Living in a Material World: Men & Women in
The Great Gatsby and Bright Lights, Big City

The 1920s:
Though moral simpletons know it not, the younger generation is unwittingly seeking to solve the most baffling problem of life, to wit, freedom of love in a setting of dignity. The new candor in sex behavior is a very great step in the direction of interlinking the spontaneity of passion with the lovely dignity of compassion. Sexual love as happy recreation is the clean new ideal of a young generation sick of duplicity and morals sham and marital insincerity and general erotic emptiness. Sex as recreation is the most exquisite conception of lovers who have learned how to look with frank delighted eyes upon the wonder in their own stirred bodies . . .

The 1980s:
Some kind of white stuff in every opening. Story of my life. . . [The gynecologist says not to] sleep with anybody [until the rash clears]. I go . . . who do you think I am, the Virgin Mary? and she goes, as your doctor I think I know your habits well enough to know what a sacrifice this will be for you, Allison. Then she gives me the usual about why don't I make them wear condoms and I'm like, for the same reason I don't fuck with my clothes on, you can't beat flesh on flesh. I want contact, right? Just give me contact and you can keep true love.[67]

Judging by these statements, recreational sex in the Twentieth Century has gone from being a "clean new ideal of a young generation" looking "with frank delighted eyes upon the wonder in their own stirred bodies" to just one of a number of "habits," an exchange of "flesh on flesh" in preference of real emotion or "true love." The difference is understandably a product of distance in time. The 1920s were "America's first great 'sexual revolution,'" producing a "new language of sex and the self" that "signaled the decline of Victorian reserve."[68] In contrast, the youth of the 1980s came "of age knowing where the youth euphoria of the [latest sexual revolution in the late 1960s] actually led . . . 'the sexual revolution [was] over, and everybody lost.'"[69] But these temporal differences are tonal, and certain structural homologies exist between the sexual cultures of these decades. Discussing the notion of a sexual revolution is largely to focus on the changing behavior patterns of women, since cultural norms of sexual relationships in the West have been largely predicated on the limitation of female sexual expression within a heterosexual context.[70] Both decades followed up on a cresting period of feminist activism, the first wave, which won women the right to vote, and the second wave, focused on securing personal rights such as reproductive control and economic opportunity. But instead of continuing the political fights of their mothers, young women turned to more individual "life-style" forms of feminism.[71] As Ellen Goodman describes "The Next Generation" following the second wave feminists, she turns to the 1920s for illumination:

I suppose feminists think of yuppies the way the suffragists must have thought of the flappers. The suffragists fought for rights. The flappers came along and acted them out in speak-easies and flirtations. The suffragists had planned a series of next steps; the flappers turned them into the Charleston. Today - if you will forgive my generalizations - the feminists who believed in sisterhood are followed by the yuppies who believe in personal success. One generation marched for progress; the next marks progress on a Nautilus chart.[72]

These generalizations, while superficially correct, do not credit the fact that many of the younger generation felt a certain liberation in their choices, usually described in terms of meeting the boys on their own ground. The most obvious of styles for women in the Twenties was the flapper, whose bobbed hair, make-up, exposed arms, bound breasts, slimmed hips, raised skirts, smoking, and 'petting parties' presented a promiscuous challenge to traditional gender roles. She was, as Kenneth A. Yellis notes, "distinctly modern. She was the first of the 20th Century types."[73] Looking like a boy, painted like a prostitute, unconstrained by restrictive clothing, preferring the company of men, and acting on 'instinct,' the flapper proclaimed she was free to "have it all."[74] But, for the youth of the 1920s, "acknowledging female sexuality became less a matter of rebellion than of going along with the crowd." Following the prompts of the media and her peers, quenching the flapper's emancipatory thirst was founded upon achieving the style, of purchasing and consuming culturally dictated products and engaging in the behaviors for which they were suggested.[75] The flapper was in fact the "ideal type" marketed by clothing catalogues and cosmetic companies, and as such was emulated to greater or lesser degrees by many women in the 1920s.[76] Naming the Eighties ideal is a more difficult task, as their figures have yet to solidify into history. The yuppie woman, as Goodman suggests, is one possibility. She was supposed to be it all by having it all; her image popularized throughout the media was an amalgamation of constantly shifting roles, a Corporate Killer - Playboy Bunny - Bionic Woman - Super Mom, all properly accessorized of course. Throwing off the armor of the power suit and shopping at Victoria's Secret, 'aerobicizing' her body at exclusive gyms and reading books on exercise for better sex, juggling overtime with a full personal life, she was told she was making a one-woman assault on masculine privilege without sacrificing her femininity. "Discipline is liberation," wrote the Eighties exercise guru Jane Fonda, and women tried to believe.[77] But the lie behind the mask was made apparent in such apparitions as the glass ceiling, sexual harassment, eating disorders, the 'second shift,' nervous breakdowns, and a skyrocketing number of plastic surgeries.[78] The very impossibility of achieving this multi-faceted image points away from the yuppie as the Eighties ideal towards her guide and goal - the Supermodel of the 1980s, whose looks and stance and environment could be altered by design or surgery to present her as what every woman should be, or at least want to be. She was not just the type, but also all types. "The fantasy of being a model, famous and universally desired, is the most widespread contemporary dream shared by young American women from all backgrounds."[79] If the flapper was a modern female ideal of behavior and style reached through the consumption of products, the model is a postmodern image of an ideal created through the commodification of the self. The relationship between these types and the economy is mediated through their expressions of sexuality. This mediation is by no means a new development, but as modernity has changed the economic culture, the economic culture has changed the sexual.

From Commodities to Consumers

As Gayle Rubin's influential essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" outlines, in human society there is a definite and mutual interdependence between economics, politics, and the systems of sexuality which construct gender. Gender, as Rubin defines it, is

a socially imposed division of the sexes. It is a product of the social relations of sexuality. Kinship systems rest upon marriage. They therefore transform males and females in "men" and "women," each an incomplete half which can only find wholeness when united with the other . . . Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities. It requires repression: in men, of whatever is the local version of "feminine" traits; in women, of the local definition of "masculine" traits.

"The organization of sex and gender," she argues, "once functioned to organize society." Fragile economic and political ties based upon kinship required that women be heterosexual and passive, able to be trafficked as currency between men without much complaint. Yet even as cultural evolution has progressed and the sex/gender system has "lost much of its traditional function" while kinship has been "systematically stripped" of its larger social roles, this system has been harnessed to serve "economic and political ends other than those it was originally designed to further." Thus the "archaic relationships which deform" human sexual life continue to strangle our "forms of sexual expression" and shackle human personality in "the straitjacket of gender." [80]

Rubin does not specify the exact nature of the economic and political ends that gender has come to further. Veblen presents a starting point in his critique of consumption, namely the idea of vicarious leisure and consumption. Stating that the ownership of property began "with the ownership of persons, primarily women," Veblen notes that the settlement of the barbaric populations led away from the practice of bride-as-war-trophy to the contractual exchange of women between powerful men. The servitude of the wife, who is "her husband's chattel, as she was her father's chattel before her purchase," is complicated by her "father's gentle blood; and hence there is a moral incongruity in her occupying herself with the debasing employments of her fellow-servants." Thus, a process of "progressive exemption" from menial tasks results in the woman attaining a "performance of leisure," a leisure made vicarious by her economically dependent, subservient position. In the realm of consumption, this dynamic translates into a tradition that states "the woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is necessary to her sustenance, - except so far as her further consumption contributes to the comfort or the good repute of her master." Because women are "not their own masters, obvious expenditure and leisure on their part would rebound to the credit of their master rather than to their own credit."[81] Women thus act in a dual role, both commodity and consumer, and within this dialectic they come to embody many of modernity's tensions.

In The Gender of Modernity, Rita Felski examines how women are at once excluded from and functional to the definitions and experiences of modernity. Examining the work of fin-de-siècle German sociologist Georg Simmel, Felski states that "the ambiguous cultural dialectic" of modernism between the "diversity" and "homogeneity" of "things and persons" is "fundamentally gendered in nature." For Simmel, Felski writes, "Man is defined as the transgressor of limits, impelled toward an expansive overreaching in restless pursuit of a significance that is never granted but always deferred . . . Modernity, then, is unambiguously gendered at the level of production; men's nature . . . demands release through processes of self-objectification." But the "inexorable rationalization" of modernity "leads to a weakening of sentimental attachments and personal ties and a resulting fragmentation of that which was originally unified . . . Yet this process is not so much detrimental to male identity as it is a function of it. The autonomy and detachment of the male subject allows him to take part in various and specialized activities without feeling threatened by a sense of fragmentation." But, according to Simmel, the "female psyche does not possess this same capacity for distantiation and yearns instead for immediacy and connection." Thus, "femininity and modernity are irrevocably opposed." Production, for men, "originates in a sense of lack, in the desire to struggle with and transcend limitations, and women . . . lack lack." Women's "manifestations of self are fleeting and contingent, shaped by the demands of the moment," so they "have no desire to objectify their spirit in a permanent fashion through the production of culture." The idea of the modern, with its "overwhelming sense of ephemerality and constant change resulting from capitalism's 'creative destruction' of history and tradition," is a contrast to feminine culture with its "repetition and continuity." Feminine culture "exists outside history and modernity, its daily rhythms undisturbed by the temporal dislocations occurring within the broader social domain. As a result, the anguish and ambiguity that often result from experiences of transitoriness and change are absent from the female psyche. Homogeneous and whole, woman is . . . serenely free of alienation and contradiction, as the very opposite of a split subject." For Simmel, femininity is emblematic of a "prelapsarian condition, 'a time before the fall into self-consciousness and into subject-object relations with nature.'" Women, shrouded in an eternalized "ontological otherness," have substance, but only outside of the progressive change of a "modernity that remains exclusively identified with masculine individuation and agency."[82] And, by this analysis, women continue to be external to and subjected by the world of men. But this is a view of modernity from the perspective of production, and a different picture emerges when consumption is the privileged lens.

Felski argues "the category of consumption situated femininity at the heart of the modern in a way that the discourses of production and rationalization . . . did not." Department stores and "the commodification of the household" "cut across the private/public distinction that was frequently evoked to assign women to a premodern sphere" (like that discussed above), providing both "a new kind of urban public space" and a "modern industry and commerce" catering primarily to women. Woman, whose traditional position as a purchaser-for-the-household rather than as a producer-for-the-masses exists "outside of the dynamic of social change," gained through her role as consumer "an intimate familiarity with the rapidly changing fashions and lifestyles that constituted an important part of the felt experience of being modern." The experience was both liberating and repressive.

'In those early . . . days of consumer capitalism . . . many women thought they had discovered a more exciting, more appealing life, freedom remade within a consumer matrix. Their participation in consumer experience challenged and subverted that complex of qualities traditionally known as feminine - dependence, passivity, religious piety, domestic inwardness, sexual purity, and maternal nurture. Mass consumer culture presented to women a new definition of gender that carved out a space for individual expression similar to men's and that stood in tension with the older definition passed on them.'

But new definitions were already in the making for women in the context of the marketplace. Female pleasure is a source of anxiety in any society based upon patriarchal authority, as women might turn to satisfying themselves instead of others. Consumer culture "helped to shape new forms of subjectivity for women, whose intimate needs, desires, and perceptions of self were mediated by public representations of commodities and the gratification that they promised." Whereas a woman in capitalist society was most often treated as "an object in the domain of heterosexual relations . . . compelled to render herself as seductive as possible in . . . the gaze of a male buyer," the consumer culture was preoccupied with her pleasure. The goods on display were arranged to entice her eyes and approval. But a woman "could only attain the status of an active subject in relation to other objects. The circuit of desire flowed from man to woman, from woman to the commodity," in an unsatisfying arrangement - frustration being the goad to buy more, spend more, long for more as the promises built. Commodities become not just "material objects," but also "complex symbolic artifacts whose social meanings derive from the unfocused dissatisfaction and indistinct longings characteristic of modern experience." Consumer culture not only subjects "women to norms of eroticized femininity that encouraged constant practices of self-surveillance," but also provides "a conduit through which heterogeneous forms of desire" can be "deflected and channeled into the imperative to buy ever more commodities." The culture of modernity would institute "new, if less visible, networks of social control" in place of the traditional restraints on women's desire that it had eroded.[83]

The gender system requires the repression of similarities in favor of creating difference. Men and women are encouraged to come together to be whole, to find their "better halves." But it is not an equal division; women serve men, not just in a physical capacity, but also as a reference point for identity. As modern men pursue a role as "transgressors of limits," engaged in the "restless pursuit of a significance that is never granted but always deferred," women are positioned as the opposite; solid, unfractured, and yearning for "immediacy and connection," women are either a grail or a home that reaches for them. But women, becoming increasingly independent throughout the century, were less suited to provide this comforting presence. Always objectified, women were learning to objectify their selves and others through a consumption that was increasingly about self-gratification. While the culture of consumerism encouraged women to "indulge their own desires in defiance of their husbands and traditional forms of moral and religious authority," this "promotion of hedonism" brought "significant economic benefits for the individual male capitalist, but its effects on intimate relations between the sexes" were destabilizing and potentially destructive."[84]

Immaterial Girls

Fitzgerald and McInerney, whose male characters search unsuccessfully for a sense of stability in a rapidly expanding world, write women who are wholly unable to meet the needs of self-identity that their lovers require. The Great Gatsby's Daisy Fay Buchanan and Amanda White of Bright Lights, Big City are both easy characters to demonize. Most readers cannot help but view their choices to leave the male leads as self-interested, economically motivated, cowardly or cruel. But Fitzgerald and McInerney leave crucial space around the lives of these women, allowing for an interpretation of their actions from a different point of view. The question comes down to a simple one: what is so attractive about such women that their loss is disastrous?

Golden Girl

For Gatsby, his attraction to Daisy is clearly a function of his self-love, as illustrated above, but only a few critics have understood Daisy's actions in this light.[85] Leland S. Person summarizes her critical treatment most succinctly. He observes that few "critics write about The Great Gatsby . . . without entering the unofficial competition of maligning [Daisy's] character," while simultaneously attributing to her a "tremendous power over Gatsby and his fate." Yet, as Person notes, "Daisy is more victim than victimizer: she is victim first of [Tom's] 'cruel' power, but then of Gatsby's . . . male tendency to project a self-satisfying, yet ultimately dehumanizing, image on woman." Although Gatsby is "as much an ideal to Daisy as she is to him," looking at her "'in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at some time,'" eventually he stops apprehending the real Daisy, and she becomes just an "'enchanted object,'" "the victim of what has become Gatsby's irrevocably meretricious look." Thus, The Great Gatsby is finally "the story of the failure of a mutual dream. The novel describes the death of a romantic vision of America and embodies that theme in the accelerated dissociation - the mutual alienation - of men and women before the materialistic values of modern society."[86] Judith Fetterley makes the point that Daisy, whose "careless" decisions critics cite as the reason for Gatsby's fall, is simply human, faced with choices which amount "in reality to no more than the choice of which form she wishes her oppression to take." Choosing to remain with Tom, who views her as an object purchased with a $35,000 string of pearls, is preferable to being with the fictitious Gatsby, to whom she is a vision in a dream, unreal and immaterial outside the glow of his imagination.[87]

Plastic Woman

In Bright Lights, Big City, the protagonist's attraction to Amanda is not a grail-like worship, but rather an expression of his desire for security, the natural goal of what Josephine Hendin calls the "shelter-seeking self."[88] His depersonalized vision of her is just as unreal as Gatsby's cast of his golden girl. The protagonist romanticizes Amanda as "the heart of the heartland . . . You pictured her backlit by a sunset, knee-deep in amber waves of grain . . . Her hair was the color of wheat, or so you imagined; after two months in Kansas you had yet to see any wheat." His marriage proposal, which was "not entirely romantic," results from his desire to be both saved and savior. After a long dissolute night, the protagonist returns home to find Amanda "furious . . . and you felt that she was right. You were a bad boy. You wanted to amend your life. You wanted to make it up to Amanda for the shitty life she had had as a kid. You told her you would marry her, and . . . she accepted." His dependency upon women to "amend" his hedonistic life reoccurs when he wonders if a certain woman might be "the one who could make you forget your cares and woes, start eating breakfast, take up jogging." This woman, a philosophy student who makes him think "of Plato's pilgrims climbing out of the cave, from the shadow world of appearances toward things as they really are," seems to offer a solution to his problems, as she is in town to present a "rebuttal to an article entitled: 'Why There Are No People.'" Amanda is unable to provide a stable base for the protagonist's sense of self, to rebut his lack of being, as she is little more than a projected image. After her departure, he realizes she had become "a mannequin," and he cannot even recall her true face. Since "she left, you have had . . . trouble identifying her face . . . Her agent said she could do any look - temptress, businesswoman, girl next door. A designer . . . said she had plastic features. You begin to suspect that all of your firm beliefs . . . were no more substantial than the images she bodied forth under the klieg lights . . . You saw what she was selling then; you saw what you wanted to see." But to him she "showed all the vital signs and made all the right noises. She said she loved you." In the end, the protagonist can reduce her to a series of numbers culminating in a price tag: she was "a perfect eight: hips thirty-four, waist twenty-three, bust thirty-three. You also know her shoe, glove and ring sizes . . . You have all the numbers. Factoring in the cheekbones . . . they add up to a hundred and fifty dollars an hour." The protagonist is left with "a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you . . . leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name." But the name is not his own. He sought in Amanda the same self-definition he seeks in the women he tries to encounter after her departure: "almost any girl . . . would help you stave off this creeping sense of mortality . . . You know for a fact that if you go into the morning alone . . . [m]ortality will pierce you through the retina."[89] The protagonist, damaged by a modern sense of self defined through fetishized commodities, needs women to be stable referents, unfractured in the face of his splintered self. Amanda, a model who epitomizes the instability of both self and appearances, cannot protect him from experiencing the acceleration and alienation of the world as death.

The protagonist himself realizes his failure to comprehend Amanda, stating that she "is a fictional character . . . I made her up." He saw but refused to acknowledge Amanda's own desires. "There was always something elusive about her, a quality you found mysterious and unsettling. You suspected she herself couldn't quite identify the longing that she variously attached to you, to her job, to having and spending, to her missing father, and that she had once attached to the idea of getting married. You were married. And still she was looking for something." Amanda was looking for herself, searching through the past and her new material possessions for a solid definition that could combat the fleeting, transitory nature of modern relationships, an attempt to "delay or perhaps cancel" the departure she always assumes is immanent. Amanda's obsession with family crests and monograms, the "sense of urgency in her new acquisitiveness" that the protagonist "feared," are attempts to cement a bond she knows will break. Her new fiancé is revealed as a male escort, a man who will fulfill her needs as long as she can pay. Odysseus is his name for a reason; by treating him as a commodity, Amanda can keep a deserter of women who resists even the call of the sirens by her side.[90]

The breakdown of romance in Fitzgerald and McInerney's works can be seen not only as the fault of women, but also as a result of the unnatural demands placed upon them by men. Women, neither grail nor home, subtly exist in these texts as agents with their own longings to satisfy and their own choices to make. The male tendency to balance the alienation of capitalist modernity with a mystified view of love as salvation is challenged by the very commodification of women that allows the double standard. Women, desired as objects, come to desire objects in turn, defining themselves in equally alienating ways. This mutual estrangement of men and women before the materialistic values of modern America, while productive for a capitalist consumer society dependent on insatiable desire, ultimately destroys any possibility of an honest, satisfying intimacy between the sexes.