. The reified “personal” relationships and disintegrating traditional values Nick perceives are symptomatic of a country that for him, as for Fitzgerald, has become uninhabitable. “Nowadays,” Tom says, “people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white” (130). Though Nick dismisses this outburst as “impassioned gibberish” (130), as the hypocritical response of a man who has suddenly transformed himself from “libertine to prig” (131), his own view of the American dilemma bolsters Tom's.

The celebrated concluding paragraphs of The Great Gatsby compose a reactionary social manifesto dressed up in the romantic rhetoric of loss. But a loss of what? Of innocence? Of the promise of spiritual perfectibility that the idea of America held out to its colonizers? As Baldwin suggests in “Stranger in the Village,” the answer depends on whether, ancestrally, one is a conqueror or one of the conquered. Readers who are not descended from the “Dutch sailors” invoked may wonder at Lionel Trilling's depoliticizing and still largely unquestioned assessment of a writer now unavoidable: “the root of Fitzgerald's heroism is to be found … in his power of love.”²⁵

As it turns out, Daisy was always a discursive failure. In both narratives, women are exhorted to save “America,” which is to say a particular textual tradition whose values and assumptions about what a culture should properly do and be are in jeopardy. Figuring America a cultural battlefield, James advocates evacuation, manning a textual lifeboat bearing the refugee of sanctified white womanhood. Awaiting Daisy stands the ultimately ineffectual Winterbourne, whose refined (homosexual?) sensibility, whose valorization of Europe (represented as the only culture) is crucial to James's work as a whole. However, Daisy's baggage, the conflicts of class and race with which—from the very beginning—she is ineluctably associated, proves too heavy; thus she is disciplined, and finally punished by death.

As an illustration of the sense of urgency underscoring the discourse of white American exiles, The Great Gatsby is clear enough. Tender Is the Night, however, to which I am about to turn, brings both Fitzgerald's social agenda and his ongoing dialogue with James into sharper focus. The opening paragraph, for example, depicting a hotel “on the pleasant shore of the French Riviera,”²⁶ is James's synonym for America invoked yet again. Gausse's Hôtel des Étrangers is isolated from its surroundings: bounded on all sides by mountain ranges, pine forests, “the pink and cream … fortifications of Cannes,” and by the sea itself, where “[m]erchantmen crawled westward [i.e., to America, the land of commerce] on the horizon” (9). Inscribing a “littoral [cut off] from true Provençal France” (9) and populated by Americans as contemptible as the Buchanans, Tender Is the Night is a meditation on boundaries and thresholds.

Recalling James's nostalgia for the old Newport, Fitzgerald suggests that his Riviera was once a place of genteel beauty, where the “cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines” (9)—was once untouched by the “pilers-on-of gold.” And there are further references to James—especially to Daisy Miller. Geneva, Zurich, Vevey, the Swiss cities dominating the map of Daisy's European experience, are Dick Diver's familiar haunts. As with Daisy, his education begins in Switzerland, and he also hails from the same American region. Daisy is from Schenectady; Dick is from Buffalo. But in Fitzgerald's text, Switzerland is more than the backdrop for a tragicomedy of manners dramatizing the differences between Europeanized Americans and parochial patriots: it is “the true centre of the Western World” (167).

Notes

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; reprint, New York: Scribner's, 1953), 13. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

2. Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 122.

3. Ibid., 116.

4. William Wasserstrom, Heiress of All the Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959), ix.

5. Ibid., x.

6. F. W. Dupee, Henry James (1951; reprint, New York: William Morrow, 1974), 110-11.

7. Wasserstrom, Heiress of All the Ages, 63.

8. Bakhtin argues that discourse in the novel straddles two stylistic lines. Novels of the first type “eliminate their brute heteroglossia [the competing linguistic forces derived from everyday speech that Bakhtin maintains are unique to the novel], replacing it everywhere with a single-imaged, ‘ennobled’ language.” Novels of this category, then, homogenize difference. Novels of the second type, however, incorporate a multiplicity of “languages, manners, genres; … [they] force all exhausted and used-up, all socially and ideologically alien and distant worlds to speak for themselves in their own language and in their own style. …” M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 409-10.

   And yet, just as the author's intentions are dialogically linked with these languages, they are also dialogically opposed to them, thereby energizing the text with unresolved conflict. The two styles of novelistic discourse Bakhtin identifies are sometimes present within the same text, and so the reader must contend not only with heteroglossia but also with oppositional modes of discourse. Such is the case with Daisy Miller. Bakhtinian theory, of course, assumes a democratic reader.

9. Wasserstrom, Heiress of All the Ages, x.

10. Ibid., 65.

11. Henry James, Daisy Miller, in Selected Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Dutton, 1964), 61-62. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

12. Richard Godden, “Some Slight Shifts in the Manner of the Novel of Manners,” in Henry James: Fiction as History, ed. Ian F. A. Bell (London: Vision, 1984), 162.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 168.

15. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 6.

16. Ibid., 4.

17. T. S. Eliot, “Notes on ‘The Waste Land,’” in The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 152.

18. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 95.

19. Henry James, The American Scene, ed. Leon Edel (1907; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 102.

20. Virginia Fowler, Henry James's American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 16.

21. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Jazz,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (1967; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 121-32.

22. Matthew J. Bruccoli, introduction to New Essays on “The Great Gatsby,” ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, The American Novel 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 7.

23. James, The American Scene, 212.

24. Joan Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968; reprint, New York: Touchstone, 1979), 211-12.

25. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking, 1950), 244.

26. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934; reprint, New York: Scribner's, 1962), 9. Subsequent page references are to this edition.