Hailed as an emblematic landmark in American literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus The Great Gatsby is the quintessential depiction of the reckless abandon associated with the Jazz Age of the 1920s. The novel captures the frivolity and culture of prosperity that grew out of the material abundance of this era, weaving them into a satiric portrait of the Roaring Twenties. In the aftermath of World War One, American society experienced profound social changes as a result of rapid urbanization and the acceleration of mass production. Relaxed morals, hedonistic values and habits of mass consumption heralded the rise of a consumer-oriented economy and mass entertainment. In turn, overindulgence and infatuation with opulence became fixated
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This pervasive attitude that emphasized immersion in a lifestyle of excess, grandeur and self-gratification was viewed by many as liberation from the United States’ Victorian past. Yet, for others, this decade came to represent a period of social degradation and the weakening of the fabric of American morals. Fitzgerald himself uses this national ethos as the basis of his critique on the moral vacancy of the Roaring Twenties and its concomitant materialist, conformist and intemperate mass culture through The Great Gatsby. In the novel, he reflects his disillusionment with the shallowness of the Jazz Age through his portrayal of a decadent society depraved by the notion of equating money with happiness and the singular prioritization of attaining aristocracy. Thus, through the portrayal of the corrupting effects that Jazz Age America’s consumerist spirit induced on the characters of Myrtle Wilson, Jay Gatsby, and the Buchannans, Fitzgerald succeeds in using The Great Gatsby as a means of satirizing and denouncing the amorality that the glamour of the 1920s superficially
This pervasive attitude that emphasized immersion in a lifestyle of excess, grandeur and self-gratification was viewed by many as liberation from the United States’ Victorian past. Yet, for others, this decade came to represent a period of social degradation and the weakening of the fabric of American morals. Fitzgerald himself uses this national ethos as the basis of his critique on the moral vacancy of the Roaring Twenties and its concomitant materialist, conformist and intemperate mass culture through The Great Gatsby. In the novel, he reflects his disillusionment with the shallowness of the Jazz Age through his portrayal of a decadent society depraved by the notion of equating money with happiness and the singular prioritization of attaining aristocracy. Thus, through the portrayal of the corrupting effects that Jazz Age America’s consumerist spirit induced on the characters of Myrtle Wilson, Jay Gatsby, and the Buchannans, Fitzgerald succeeds in using The Great Gatsby as a means of satirizing and denouncing the amorality that the glamour of the 1920s superficially