THE DISCOURSE

OF THE
SELF-MADE MAN
A NEW
HISTORICAL
READING OF THE
GREAT GATSBY

STUDENT: LAVINIA MUNTEAN

NEW HISTORICISM

 New Historicism -
Stephen Greenblatt
 approaches literary texts as
documents that may be read
in conjunction with non-
literary texts to produce a
critical understanding of
particular historical
moments and cultural
contexts
 The novel presents the social and economic realities of
American life at the time of its writing – 1920’s

A dominant discourse of the period was the discourse of

THE GREAT GATSBY the self-made man

It embodies one of its central contradictions – discourse of

the self-made man, while it claims to open the annals of
American history to all those who have the ambition and
perseverance required to make ther mark
THE SELF-MADE MAN
 the similarities between Gatsby’s boyhood “schedule”—
in which the young man divided his day among physical
exercise, the study of electricity, work, sports, the practice
of elocution and poise, and the study of needed inventions
—and the self-improvement ideology found in the
autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, America’s original
self-made man.
 Jay Gatsby fits this profile in a number of ways. He was
born to poor “farm people” and spent his youth in rural
Minnesota. His boyhood list of “General Resolves,”
found in his copy of Hopalong Cassidy just below his
Franklinesque daily schedule of activities, reads like a
mini-success manual:
 The discrepancy between Gatsby - Tom Buchanan and
Nick Carraway
The same ideology in the speeches and essays in which many self-made millionaires revealed
the secrets of their success, as Andrew Carnegie often did in his writings.

In “The Road to Business Success” (1885), for example, Carnegie tells the would-be self-made
man to aim high, save his money, and avoid liquor. To rise in the business world, Carnegie
notes, a young man must be able to think for himself:

Horatio Alger, was immensely popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In these tales, the hero is always a poor young boy who is hardworking, honest, neat, self-
reliant, persevering, modest, kind, generous, and lucky

Perhaps the most pervasive vehicles for the ideology of the self-made man were the McGuffey
Readers, a series of elementary school books used to teach reading - the Readers illustrated the
belief that success is a product of good character. For example, a poor boy receives a job
because the old man he has kindly helped cross the street turns out to own his own business. Or
an orphan boy is adopted by a wealthy man because he has resisted the temptation to steal the
man’s gold watch
 there is a startling resemblance between Gatsby’s early
life and the formative years of America’s most famous
self-made millionaires
 The Great Gatsby reflects the discourse of the self-
made man circulating in so many of the texts that both
shaped and were shaped by American culture during
the final decades of the nineteenth century and the
early decades of the twentieth.
 ‘self-made man’ claims to open the annals of
American history to all those who have the ambition
and perseverance required to “make their mark” on its
pages
 the discourse is permeated by the desire to escape
history, the historical realities of time, place, and
human limitation
 Although self-made men often spoke of the harsh
historical realities they experienced as children,
particularly of their poverty, they did so only to
celebrate how far they had come
 The Great Gatsby reflects this same desire to transcend history in
Gatsby’s efforts to deny his true origins.
 Gatsby’s “parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people,”
but “his imagination had never really accepted them as his
parents at all”.
 Gatsby invented a family, an Oxford education, and an
inheritance in order to convince himself and others that he was
born to wealth and social position. That is, Gatsby wants to deny
the historical realities of socioeconomic class to which he had
been subjected all his life.
 Jay Gatsby remains the icon of America’s romanticization of the
self-made man.
 , The Great Gatsby’s embodiment of the complexities and contradictions
of the discourse of the self-made man reveals the complexities and
contradictions that informed the attitude of Fitzgerald’s America toward
the achievement of financial success. Without the discourse of the self-
made man, Fitzgerald’s best-known novel would not be possible.