Great Gatsby intro

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 5

The book is set in the Roaring twenties
What do you know about this time?

The Roaring Twenties / The Jazz Agee

- Fashion

- Music

- Dancing

- Prosperity

- Loose morals

-  Alcohol

- Flapper girls

- Mafiosi 

When did women gain the right to vote in the US?

1. 1930
2. 1920
3. 1910
4. 1940

What were some of the societal changes during the roaring twenties?

1. Less leisure time for individuals
2. People had to work more hours
3. Increased freedom and empowerment for women and black people
4. Limited access to music and entertainment

The Roaring Twenties

• The American Dream
• Roaring twenties/The Jazz Age
• Prohibition (ban on alcohol)
• Old money vs New money

Lesson objective: Learn more about the roaring twenties and how it influenced literature.

Context of composition =

Writers are also affected by their environment and personal experiences. Time, race, gender nationality and family history are a few factors. (Look for contextual clues as evidence that show what the writer wants to convey.)

The American Dream = During the 1920s, the perception of the American Dream was that an individual can achieve success in life regardless of family history or social status if they only work hard enough -> New Money

Roaring Twenties = period of rapid industrial and economic growth and social change. The decade has a distinctive cultural edge in various big Western cities, so in Paris the "roaring twenties" was also a thing. Art and culture were at the center of attention, Jazz also peaked during this period. Roaring Twenties is also known as the Jazz age.  

Jazz: (black) culture, dance.

The spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of novelty associated with modernity and a break with tradition. (break from the depressive times associated with WWI)

Everything seemed possible through modern technology! (There's a lot of new technology and machinery at play in the novel)

Prohibition = Progressive party became the leading party. The party was backed by the protestant church, believing that prohibition of alcohol and drugs would decrease crime. Its crowning achievement was the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the associated Volstead Act which made illegal the manufacture, import and sale of beer, wine and hard liquor (though drinking was technically not illegal).

Old Money vs Money =

“old money” meaning the generational trend of inheriting money from family opposed to “new money” meaning coming into money independently.

Old money families are proud and value their history and connections. Closed-knit community. Looks down upon New Money because they are lower class people who have climbed up the financial ladder. 

New Money: related to the American dream, to be self-made. Success can be reached when you work hard (new money = labour)

Prohibition

Prohibition was a nationwide ban on the sale and import of alcoholic beverages that lasted from 1920 to 1933.

Drugs and gambling were also prohibited.

Prohibition referred to...

1. the restriction of alcohol only
2. the Jazz Age
3. the restriction of vice activities such as gambling, alcohol, & narcotics
4. all of the above

What was the purpose of prohibition?

1. To ban alcohol
2. To make sure people went to bed early
3. To increase alcohol consumption
4. To promote social gatherings

The Roaring Twenties / The Jazz Agee

- Fashion

- Music

- Dancing

- Prosperity

- Loose morals

-  Alcohol

- Flapper girls

- Mafiosi 

What solved the mass unemployment of the thirties in the US?

1. Great Depression action plan
2. Technological advancements in industries
3. The Marshall plan
4. WW2

What event marked the end of the “roaring twenties”?

1. The wall street crash of 1929
2. World War II
3. The Prohibition Era
4. The end of World War I

The Great Gatsby

The book 'the Great Gatsby'was set in the roaring twenties.

The main themes in The Great Gatsby are the American Dream, love, money, and corruption.

Context of composition =

Writers are also affected by their environment and personal experiences. Time, race, gender nationality and family history are a few factors. 

People, authors, are products of their time (when writing contemporary stories, so not in the case of historic novels)

Aristocratic blood: Fitzgerald was the only son of an unsuccessful, aristocratic father and an energetic, provincial mother. Half the time he thought of himself as the heir of his father’s tradition. As a result, he had typically ambivalent American feelings about American life, which seemed to him at once vulgar and dazzlingly promising.

Heightened sensitivity: He also had an intensely romantic imagination, what he once called “a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” and he charged into experience determined to realize those promises.

Zelda Fitzgerald:

known for their extraordinary love and their way of life.

Fast life: literary and economic success made it possible for Fitzgerald and Zelda to live a life they dreamed about, he wrote about. They were beautifully equipped for it as it was in their blood (aristocrats). However, living the fast life, the couple realized it could end them (losing touch with reality, not ever being satisfied or content). They moved to France. Nonetheless, they found themselves again in a world of glamour. Unsure how he felt about it all, he depicted the divided nature in his finest work The Great Gatsby. His other works represented the Jazz Age, but not with the same level of nuance and gravity as in Gatsby. 

1930s: Fitzgerald becomes an alcoholic, Zelda mentally unstable. Eventually goes to a sanitarium. With its failure and his despair over Zelda, Fitzgerald was close to becoming an incurable alcoholic. By 1937, however, he had come back far enough to become a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and there he met and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a famous Hollywood gossip columnist. He started writing a novel again, a novel about Hollywood, it was his final attempt to create his dream of the promises of American life and of the kind of man who could realize them. Ironically, he died from a heart attack halfway through writing. Why is this ironic? (= he could not make his dream true. He was not the type of man who could realize the American dream lif.

The American dream

Initially, the American Dream was that of equality, but over time, and especially in the 1920s, it became a dream of material possessions.