A level - The Great Gatsby

NEW GATSBY SOW A-LEVEL 2025.pptx

the great gatsby ch 1-10.pptx

02_Slideshow.pptx

Three Letters from Switzerland - The Paris ReviewWhile she was a patient at Les Rives de Prangins, Zelda Fitzgerald wrote letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald detailing the nonevents of her days.

Copy of 1.-Key-themes-and-context.pptx

CONTEXT

Read the full text here. https://www.wsfcs.k12.nc.us/cms/lib/NC01001395/Centricity/Domain/7935/Gatsby_PDF_FullText.pdf

Watch this 'Roaring Twenties' clip above to give you a sense of the period. Great Gatsby is often referred to as the epitome of ‘jazz age’ in American literature, therefore it's important to understand its social/historical context (use of roaring eg. “Roaring noon.”)

It was a period of great social change and, following the war, greatly increasing wealth. A break down of strict pre-war social conventions affected:

Music – jazz
(pop culture – also cinema)
Art/architecture – art deco (+ skyscrapers = symbol of new America)
Fashion
Dance
Liberalisation of social mores and changing role of women
Political/racial intolerance

Fitzgerald’s novel documents these changes, and shows his cynicism in relation to them (The Lost Generation - war-time generation, generally dispirited - read also Ernest Hemingway and T.S.Eliot)

PROHIBITION

Partly as a response to these social changes by some, more Conservative or Catholic groups, the 1920’s was also a period characterised by prohibition

Prohibition – The Volstead Act of 1920 prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of ‘intoxicating liquors’ (alcohol).

THE EFFECTS OF PROHIBITION?

Definitely DID NOT STOP people consuming alcohol:

Partly, because it was enforced so unsuccessfully

- not enough officers – badly paid therefore easily corruptible

- geography of America – coastline + proximity of Mexico and Canada

- people still wanted to drink cf. Gatsby’s parties

EXAMPLES FROM GATSBY HERE…

Chp 3 – Gatsby’s weekend parties

“In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials.”

“the cocktail table — the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.”

“I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down into the garden.”

“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”

“Champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls”

Chp 4

“Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand.”

And partly because of the rise of Speakeasies (there were far more speakeasies than there had been saloons before prohibition), bootlegging, moonshine etc. which led to a huge ‘underground’ market in alcohol that provided the ideal breeding ground for organised crime and corruption, characterised by the Italo-American gangsters such as Al Capone.

Now watch the clip above from Bugsy Malone (Fat Sam’s Grand Slam here)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNfB58oBjA0K0k

(Bugsy Malone, 1976, Alan Parker based on events in prohibition-era America)

+ explain about the speakeasy here

Prohibition was eventually repealed in 1933 during the depression, since it was believed the alcohol industry could be a valuable source of revenue for the US. But it was too late, the organised crime, corruption and gangster violence remained.

ORGANISED CRIME AND GANGSTER VIOLENCE

The American Mafia is largely formed by a number of Italian (often Sicilian) families and there is often a link between the Italian and American mafias (most notably ‘Cosa Nostra’ in Siciliy).

Although the American Mafia was first present around the end of the 19th C. at the time of large-scale Italian emigration to the USA, it became most powerful during the prohibition era.

Following the introduction of prohibition, the mafia (mob), moved into the profitable and violent bootlegging market, filling the new demand for black-market alcohol. Many mafia bosses (mobsters) became very well known: Al Capone (as already said) in Chicago, and his enemy there Bugs Moran (cf. St Valentine’s Day Massacre); in New York, Charles ‘Lucky Luke’ Luciano Mobsters were often responsible for importing, distributing and even producing alcohol themselves, as well as owning many of the speakeasies (eg. by 1930, Al Capone controlled all 10,000 of Chicago’s Speakeasies)

à WHO’S HEARD OF AL CAPONE? WHAT DO THEY KNOW ABOUT HIM?

Alphonse Capone (‘Al Scarface Capone’), was/is arguably America’s most-famous mobster. Originally from the South of Italy, he was most well-known for his control of the Chicago crime syndicate which controlled the city as well as much of America’s alcohol supply during the prohibition-era.

Perhaps his most notorious action was the ‘St. Valentine’s Day Massacre’ (February 14th 1929), the culmination of gang warfare in Chicago between Capone’s syndicate and Moran’s North Side gang. On the 14th February 1929, 7 members of Bugs’s gang were shot dead by men disguised as police officers in a garage in Chicago’s North Side district. Noone was ever brought to trial for this crime.

In 1931, Capone was finally arrested (surprisingly!) for tax evasion, and was sent to Alcatraz where he died in 1947.

In order for these activities to continue, the mafia was involved in the full-scale bribery and corruption of policemen, law enforcers and the government.

à WHERE IS GANG VIOLENCE REFERENCED IN GATSBY?

Chp 5

“The old Metropole,” brooded Mr. Wolfsheim gloomily. “Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside. ‘all right,’ says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I pulled him down in his chair.

“‘Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t you, so help me, move outside this room.’

“It was four o’clock in the morning then, and if we’d of raised the blinds we’d of seen daylight.”

“Did he go?” I asked innocently.

“Sure he went.” Mr. Wolfsheim’s nose flashed at me indignantly. “He turned around in the door and says: ‘Don’t let that waiter take away my coffee!’ Then he went out on the sidewalk, and they shot him three times in his full belly and drove away.”

THE GREAT GASTBY IN REALTION TO ‘THE ROARING 20S’

à WHICH PARTS OF LIFE IN ‘THE ROARING 20S’ DOES FITZGERALD COMMENT ON?

(GROUP WORK QUICKLY, THEN CLASS DISCUSSION)

- liberalisation of social mores – people all enjoying themselves

- prohibition – showing people still wanted to (and did succeed) drink

- crime and corruption – suggested by the figure of Gatsby (even if never explicitly proved) – drugstores an example of front for bootleggers (eg. Al Capone = used furniture dealer)

Chp 6

“Who is this Gatsby anyhow?” demanded Tom suddenly. “Some big bootlegger?”

“Where’d you hear that?” I inquired.

“I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.”

Chp 7

“I found out what your ‘drug-stores’ were.” He turned to us and spoke rapidly. “He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.”

à IS FITZGERALD SHOWING A POSITIVE OR A NEGATIVE VIEW OF ‘THE ROARING TWENTIES’?

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Show and explain the NY Times link here – loads of learning resources

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/teaching-the-great-gatsby-with-the-new-york-times/

Guardian link

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1995/jun/26/classics.fscottfitzgerald

Time magazine article about prohibition

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1989146,00.html

Useful American history website

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-prohibitionspeakeasy.html

Documentary about the link between prohibition and gangster violence (3 parts)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDtW5k49BBM&feature=related