Revising race and social mobility in adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is an American novel that has arguably established a global cultural recognizability, with the Hollywood adaptations of this novel commanding the biggest budgets and stars. However, Fitzgerald’s depiction of race poses problems for the contemporary reader, as it both critiques and replicates racism. Baz Luhrmann’s Hollywood-produced The Great Gatsby (2013) and the independent production G (2002), directed by Christopher Scott Cherot, both choose to emphasize this theme. Whilst Luhrmann links race to aspirational hip-hop “bling” consumerism, G recreates the theme as intrinsic to the meaning of Gatsby as a parable of the failure of social mobility. In 2021, The Great Gatsby was released from global copyright restrictions. The article ends by asking how we read these texts through an African and indeed South African perspective, and the possibilities a South African adaptation of Gatsby might offer.

Keywords:

• Race
• social mobility
• The Great Gatsby
• Luhrmann
• Cherot’s G
• film adaptation

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Dr Claire Scott, Media and Cultural Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, for her insightful comments on a draft version of this paper.

Notes

1 Luhrmann, The Great Gatsby.

2 Cherot, G.

3 Vogel, “Civilization's Going to Pieces,” 41.

4 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 146.

5 The theme is consistently taken up, for example, from Lionel Trilling, writing in 1950, to Milton Stern (1970), Richard Gray (2011), and John Kuhnle in 2020. See Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 243–254; Stern, The Golden Moment; Gray, A Brief History of American Literature, 196–200; Kuhnle, “Jay Gatsby, Scion of America,” 217–230.

6 The term gained general currency only in the 1930s. See Sarah Churchwell, “The Great Gatsby and the American Dream.”

7 Wagner-Martin, Routledge Introduction to American Modernism, 84, 90.

8 Kuhnle, “Jay Gatsby, Scion of America,” 229.

9 Atkins, “In Search of the Greatest Gatsby,” 217.

10 Cutchins, “Adaptations in the Classroom,” 296.

11 Applebee, Literature in the Secondary School.

12 The GCC was developed by Alan Kruegar in 2012 as an illustration that “greater income inequality in one generation amplifies the consequences of having rich or poor parents for the economic status of the next generation.” Kruegar, “The Great Utility of the Great Gatsby Curve.” Numerous scholarly articles show that the use of this term has become widespread since 2012, with the GGC discussed well beyond the American context—for example, in relation to Canada (Connolly, Haeck, and Lapierre, Social Mobility Trends in Canada); China (Fan, Yi, and Zhang, “The Great Gatsby Curve in China” and other countries (Rauh, “Voting, Education, and the Great Gatsby Curve”).

13 See Bourdieu and Nice, “The Production of Belief,” 262, and Foster, “Adapting History and the History of Adaptation,” 121.

14 This ambivalence is also to be found in the novel, which vividly describes the pleasures of the senses and delights of modern technology whilst imbuing these with hints of potential destruction. Gatsby’s car is one of these conflations—Nick links the car to death as it passes a hearse on the way into New York: “I was glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their sombre holiday.” Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 67.

15 Morales, “The Return of Hav Plenty’s Christopher Scott Cherot.”

16 Griggs, Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies, 234.

17 Internet Movie Database, “The Great Gatsby (2013).”

18 Walker, “Baz Luhrmann,” 4; Griggs, Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies, 208.

19 DiCaprio, Luhrmann, and Mulligan, “Leonardo DiCaprio, Baz Luhrmann and Carey Mulligan on The Great Gatsby.”

20 Luhrmann, “Baz Luhrmann–The Great Gatsby Interview HD.”

21 Ohneswere, “Baz Luhrmann Speaks on Directing ‘The Great Gatsby’.”

22 Jackson and Anderson, “Hip Hop Culture Around the Globe,” 22.

23 Corredera, “Far More Black Than Black.”

24 hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, 18. bell hooks frames this as a rebellion against the poor rewards experienced by black men when they comply with capitalist systems that work against them.

25 Ibid., 18.

26 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 67.

27 MacLean, “Preserving Utopia,” 126.

28 Corredera, “Far More Black Than Black.”

29 Ibid.

30 MacLean, “Preserving Utopia,” 123.

31 “Gatsby’s carnivalesque parties,” whilst “demonstrating how profoundly black culture influenced white culture,” Vogel, “Civilization's Going to Pieces,” 37, are nonetheless “shadowed by the excision of racial and ethnic performance,” according to Meredith Goldsmith, “White Skin, White Mask,” 453.

32 Trakin, “From Flappers to Rappers.”

33 Robledo, “The Great Gatsby.”

34 Nathan, “The Great Gatsby Review.”

35 Dimock, “Introduction to American Literature in the World,” 12.

36 Hence I would disagree with Yvonne Griggs who writes of G that “there is little engagement with Fitzgerald’s ideological concerns […] matters of race, class, consumerism and pursuit of the American dream are of equal relevance, but here they are either consciously excised, side-lined or dealt with in a superficial manner.” Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies, 234.

37 Vogel, “Civilization’s Going to Pieces,” 51.

38 Corredera, “Far More Black Than Black.”

39 Ibid.

40 Griggs, Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies, 235.

41 Corredera, “Far More Black Than Black.”

42 Schreier, “Desire's Second Act,” 157.

43 Goldsmith, “White Skin, White Mask,” 447.

44 Nowlin and Rampersad, “Fitzgerald and Race I.”

45 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 18.

46 Vogel, “Civilization's Going to Pieces,” 36.

47 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 123.

48 Ibid., 24.

49 Ibid., 73.

50 Ibid., 115.

51 Michaels, “Our America,” 25.

52 See Goldsmith, “White Skin, White Mask”; Lewis, "Babbled Slander Where the Paler Shades Dwell”; Schreier, “Desire's Second Act”; Vogel, “Civilization's Going to Pieces.”

53 Van Thompson, The Tragic Black Buck, 18.

54 Phillips, “Passing for White in The Great Gatsby.”

55 Lewis, “Babbled Slander Where the Paler Shades Dwell,” 174.

56 Goldsmith, “White Skin, White Mask,” 443. Meredith Goldsmith argues that the revelation of Gatsby's past is framed through African-American and ethnic comparisons, because of a dearth of white working-class models.

57 Sides, “Precedence and Warning,” 223.

58 Lewis, “Babbled Slander Where the Paler Shades Dwell,” 180.

59 Vogel, “Civilization's Going to Pieces,” 43. See also Theodore Allen, who writes: “Given the common constitutional principles of the three cases—the Irish, the American Indian, and the African–American—the abundant parallels they present are more than suggestive; they constitute a compelling argument for the sociogenic theory of racial oppression,” “Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race,” 6. Whilst the similarities might be notable, it should not be forgotten that black and white working-class males still have differing racial identities that are linked to differing socioeconomic opportunities and outcomes—see Roediger, “The Wages of Whiteness,” 41–55.

60 Lewis, “Babbled Slander Where the Paler Shades Dwell,” 180.

61 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 18.

62 Ibid., 123.

63 Ibid., 67.

64 Goldsmith, “White Skin, White Mask,” 446.

65 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 67.

66 Ibid.

67 Mullen, “Glitz, Glamour and Gatsby.”

68 Griggs, Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies, 237.

69 Foundas, “G.”

70 Internet Movie Database, “G (2002) User Reviews.”

71 Kirschling, “G.”

72 Foundas, “G.”

73 Internet Movie Database, “G (2002) User Reviews.”

74 Kirschling, “G.”

75 hooks, We Real Cool, 25.

76 Touré, “How to Talk to Young Black Boys About Trayvon Martin.”

77 Schreier, “Desire's Second Act,” 154.

78 Ibid., 155.

79 Ibid.

80 Sides, “Precedence and Warning,” 223.

81 Ibid., 224.

82 Jones, “Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township,” 210.

83 Moses, Van Der Berg, and Rich, “A Society Divided,” 1–3; and Tonheim and Matose, “South Africa: Social Mobility for a Few?” 2.

84 Krige, “‘Growing Up’ and ‘Moving Up’,” 113.

85 Hood, Tsotsi.

86 Matlwa, Coconut.

87 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 8.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ursula Saba Vooght

Dr Ursula Vooght is a Lecturer in the department of Media, Language and Communication at Durban University of Technology. She has previously taught and supervised postgraduate film students at AFDA, Durban. Her primary research interest is in the adaptation of texts. This long-standing interest has been pursued through her PhD Media and Cultural Studies (University of KwaZulu-Natal) and published research, and her own creative projects, which include graphic novel and screenplay adaptations. Prior to entering academia, she worked for more than a decade in Corporate Communications and completed her MA Cultural and Critical Studies through Birkbeck College (London University).