SOURCE: Kumamoto, Chikako D. “Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.” Explicator 60, no. 1 (fall 2001): 37-41.

[In the following essay, Kumamoto explores Fitzgerald's use of the “egg and chicken” metaphors as part of Gatsby's structure.]

FITZGERALD'S THE GREAT GATSBY

Having moved to the suburbs of New York City, Nick Carraway makes the now-famous comparison between his neighborhood and its adjacent community: “Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy of bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great barnyard of Long Island Sound” (Fitzgerald 9).

One may inquire, however, whether Nick means the egg metaphor simply as a felicitous coincidence or as a surreptitious carrier of his narrative thesis. Among theme-clarifying studies of Fitzgerald's major images in the novel—studies by Lehan, Geismer, Johnson, Laying, Miller, and Sutton, for instance—only Kermit Moyer comments specifically on the egg-shaped setting as Fitzgerald's structural design shoring up the parallel between the novel's narrative circularity and the circular geography (45). In my essay I examine this and also investigate how Nick's seldom-critiqued “a pair of enormous eggs,” as well as other heretofore unnoticed egg-inspired images in the narrative, acts as his submerged thematic signals.

Plausible meanings of egg references can be traced to two sources, the first of which is Fitzgerald's known attraction to “The Feast of Trimalchio” in Petronius's The Satyricon. Fitzgerald scholars document the frequent correspondence between Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins chronicling Fitzgerald's obsession with using Trimalchio as part of the final title, as in Trimalchio or Trimalchio in West Egg, before he settled down to The Great Gatsby.¹ The recent Cambridge University Press publication of Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby also makes us privy to the history of the Trimalchio text that would eventually become The Great Gatsby (West xiii-xix). As Gatsby's literary antecedent, Trimalchio appears to have provided Fitzgerald with a keen awareness of the elevating effect of classical inscriptions on the Gatsby character. As Brian Way speculates, Fitzgerald must have learned from Petronius something of “the dramatic organization of such scenes [Gatsby's parties]—about the mounting rhythms that run through huge entertainment” (105-06). I argue, then, that this Trimalchio link can further intimate Fitzgerald's possible secondary awareness of the satiric suggestiveness of images of eggs and fowls underscoring Gatsby's “vast, vulgar, and meretricious” dream shared by the social-climbing Trimalchio (104).

It is in this respect that Gatsby's parties revisit Trimalchio's, where Roman celebrities and adventurers are courted with rare dishes of peahen's eggs, oriole, and other fowls:

We, meanwhile, were still occupied with the hors d'oeuvres when a tray was carried in and set down before us. On it lay a basket, and in it a hen, carved from wood, with wings outspread as though sitting on her eggs. Then two slaves came forward and, to a loud flourish from the orchestra, began rummaging in the straw and pulling out peahen's eggs which they divided among the guests. Trimalchio gave the whole performance his closest attention. “Friends,” he said, “I ordered peahen eggs to be set under that hen, but I'm half afraid they may have hatched already. Still, let's see if we can suck them.” We were handed spoons […] and cracked open the eggs. […] I heard one of the guests, obviously a veteran of these dinners, say, “I wonder what little surprise we've got in here.” So I cracked the shell with my hand and found inside a fine fat oriole, nicely seasoned with pepper.

(Petronius 30-31)

Roman feasts like Trimalchio's were a popular social institution where the host enhanced personal status by expending great care and effort on the visual sumptuousness of the food (Donahue; D'Arms 308-20). Moreover, hen's eggs were a highly prized item in the Roman diet, and fabulous public feasts were judged incomplete without various dishes of eggs, chicken, ducks, and other fowls (Smith 551-55; Macrobius). In the notes to his translation of The Satyricon, William Arrowsmith explains that during the Republic peahen eggs were considered a fabulous delicacy and that an oriole (or fig eater) is a brilliantly colored bird whose habit of stuffing itself on ripe figs endeared it to Roman epicures (Petronius 192). In Petronius's Menippean pen, the egg and fowl dishes coalesce into a satiric iconography of Trimalchio's pretensions to social status and his attempts to belong to Roman patrician society. From such egg and fowl lore of antiquity, one can infer Fitzgerald's intertextual ambition to heighten the irreconcilable social gap between West Egg, with a chauffeur clad “in a uniform of robin's egg blue,” and East Egg, “with a single green light” (26, 45). Like Trimalchio's, Gatsby's parties attract guests with illegal liquors, rare foods, popular entertainment, and upstart celebrities, in spite of “Tom and Daisy's aversion to them” (West xviii).²

Fitzgerald expands the Petronian association in chapter 7, in which Gatsby desperately clings to his dream of having what he believes to be the status of the American patrician. Fitzgerald first pays homage to his classical indebtedness by writing that “his career as Trimalchio was over” when Gatsby stops his Saturday night parties (119). He then adds a satiric bite to the egg and fowl allusions with the aid of the idiomatic meanings of “chicken” when he describes Nick's glimpse of Tom and Daisy “sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of ale […] conspiring together” (152-53). By this point in the narrative, Nick has learned from Gatsby that it was Daisy who was driving the car that killed Myrtle Wilson. Lexical sources from as early as 1400 and 1630 use “chicken” to mean people who are cowardly and have lost their nerve at crucial moments, in phrases like “cherles chekyn” and “Not finding the Defendants to be Chikins, to be afraid of every cloud or kite” (Barnhart 120; Rogers 56). Another connotation of “chicken” for Fitzgerald's contemporaries was general prosperity for the masses, as in “a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage,” the slogan of the Republican Party in the 1928 presidential campaign (Hurwitz 107). What better symbol of the death of normal human conscience, courage, and empathy at the heart of the narrative action than the picture of cold chicken appropriated to Tom and Daisy, paired with Nick's tiptoeing away, which renders all those colloquial meanings of chicken ironically apt? On one hand, the term “chicken” points to Daisy's panicky self-absorption in the face of her punishable crime. Most damningly, Tom's lawless, face-saving exercising of social privilege (his callous unconcern with his mistress's death) colludes with Daisy's ready renunciation of her talismanic power that has so attracted Gatsby (“Once in a while she looked up at him [Tom] and nodded in agreement”). Thus the chicken trope unmasks the cowardly Tom and Daisy's “conspiring together” to re-establish the unbreakable, unholy alliance of marriage, cash, and status—a fundamental cause of Gatsby's tragedy.

More than a show of witty conceit, “a pair of enormous eggs” and fowls are visual analogs for Fitzgerald's ironic gaze, obliquely trained on the bitter abilities of inherited rank and the magic of money to subvert genuine human connectives like love.

Notes

1. The following sources document Fitzgerald's title-naming history: West xi; Bryer and Kuehl; Turnbull 478; Bruccoli and Duggan 153.

2. James L. W. West III, the editor of the recent Cambridge edition of Trimalchio, notes that one of the differences between the early version and the final The Great Gatsby is the reader's increased awareness of “Gatsby's courting of celebrities—and Tom and Daisy's aversion to them” (xviii).

Works Cited

Barnhart, Robert K., ed. The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology. New York: Harper, 1995.

Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Margaret M. Duggan, eds. Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1980.

Bryer, Jackson R., and John Kuehl, eds. Dear Scott/Dear Max. New York: Scribner, 1971.

D'Arms, John. “The Roman Convivium and the Idea of Equality.” Sympotica: A Symposium on The Symposition. Ed. Oswyn Murray. Oxford: Clarendon. 308-20.

Donahue, John F. “Euergetic Self-Representation and the Inscription at Satyricon 71.10.” Classical Philology 94.1 (January 1994).

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Macmillan, 1992.

Geismer, Maxwell. “F. Scott Fitzgerald: Orestes at the Ritz.” The Last of the Provincials: The American Novels 1915-1925. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947. 316-20.

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Johnson, Christine. “The Great Gatsby: The Final Vision.” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1976: 109-15.

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Lehan, Richard D. “The Great Gatsby.” F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1966. 91-122.

Macrobius. “Saturnalia Convivia, III. 13: The Bill of Fare of a Great Roman Banquet. 63 BCE.” Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources. Ed. William Stearns Davis. Vol. 2. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1912-13. Available through Ancient History Source Book, ‹http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/macrobius-3-13.html›.

Miller, James E. “Fitzgerald's Gatsby: The World as Ash Heap.” The Twenties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama. Delena: Everett/Edwards, 1975. 181-202.

Moyer, Kermit W. “The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald's Meditation on American History.” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1972: 45-49.

Petronius, Arbiter. The Satyricon of Petronius. Trans. and introd. William Arrowsmith. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1959.

Rogers, James. The Dictionary of Clichés. New York: Ballantine, 1985.

Smith, Martin. “Ducks Eggs in Statius, ‘Silvae’ 4.9.30?” Classical Quarterly 44.2 (July-December 1994): 551-55.

Sutton, Brian. “Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.” Explicator 55.2 (Winter 1997): 94-95.

Turnbull, Andrew. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner, 1963.

Way, Brian. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction. London: Arnold, 1980.

West, James L. W., III, ed. Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby. By F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.