The American Dream In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

I believe that the subject that ties these two books together is the idea of the pursuit of the American dream and how each individual in America can pursue their dream in whatever way they choose. The differences between the subjects of these books is what the American dream actually means to each person and if it is actually attainable. Nick, Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy are all searching for their own personal American dream, but it is unclear whether they all can actually attain it. A clear example of the American dream being reached and still not being enough is described early on in the book when Tom character is introduced. He is described as being a former football player who received great fame and adulation for his physical accomplishments
and that “everything afterwards savors of anticlimax”. After his football days Tom got married to a beautiful woman, Daisy, had a child and lived his life filled with luxury and security. That idea is so commonly seen as being the American dream and even though Tom has already attained it, it’s still not unhappy. Tom is gruff and unhappy, cheats on Daisy, and doesn’t realize how fortunate he is to have the lifestyle that he has. In Breadgivers, the subject of the American dream is just as prevalent, but Sara’s dreams differ greatly from those presented in The Great Gatsby.
Settling down and having a family are not the dreams see seeks. Money will not grant her the happiness that she is searching for, only education and a life on her own where she can be her own person will do that. Any view that goes outside of this notion of the common American dream of marriage and children Sara meets with extreme resentment. An example I found of the difficulty of achieving the American dream was when Sara discovers that her sister Mashah, who is now married and has a child, much due to the encouragement and influence of her father, is extremely exhausted and unhappy with her new life. Moe realizes this and blames their unhappiness on Mashah even though he is selfish and doesn’t properly care and provide for his family. Sara’s fight with Mashah’s husband Moe is in many ways the climactic point where Sara realizes that traditional values for women and the pursuit of the American dream are not the same for her. Sara confronts Moe, telling him, “You married Mashah because she was beautiful, then you piled your children on her neck, starved her, wore her out.” The dream of getting married, settling down and having children did nothing but ruin Mashah, and this deeply ruins Sara’s ideas of traditional American pursuits of
happiness. Both novels give an extremely critical view of American culture in the 1920’s, condemning the social and economic changes that the nation was going through. I viewed The Great Gatsby as a critique of American excess as the 1920s was a time that created one of the most excessive consumer cultures of all time. Everyone wanted things to bigger, better, and wanted more and more. The Great Gatsby to me was not a love story, but rather a critique of the old money system and that even money cannot buy happiness. It explains that money was not everything and that Americans were becoming more petty and uncaring about those who were not as heavily involved in consumer culture. Breadgivers also critiques the uncaring nature of America in the 1920s through the eyes of poverty, rather than Gatsby’s view through the eyes of the rich and excessive. Sara’s struggles come from the voice of an author who went through similar situations herself. Both novels have narrators who are experiencing an identity crisis that would hit close to home in the minds and hearts of the people who would be reading the novels at the time they were originally published. The search for what America was turning in to and what kind of nation we were going to be was still in a delicate stage, as neither of the two world wars had occurred yet and the American identity was not entirely formed.
I see both of these novels as equally culturally significant. They both give readers a view into the exact same period of time in American culture but through two unique and entirely different perspectives. These differing perspectives allow readers to get a well-rounded and more complete view of 1920’s American culture through the eyes of the people who were actually there, the authors. The worlds of The Great Gatsby and Breadgivers are both fictional but also strikingly realistic in the way that they depict an era. The 1920’s are seen as roaring and glamorous, a time when every American was excited for life and hopeful about the future. However, these two novels work together to give a view of the culture of the time that is much more relatable and realistic. The non-fantastical nature of Breadgivers and the critical but slightly hopeful nature of The Great Gatsby are, in my opinion, a perfect pair of books for anyone to read who wants to understand the 1920’s in America. I didn’t realize until recently that these two books are so incredibly similar, but their differences are what make them truly unique representations of an entire decade.
The historical context provided in the preface to Breadgivers was helpful to me in understanding why the novel is so culturally significant and historically accurate in its depiction of 1920’s New York.
Learning the author’s history and her cultural background made it easier for me to understand why she wrote the novel the way she did. It made me realize that even though the book is fictional, it is actually quite representative of the real life experiences that Anzia Yezierska had. Her struggle with shedding old-world traditional values all the while being pressured immensely by her family to maintain her long-standing cultural backgrounds directly relates Yezierska, and her characters, to the millions of American immigrants who were struggling with the same identity crisis. She also identifies the struggle that women at the time were facing with their place in society, breaking out of the domestic sphere, and what level of education and success was deemed appropriate. The area of cultural context that that Alice Kessler Harris leaves out was, to me, the racism and inequality of racial backgrounds that was going on at the time. The race issue was such a strikingly obvious issue going on in the US at the time and was never really mentioned anywhere in the preface or in Breadgivers at all, and could have been easily mentioned at some
point.
The kind of secondary sources that could be used to parallel the historical and cultural contexts for these books are any sort of work that has been published on the “roaring 20s”. When I was younger, before I studied history in any detail, I believed the 1920’s was the most exciting, happy, and prosperous times in American history. A book on the impact of consumer culture in the 1920’s would be excellent for giving readers an idea of just how important and impactful the development of intense consumerism was during this time and how it affected every single American, rich or poor. Another secondary source that could be helpful would be a source that documents the statistics on the number of immigrants from various nations that had already come into America and divided it up into country of origin and economic status in America. These statistics would be key to understanding how crucial immigration was to creating the economy of 1920’s America and that the American dream was not always immediately or easily realized by the millions of immigrants who chose to make America their new home.