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

This work examines F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City as novels of social critique. Sections I and II (Introduction and Critical Reputations) provide a brief initiation into the topic and argue that academic critics have radically failed to appreciate McInerney's work as an object of literary study. Section III (Economic Culture in Modern Boom Times) places these novels within the historical context of modernity / post-modernity to reveal how Fitzgerald and McInerney construct the subjectivities of their male characters as products damaged by capitalist consumer society. Section IV (Sexual Culture in Modern Boom Times) analyzes the negative impact of such subjectivities on heterosexual romantic relationships divided along traditional gender lines. Section V (Loving in a Material World) concludes the study with a summary of these authors' critiques and their potential remedies.

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The 1980s in America were not unlike the 1920s, as almost everyone noticed. Costly foreign military adventures had wound down, postwar slumps had turned to booms, friends of business in both parties had power in Washington, the demand for illegal substances was enriching the criminal classes even as the rewards of high finance were making criminals of certain of the rich. And the young, it seemed, were running wild to the corrupting beat of music their elders couldn't see the point of. In both decades the age demanded a new literature commensurate with its power to excite and offend, and as usual the literary business stood ready to oblige.[1]

Literature is one of the most fascinating cultural artifacts, acting almost as a substitute form of history. Novels in particular are one of "the strongest and supplest medium[s] for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another," making them uniquely effective for communicating the "the hum and buzz of implication" so important to understanding decades like the 1920s and the 1980s.[2] Equidistant from their respective ends of the last millennium, these flashy eras of economic prosperity and social excess punctuated by sudden, sharp stock market crashes are frequently linked together in popular perception. Authors whose works are heavily associated with their individual eras are often selected as its representatives, providing the fictions that define as much as identify their generations. This is clearly the case with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who took credit for naming the "Jazz Age" and is overwhelmingly cited as its leading example.[3] His sad young men and flappers are the icons of an age. It is more difficult to recognize the spokesperson for the Eighties, since its relative historical proximity disallows a clear view. Jay McInerney, an author commonly compared to Fitzgerald, stands out as one possibility. Although initially anointed by reviewers as the voice of the Eighties generation, McInerney has so far failed to gain broad academic acceptance. But like Fitzgerald, McInerney has captured the spirit and meaning of his times in ways that define not only the decade, but also the essential conflicts of American culture. His aspiring yuppies and fashion models grapple with many of the same issues faced by Fitzgerald's characters. Their works show surprising similarities despite the fact their individual social moments are separated by more than 50 years of great historical change, including the progression towards a post-industrial economy and a major upheaval in relations between the sexes. Both authors write almost exclusively about the trials and tribulations of love in the boom times, depicting the debilitating effects of the culture of affluence on romantic and sexual relationships in ways that reveal the essential conflicts of their times. The material girls and boys in their novels are, as the Eighties' most representative pop star so elegantly sang, "living in a material world." Fitzgerald and McInerney portray gender relationships significantly influenced by the cultural climate, a rarefied atmosphere that undermines the idealistic pretensions of the American Dream.

Jay McInerney, in spite of authoring some of the most relevant fiction of his time, has rarely been the subject of serious scholarly attention.[4] Any study discussing McInerney's novels favorably, and indeed comparing them with those of a canonized literary genius like Fitzgerald, must first tackle this critical disregard. Throughout the history of McInerney's public reception, reviewers have noted his similarities to Fitzgerald almost "ritualistically" and usually disparagingly, considering his writing little more than a poor imitation.[5] Most have systematically failed to truly fathom the depths available in such a contrast. Fitzgerald is in fact a useful author for discussing both McInerney's critical placement and his work, for they have occupied similar cultural positions in regards to their times. Both have written about "what it was like, for some, to be young, privileged, and American"[6] in their respective decades, and both have faced critical neglect during their lifetimes, with Fitzgerald's canonical position solidifying only after his death. John W. Aldridge's Talents and Technicians, a book largely derogatory of Eighties popular fiction in general, remarks that

Jay McInerney has been the recipient of far more publicity than is good for a young writer of promise . . . [He has] experienced the best and worst effects of the kind of golden boy celebrity once enjoyed by the young F. Scott Fitzgerald . . . with whom he has been repeatedly compared, and if one does not look too closely, the comparisons seem quite apt. [Both men] wrote first novels that either reflected the manners and morals of their respective generations or . . . were recognized by their generations as telling some essential truth about them. But the similarity ends there, and the fact that it does is a measure of the limitations of McInerney's vision when assessed in relation to the larger and more complex vision of his distinguished predecessor . . . [which] enabled him at a very young age to create . . . something far more substantial than a shallow and merely documentary portrait of the manners and morals of American Jazz Age youth.[7]

Early promise, extraordinary publicity, excessive celebrity, and the totemic quality of generational fiction are extremely important factors to note. These issues enter into most discussions of McInerney, as they do with Fitzgerald, and are in part responsible for their critical troubles. Matthew J. Bruccoli, an indefatigable defender of Fitzgerald's professional abilities, states that the "posthumous Fitzgerald revival was a triumph of genius over misfortune - testimony to the enduring force of words on paper." This "misfortune" was not simply Fitzgerald's long struggle with his well-documented personal problems, but also the divide between his status as a literary reputation and a legendary celebrity. At times, Bruccoli writes, it often seemed that Fitzgerald "was almost deliberately damaging his literary stature by trading permanent fame for notoriety."[8] McInerney has also been a semi-willing victim of "the carnage wrought by media overexposure and self-destructive living," as evidenced by his highly publicized nightlife and romantic entanglements.[9] These authors, due in part to their celebrity and positions as the "voice of a generation," were granted a limited time in the public eye, the reward for their early promise. McInerney provides insight into his own reception and eventual rejection when he discusses Fitzgerald's fate: "the spotlight retreated from him, really. It was very strange the way his career was so much a function of the decade . . . He became a symbol of the time, then he was crucified when people became disenchanted with their own excesses."[10] In "The Short Happy Life of the American Yuppie," Hendrik Hertzberg describes the fate of the "young urban professional" in an analogous fashion: "We turned him into an effigy, and then we hanged him. He became the collective projection of a moral anxiety. We loaded onto him everything we hated about the times we had been living through - everything we hated about what we suspected we ourselves might have become . . . Then we strung the little bastard up."[11] McInerney, whose novels immortalized and occasionally celebrated the yuppie, could very well have provided the face for such an effigy. Both authors, famous for writing generational fiction and successfully capturing their cultural zeitgeists, were disregarded when times changed.

But the similarity does not in fact end there. Aldridge's implication that McInerney's work is only "a shallow and merely documentary portrait of the manners and morals" of his generation reveals a sad lack of critical perspective. At times, his character analysis is so naïve that one wonders if he merely glanced through the novels, noting only their superficial aspects in order to ignore the deeper implications.[12] His tendency to see McInerney merely as a stylistic technician instead of as a literary talent brings to mind one of Fitzgerald's contemporary reviewers, who quipped that authors of the younger generation "know they write such clever stuff, / But not that it is stuff, though clever."[13] It is only with time that This Side of Paradise has come to be seen as something more "substantial" than a portrait of the Jazz Age, and this is still not a unanimous critical opinion.[14] Even after the publication of The Great Gatsby, usually considered Fitzgerald's most lasting contribution to American literature, critics were little able to see more than "'a fine yarn, exhilaratingly spun.'" As Jackson R. Bryer remarks in the introduction to his bibliographic study of Fitzgerald's critical reputation, not

only is there wide variance between the [original reviews] respecting the general worth of the novel, but critics at that time apparently were unable to go beyond the external plot and characters . . . [The] difference in approach and degree of understanding [today] lends considerable support to a theory that the generation of the 1920's was too close to the overt subject matter of Fitzgerald's works to consider them in any other light than as attempts to portray his times. Today, this theory continues, we are distanced enough, both physically and emotionally, from the Twenties, to find additional depth in a book like The Great Gatsby . . .[15]

The relative historical proximity of McInerney's work has had much to do with his lack of regard by Aldridge and other critics, a situation that time may remedy. Perhaps the next wave of critics released by universities will have enough distance from McInerney's initial appearance to see beyond the media attention and appraise the value of his work, not only as a means of understanding his time, but as a contribution to American letters in general.[16] Samuel Johnson's remark that while "'an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead, we rate them by his best,'" need not always be the case.[17] Studies such as this one, it is hoped, will help speed the process of McInerney's critical acceptance. By comparing McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City with Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, this study will attempt to identify the "additional depth" in his work that has hitherto been ignored and neglected.[18]

Crucial to understanding McInerney's work, and that of Fitzgerald, is an understanding of the nation and the decades that so fundamentally shaped their lives and their work. The arenas of lived experience that most extremely informed their fictions were the economic and sexual cultures unique to the modern American boom times. The social collusion between these two facets of life fashioned these authors' central critiques of their society's ideological contradiction, the American dream.

The 1920s:
Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a reverie of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty grey turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken . . .

The 1980s:
[A] new era was starting. American culture in the 1980s would be a culture based on triumph - on the admiration of power and status - and nothing would be more important to that culture than its symbols. Especially at the start, they were what allowed the president to insist, "We have every right to dream heroic dreams." . . . Money words . . . became the key language of the 1980s, and they signaled a culture with an insatiable need to proclaim its triumphs. Even more important . . . they signaled a culture that was coherent in its promise. [19]

The fear of poverty and the worship of success, the admiration of power and status - these are key components of modern American culture, particularly in times of fiscal boom. When the economy is performing, the dualistic drive of the American dream between idealism and materialism seems complimentary rather than contradictory - that, as crude interpretations of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence can suggest, the pursuit of property and the pursuit of happiness are interchangeable ends. The 1920s and the 1980s were two such times when the promise of America seemed nearly coherent. As Kevin Phillips notes in his study of Wealth and Democracy, these times shared several characteristic aspects of all "capitalist heydays" capped by speculative busts.[20] The Twenties and Eighties were generally conservative in politics and ideology, exalting business, entrepreneurialism, and free enterprise. Laissez-faire practices were in while 'big government' and social welfare legislation were out. Commerce and finance underwent major restructuring through "repeating merger waves and the rise of trusts, holding companies, leveraged buy-outs, spin-offs et al." The coastal cities, having prominent service and finance-based economic sectors, gained in strength while the commodity-producing interior weakened. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago were the places to be. Wealth became more concentrated, resulting in economic polarization and rising levels of inequality, coupled with an increase in "survival-of-the-fittest thinking . . . from social Darwinism to welfare reform and globalization." There were winners and there were losers, and the distinction was dependent upon how much money one could make to spend. Finally, the economy became heavy with "rising, increasingly precarious levels of speculation, leverage, and debt" as the costs of the decades began to outweigh their profits.[21]

For those lucky enough to be both wealthy and young, the Twenties and the Eighties were periods of great excitement as their expenditures fueled the noise of the Roaring decades. As F. Scott Fitzgerald memorably eulogized his Jazz Age, it was "the most expensive orgy in history . . . the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls. But moralizing is easy now and it was pleasant to be in one's twenties in such a certain and unworried time. Even when you were broke you didn't worry about money, because it was in such profusion around you."[22] The Eldorado atmosphere of the times was contagious, furthering styles of living that generate a strong nostalgia impulse today, even when mixed with a retrospective social repentance.[23] But while these social similarities provide a basis for comparisons, their historical context helps to clarify their existence as economic outgrowths into culture.

From Production to Consumption

Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism delineates many of the historical factors that have created American economic culture. Since the sixteenth century, economic activity has surpassed military and religious concerns as the central focus of Western civilization. A "singular new mode of operation," the socioeconomic system of capitalism, "was fused with a distinctive culture" of "self-realization" apart from "traditional restraints" and a "character structure" of "self-control and delayed gratification, of purposeful behavior in the pursuit of well-defined goals." This system traveled over the Atlantic with the colonial settlers, eventually taking root and producing individuals like Benjamin Franklin, the most emblematic figure of this first American economic culture. Theoretically, property was tied to happiness only as a mark of one's productivity, self-sovereignty and independence. Wealth was a sign of merit. Over time, as the separation from the fetters of "custom and tradition" grew, the "economic impulse" of capitalism was free to exert its "boundlessness." By the middle of the nineteenth century, Bell notes, "Change became the norm." It was the permanent "trajectory of the economic impulse" and "the trajectory of the culture," and one of the final factors in that process which is termed modernity. [24]

Modernity, of course, is a critical chimera, referring at once to a process of change and its lived experience. It connotes a certain "newness" in human history, tied to advanced technology, swelling urbanization, bureaucratic control, capitalism and consumerism, and the resulting rise in people's appreciation of their existence as individualized subjects, within localized spaces and temporalities. More a feeling than a solid definition, it has yet to be articulated beyond contention. As Miles Ogborn notes, "differences over what modernity is mean that there can be no agreement on its chronology."[25] However, most scholars would agree that modernity, both as an experience and a process, was fully evident in America by the 1910s, to the extent that the "postmodern" condition was already being discussed as early as 1917.[26] As Rita Felski states, "'modernity' is a term that 'serves to draw attention to long-term processes of social change, to the multidimensional yet often systematic interconnections between a variety of cultural, political, and economic structures.'" But modernity "'refers not simply to a substantive range of sociohistorical phenomena - capitalism, bureaucracy, technological development, and so on - but above all to particular (though often contradictory) experiences of temporality and historical consciousness.'"[27] Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a foundational and often quoted text for attempting to comprehend the experience of modernity. He writes

There is a mode of vital experience - experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils - that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this experience 'modernity'. To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.[28]

Modernity, as it is described here, is essentially a process and experience of transition from tradition to the new. It can be seen at the root of the despairing conclusion Fitzgerald reaches in This Side of Paradise, when Amory Blaine declares his generation, "dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success," had "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." But, while strolling among the remnants of the old order, Amory has the comfort, if slightly cold, of self-knowledge, a base on which to build new definitions of meaning.[29] As the march of modernity progressed and the last vestiges of the old gave way to ever-changing symbols, the postmodern condition would remove even this base, particularly as the new definitions of self would be constructed through the functioning of the capitalist system.

Capitalism and modernity promote distinctly different modes of personal behavior. "At the start, the capitalist economic impulse and the cultural drive of modernity shared a common source, the ideas of liberty and liberation, whose embodiments were 'rugged individualism' in economic affairs and the 'unrestrained self' in culture," but these ideas soon conflicted. "The antagonism deepened as the organization of work and production became bureaucratized and individuals were reduced to roles, so that the norms of the workplace were increasingly at variance with the emphasis on self-exploration and self-gratification."[30] In Bright Lights, Big City, McInerney shows the cumulative effects of this division through the protagonist's inability to conform to the strictures of his position at a prestigious magazine in the Department of Factual Verification, especially its artlessness as determined by the "'Manual of Factual Verification" and the restrictions of his controlling boss, whom he calls "The Clinger." The atmosphere of the workplace is described as like "the Kremlin," and attempts at expressiveness result in instant reprisals and long-winded lectures about procedure. The protagonist experiences relief only after he prompts "The Clinger" to dismiss him.[31]

Alienating labor makes efficiency and productivity a difficult route to happiness, leaving little incentive to work. This conflict between a "bureaucratized" capitalist economy and a modernist culture of self effectively dissolved the previous prominence of "character" as a "unity of moral codes and disciplined purpose." In its place arose "an emphasis on 'personality,' which is the enhancement of self through the compulsive search for individual differentiation . . . [N]ot work but the 'life-style' became the source of satisfaction and criterion for desirable behavior in the society." The capitalist economic system, dependent on the energy of people to produce wealth, evolved to meet this potential challenge by appropriating the means of defining and satisfying the concomitant desires of a subject dependent on style. Thus, while in the "world of capitalist enterprise, the normal ethos in the spheres of production and organization [was] still one of work, delayed gratification, career orientation, [and] devotion to the enterprise," in the realm of capitalist marketing "a hedonistic way of life whose promise is the voluptuous gratification of the lineaments of desire" was promoted through "the sale of goods, packaged in the glossy images of glamour and sex."[32] The growing advertising industry of the 1920s set about "'effecting a self-conscious change in the psychic economy,' as historian Stuart Ewen puts it, creating new needs for 'prestige,' 'glamour,' or 'sex appeal,' new fears of looking old or having halitosis, and new pressures on families."[33] A life of happiness was a life of insulation in consumer goods. This new capitalism still demands a Protestant work ethic in the area of production, but it also must "stimulate a demand for pleasure and play in the area of consumption." Happiness was meeting this demand.

Wealth became a means to consumption, now the sign of merit, but technical advancements (i.e., mass production) led to the rising consumption of "past luxuries," redefined as necessities through accessibility and marketing, by the lower classes who could now purchase goods through installment buying, which revalued "debt" as "credit." "Work and accumulation" of capital were no longer ends in themselves, but rather "means to consumption and display." Advancement was no longer a matter of slowly "rising up a social ladder . . . but of adopting a specific style of life - country club, artiness, travel, hobbies - which marked one as a member of a consumption community."[34] Achievement is signified through appearance and display.

Of course, the upper class has always distinguished itself through display. Edgar Allen Poe once observed that because the United States lacked an "aristocracy of blood, and having therefore . . . fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchical countries."[35] Writing near the close of the "Gilded Age," a time with many similarities to the 1920s and the 1980s, Thorstein Veblen constructed a telling critique of the upper class from his similar observations in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Identifying the struggle to gain social status through the attainment and display of wealth as the motivating factor in cultural development, Veblen describes how "pecuniary emulation" is the driving force behind ownership of property. To achieve esteem "in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth" as a "necessary condition of reputability." But in "order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on the evidence." The leisure class, separated by its pecuniary superiority from the "drudgery" of productive work, puts its wealth in evidence through conspicuous consumption in public and the cultivation of manners and specialized knowledge in private, thus demonstrating their ability to engage in non-productive consumptions of time. "A knowledge of good form is prima facie evidence that that portion of the well-bred person's life which is not spent under the observation of the spectator has been worthily spent in acquiring accomplishments that are of no lucrative effect . . . [The] value of manners lies in the fact that they are the voucher of a life of leisure." The rich become a class of connoisseurs as a means of consuming conspicuously and marking their distinction, developing tastes for material goods and intoxicating substances that are prohibitively expensive for others and of only relative value. Their choices set the standards for the rest of society, as "the standard of expenditure . . . is an ideal of consumption that lies just beyond our reach . . . [E]specially in any community where class distinctions are somewhat vague, all canons of reputability and decency, and all standard of consumption, are traced back by insensible gradations to the usages and habits of thought of the highest social and pecuniary class - the wealthy leisure class."[36] But because their distinction rests on the cultivation of superiority and not some essential difference, their position is problematic.

In the modern environment, "the means of communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging his reputability than the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under their direct observation." Consumption therefore supplants leisure as the standard measure of "decency." To a certain extent, one needs only to spend like the leisure class in order to be taken as one of its members. In the learned nature of manners, even when built upon the advantages of "a cumulative life of leisure," there also exists the potential for imitation. There is always "the possibility of producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of person and manner by shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill." "This syncopated gentle birth gives results which . . . are in no wise substantially inferior to others who may have had a longer but less arduous training in the pecuniary properties."[37] The myth of "good blood" begins to disintegrate when its properties can be functionally incorporated into any personality with the desire and ability to appropriate them.

By the 1920s, mass production was democratizing the products of consumption, advertising was universally creating and disseminating codes of social deportment, and their combination was making the achievement of a desirable lifestyle seem possible for those previously restricted from the esteem granted to the leisure class. "You might not have their money," these forces seemed to say, "but you can buy the trappings of their lifestyle." From schoolbook heroes like Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, the culture had turned its eyes first to the "captains of industry" and then to the increasing flood of celebrity figures produced by modernity through its various media. In a culture preoccupied with personality, "celebrity" is a natural measure of success. Celebrities, with their wealth and personality, became a new leisure class.[38] Their exalted position has led McInerney to criticize the Eighties for being "an age in which an actor is the President, in which fashion models are asked for their opinions, in which getting into a nightclub is seen as a significant human achievement."[39] The "achievement" to be signified "through appearance and display" was the ability to approximate the lifestyles of a leisure class, a class that by definition would always exceed the potential refinement of those classes that must also produce the products they consume. When capitalism seized the reins of defining style through marketing, it encouraged the conspicuous consumption of a vast range of products defined as necessary for achieving the right kind of social distinction. Those most closely able to mimic the promoted styles would find themselves achingly engaged in the orgies of wealth that were the 1920s and the 1980s.

Material Boys

Fitzgerald and McInerney microscopically examine the distances between those who inhabit the upper echelons of society and those who most closely orbit their stratum, particularly in terms of the conflicts created between men as cultural figures. The impact of modern economic life, which reaches its full effect in the postmodern era, is to alter the very nature of the self and to question the survival of the individual in an increasingly commodified world. Fitzgerald and McInerney's male characters define themselves with varying degrees of effectiveness in response to these challenges. The juxtaposition of their lifestyles, particularly in terms of their differing personalities, consumption habits, and motivating urges, produces a critique that is at once unflattering of and sympathetic towards the failings of modern men.

Ash and Soot

However, in their novels exists the ghostly presence of people that appear to subsist in the absence of all these drives, a dark specter outside the carnival of wealth. The lowest denizens of the economic system, who have either failed to begin or have ceased both producing and consuming effectively, are a source of fear and unintelligibility. For Fitzgerald, the "valley of ashes" occupied by the cuckolded mechanic George Wilson is the embodiment of this apprehension in The Great Gatsby. The emptiness of this realm has often been viewed in terms of its religious or Marxian significance, and these are valid interpretations. But reading it through the lens of Veblen leads Patricia Bizzell to another conclusion:

The valley of ashes is not, as Leo Marx has argued, primarily an instrument of judgment against wealth, and the destructive processes that support it. Rather, the valley of ashes symbolizes the condition of people who have not yet begun the process of pecuniary emulation . . . The faded eyes [on the billboard] symbolize absent orthodoxy, which if present, could mediate between this colorless world of 'bitter fact' . . . In the absence of orthodoxy to give shape to their lives, these "ash-grey men" are "already crumbling" - unless they try to emerge from this shadow world and enter the process of pecuniary emulation, the process offered by American ideology in place of authentic orthodoxy.[40]

Thus, in the valley of ashes, men exist without the comfort of tradition and without an idealized sense of self, a style in which to buttress their lives beyond the level of mere existence. Wilson, a "spiritless" and "anæmic" man "so dumb he doesn't know he is alive," mingles "immediately with the cement color of the walls" and is veiled with a "white ashen dust" just "like everything in the vicinity-except his wife," Myrtle. Her impetus can be felt behind his pretensions to pecuniary emulation, the "shadow of a garage" which he runs and his futile interest in buying Tom's car, because he "was his wife's man and not his own." Myrtle's vitality appears to be all that keeps Wilson from becoming ash himself. The realization of her infidelity has almost as devastating an effect on him as her death. As Nick describes it, "He had discovered that Myrtle had some life apart from him in another world and the shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discover less than an hour before - and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well." This difference, which on Wilson appears as a sign of "guilt," is also the difference between the poor and the rich, those outside of and those on top of the economic impulse. Tom can leverage his standing to control his wife; Wilson has only a locked door, and even as his wife screams "Beat me!" he cannot resort to violence to control her. Her death leaves him a "poor ghost" whose "incoherent muttering" coalesces until he becomes "an ashen, fantastic figure" of destruction, who in turn destroys himself.[41] As Aldridge writes, "Wilson carries forward and for the first time fully characterizes Fitzgerald's earlier horror of poverty and illness."[42]

For McInerney, the horror of poverty and illness finds its target in the "MIAs" of the Eighties, New York's supposedly hostile and frequently mentally ill homeless population. These "bums, beggars and hobos that return to haunt the pages of the Eighties novel were just outside the periphery of Fitzgerald's world."[43] Like Wilson, they are ghosts, but read more like poltergeists than specters. Their lack of substance is less a matter of fact or force than of social agreement, as a front-page article from the New York Times in the summer of 1988 makes clear. Choice quotes from the city's residents reveal the unshocking conclusion that as the homeless "become increasingly aggressive, even intimidating," "'people try very hard to tune them out by not seeing them and not giving them money.'"[44] The worst offenders, however, ask for more than spare change. The protagonist of Bright Lights, Big City ends up "facing a casualty, one of the city's MIAs" on the subway when "a sooty hand" taps his shoulder. While he is "more than willing to lay some silver on the physically handicapped," the "folks with the long-distance eyes" give him "the heebie-jeebies." The MIA, who proclaims that on "January 13th" he will be 29 years old in a way that "sounds like a threat to kill you with a blunt object," is "fairly neat, as if he had only recently let go of social convention, but his eyes are out-to-lunch and his mouth is working furiously." Eventually the MIA, "staring intently at an ad for a business training institute," sits down on the lap of an old lady, pinning her in place while remaining oblivious to her pleas and tears and weak attempts to dislodge him. Everyone in the car, including half "a dozen healthy men" "within spitting distance," are "watching and pretending they're not." No one intervenes, and when the protagonist finally stands, the MIA is already moving on.[45] This MIA, whose eyes and movements of mouth are defined in contradictory states of business, has left the realm of the producers who are taking the train to work. He insists on his own existence by proclaiming his birthday, as solid a determinant as any he has, and simultaneously forces this existence on others while denying their presence by invading the woman's personal space. In turn, the rest of the train denies his existence by ignoring his actions. While Wilson is a distant and outside threat, formed by the vacuum between the past and the new, the MIA is a deserter. Once engaged in the capitalist system, his current absence from it is a threat to the "healthy" men who ignore his presence in an attempt to deny the possibility of such a fate for themselves. Although they stand apart from the capitalist consumer culture, Wilson and the MIA are not figures of liberation. They are the products of industrial waste, ash and soot, and the embodiments of fear and destruction facing the starring actors of the world, Fitzgerald and McInerney's consumers in the orgy of lifestyle, the upper and middle classes.

Social Stasis, Social Climbing

Fitzgerald, temporally closer to the beginnings of change in modern American society, represents a leisure class faced with self-extinction through their own excesses, and yet maintains a sense of their magnetic quality. From his writings, it is not difficult to believe Fitzgerald once commented to Hemingway that "the very rich are different from you and me," to which Hemingway is supposed to have snapped, "Yeah, they have more money." Although Bruccoli has opposed the accuracy of this "apocryphal exchange," its continued currency adds weight to the interpretation that Fitzgerald's treatment of the extremely wealthy conveys a sense of their election, particularly in their youth.[46] Although he does not necessarily like them, he is aware of their power over others and their environment, and understands the desirability of the possessions that signify their status.

In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan emerges as one of Fitzgerald's most unsavory depiction of the silver spoon set. He is not an admirable man, particularly because his sense of superiority is under attack. As Nick describes him, Tom is the quintessential embodiment of the leisure class, drifting "here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together." His family is "enormously wealthy" and he had "come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that." But he has not earned his money, and as Gatsby's introduction of him as only "the polo player" marks, he engages in no productive occupation. Tom's achievements are limited to only "various physical accomplishments," most notably his standing as "one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven - a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax." With little else than money and the past to comfort him, Tom is destined to "drift on forever, seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game." As Bizzell notes, Tom "has not even the achievements of pecuniary emulation to his credit; presumably, he is very like his father; and as a result, he and his kind are in danger of dying out."[47] Tom, now a "man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner," has "arrogant eyes" which have "established dominance over his face," giving "him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward." He is a man looking into the future, troubled by what he sees. While other men are turning their stables into garages, Tom does the opposite, clinging to the symbols that have defined aristocratic privilege since the Middle Ages. He senses that something, the essence of modernity, might dislodge his kind from their heights, and his most obvious failings, including his brutish nature, racist ideologies, and possessive infidelity, are all attempts at resisting this social change. Tom's insecurity, as Nick notes, makes "him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart."[48] Robert Sklar states that Tom's physicality is an obvious metaphor for his "real strength, his imperishable strength, . . . the power of his social standing."[49] Violence therefore emerges as a means for Tom to enforce his dominance over others and maintain strict class boundaries, as when he breaks Myrtle's nose for the audacity discussing his wife on a first name basis. Racist reading gives Tom a language for describing his sense that his civilization is "going to pieces," with his group of "Nordics" being submerged in the rising tide of the "Colored Empires." But although Tom sees himself "standing alone on the last barrier of civilization," the purpose of his rhetoric against throwing "everything overboard and having intermarriage between black and white" is based very clearly in his fear that he might lose the advantages of his birth to "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere."[50] If Gatsby can take his wife, just as he has taken Wilson's, then the power of his social standing is no longer imperishable. Retaining Daisy is simply one more of Tom's fingers in the dyke of social change. But the Flood is coming. As Stephen Matterson notes, Tom Buchanan's name refers back to the last President during slavery, James Buchanan.[51] President Buchanan ran on a "Save the Union" platform, promising to end the "agitation of the slavery question" in the North. Although he managed to prevent civil war during his term, his compromises were unable to hold for very long.[52] Implicit in the Buchanan name, upon which rests Tom's claim to superiority, is the suggestion of a temporary security that cannot postpone the progress of change forever.

Gatsby is the most obvious target of Tom's insecurity, the preeminent figure of modernity's instability in The Great Gatsby. When taken together, the variety of critical responses to his character, which detail various interpretations of his position as a figure of myth and history, reveal his contradictory nature more than anything else. He is materialistic and idealistic, a hero in the style of Franklin and a celebrity surrounded by rumor, a challenge to the past and yet its greatest champion, a self-made man and a self-defeating one, a product of society and its victim.[53] The issues surrounding Gatsby revolve around the question, as Marshall Berman asks it, of how "Gatsby is himself to be measured?"[54] Answering this question requires addressing at least four of Gatsby's aspects: his life, his style, his goal, and his fate. In life, Gatsby has risen to the heights of success by mimicking the old American ideal of self-realization, delayed gratification, and purposeful behavior in the pursuit of well-defined goals, illustrated by the schedule he recorded as a youth and by his five year pursuit of Daisy. But he has done all the right things through the wrong ways. His "Platonic conception of himself" is not based in substance, allowing him to view the ill-gotten gains of bootlegging and other criminal activities as a means of achieving his goals. Rather, Gatsby's conception is a modern one of style, a self defined by and through the compulsive search for individual differentiation. Nick romanticizes this fact beautifully, stating if "personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life . . . This responsiveness . . . was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness." Even from his earliest days, this romantic readiness is tied to the acquisition of material goods. His possessions, the grand car and expansive house and vulgarly magical parties, are the reality of the "ineffable gaudiness" that "spun itself out in his brain." His first transformation of self into the man of his dreams occurs when he spies a millionaire's yacht, which to Gatsby "represented all the beauty and glamour in the world," and his striving after Daisy can be seen as merely the final incarnation of this drive. In his quest, he becomes almost unreal, surrounding himself in the "threadbare" phrases of magazine romance, evoking no image so much as that "of a turbaned 'character' leaking sawdust at every pore" that only solidifies under the pressure of his insistence of its truth. He is, as Daisy notes, "the advertisement of the man." The rumors are true. Gatsby has in fact "killed a man," namely James Gatz, and replaced him with an image, one so grand that it "was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world." He is a celebrity by sheer wealth and the mysteries of style. Gatsby, when faced with a challenge to this image, shows the danger to himself and others innate in his existence. Tom's resolve to drive Gatsby's car, which he degrades as a "circus wagon," causes "an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable" as if Nick "had only heard it described in words" to pass over Gatsby's face. It reappears again when Tom begins to discredit Gatsby's life story, and this time Nick can places it: "He looked - and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden - as if he had 'killed a man.'" Gatsby cannot tolerate the stripping of his stylized life. Daisy, to whom Gatsby had "wed his unutterable visions," is part of this life style. His goal is not so much to claim her as his own, but to reclaim what he has already taken. Gatsby "wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy." Indeed, his desire is that she renounce Tom completely, and thus wipe away the harm done to the image for which he has killed.[55] It is the force of the image, fueled by a drive for pecuniary emulation unmatched by any other man in the book, which fills Tom with fear. As Bizzell describes it, "both men . . . derive [a] quality of threat partly from their wealth. In Gatsby's case, it may also come from a sense of the violence he's done to himself to attain such a gorgeous imitation; a fearful strength of will must have been required to raise him so high from an obscure background."[56] But this strength of will eventually crumples under the assault of Tom and the irrevocable loss of Daisy. Having been stripped of his illusions, Gatsby finds himself living in a "new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees." In the wake of his dreams, Gatsby falls prey to the "foul dust" so closely aligned with ash, the high price of both "living too long with a single dream" and living without one. His modern structure of self is incompatible with any idealistic longing beyond the immediate mode of consumption; he would have been safer simply living in his protective "womb of purposeless splendor."[57]

Upwardly Mobile and Falling Down

Elizabeth Young notes in her analysis of Eighties fiction that this decade, with its homogenized society, could never give birth to a character like Jay Gatsby.[58] She is right, for Gatsby is a product of a time in transition, when a romantic vitality of spirit and a belief in the possibility of change and self-transformation could, at least for a time, struggle against both the bounds of tradition and the new, distorting effects of capitalist modernity. But the occupants of Bright Lights, Big City were born into the world post-modern, when the last bastions of tradition are converted into marketing campaign slogans and self-definition is dissolved in the frenetic flight from one trendy, disappointing club to the next.

Tad Allagash is a hedonistic prince of this age, fully involved in the action of the Eighties, with no mission in life except to have more fun than anyone else in New York. He is the embodiment of its "perpetual motion," which is also the strict "Allagash rule." Only one drink per stop, since "there is always the likelihood that where you aren't is more fun than where you are." His background is clearly privileged, for his "friends are all rich and spoiled, like the cousin from Memphis" who refused to "go below Fourteenth Street because, he said, he didn't have a lowlife visa." Tad evidences his power by using his name as a verb to elucidate his vague plan for the evening's entertainment, which consists simply of rolling into "the heart of the night. Wherever there are dances to be danced, drugs to be hoovered, women to be Allagashed," Tad will be there, as long as it is the place to be. He is an agent of advertising, a pimp of the new and improved, willing to boost his friend's "sales" on the sexual market with lies. But he himself is his own best advertisement, "looking très sportif in J. Press torso and punked-out red SoHo trousers." Although he works, and chides the protagonist for failing to "keep appearances up" by observing regular office hours, he is one of those "faces familiar under artificial light, belonging to people whose daytime existence is only a tag - designer, writer, artist." He is the ideal of social economic behavior after the progress of modernity, working and yet defining himself through a hedonistic style of life, devoted to the voluptuous gratification of the lineaments of desire, sparing no expense. If, as David Kaufmann speculates, the yuppie "marked a reaction to . . . the renewed threat of downward mobility" in that "the new type of Yuppie became a tentative solution to the larger cultural problem of how to come to terms with the specter of economic and/or status decline," then Tad is the perfect specimen.[59] Always moving forward, never looking back, Tad denies the possibility of exhaustion or fall. He has never experienced the "urge for a quite night at home." In a way, Tad is a voice of wisdom, the one whose world view is validated by the book's title - "bright lights, big city" is the lyrical epithet he applies to the phenomena behind the desertion of protagonist's wife, and to Tad, all heartbreak is "just another version of the same old story." But Tad is also completely empty; he does not "speak the language of the inner self." As he notes, where "skin-deep is the mode, traditional values are not going to take root and flourish." He is perfectly adapted to his environment, the "new world" which is "material without being real," only because he is "a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice."[60] He is the embodiment of pure style in search of nothing deeper than self-gratification.

The protagonist presents himself as a tourist in Tad's postmodern existence. "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning," he tells himself, but "here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar." He buttresses his sense of difference from Tad with his desire for the good life, one far removed from his present circumstances. He wants to meet "the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this . . . When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a garden . . . Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't."[61] But lacking even a name, the protagonist cannot really say what he is. Referring to himself almost exclusively in the second person "You," he creates both "the sense of an everyman" and "an absence of being" which reflect the problems he is trying to escape. As Jefferson Faye has noted, the protagonist is essentially a "self divided," "exiled from himself, an ethereal voyeur helplessly watching his own self-destruction from outside." While Tad is a performer, the protagonist exists in a constant state of self-reflection, "talking to the mirror," unable to face his problems head-on.[62] He is verbally staring at the image of an identity he does not recognize nor name, or control. On the surface, his personal problems are obvious: the results of his strenuous "R & R" activities involving "Bolivian Marching Powder," his model-wife Amanda's "sexual abandonment," his failing career and lost literary aspirations, and finally the approaching anniversary of his mother's death. At the base, however, the trouble is his loss of self experienced in these events, which harkens back to his childhood experience of moving annually to a new school, where "there was a new body of lore to be mastered," and the "color" of his "bike" and his "socks" was always wrong. Thus, his "primal scene" is not "the encounter of parents in coitus," but takes rather "the shape of a ring of schoolchildren . . . laughing with malice, pointing their vicious little fingers to insist upon your otherness." The constant flood of new material definitions that he must learn is too much; he cannot keep up and fears exposure as a "fraud, an imposter in the social circle." After meeting Amanda and moving to New York, the protagonist states he "began to feel that you were no longer on the outside looking in." He was "the stuff of which consumer profiles - American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model - are made." But then something "changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating."[63] It takes an awful lot of marching powder to convince him that he is once again "upwardly mobile." Instead of perpetual motion, the protagonist is slowing towards a stop. Graham Caveney, working on the family psychodrama of the book, finds the "conflict between the narrator's image of himself and his quest to displace this with a new one" at the center of the novel's effect.[64] Much like Gatsby, the protagonist has seen his markers of self-identity stripped from him, and as this has happened so many times in the past, he does not have an authentic self or dream to fall back upon. Even the Hasidim, whom he admired for their "perfect economy of belief," are giving "most of the blow in the country . . . a Yiddish accent." At the end of the novel, the disheveled and bleeding protagonist, ripped from the womb of his hedonistic coma, trades his Ray-Bans for a bag of bread rolls. Something is "wrong" with the way his legs are moving, and he is unsure if his nose is still bleeding. The bread man tells him "You're crazy," and it is possible he thinks the protagonist is an MIA, or at least on the soon-to-be list. The bread makes him gag, and he tells himself "you will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again."[65] Whether taken as sacramental or degrading act, it is clear that the protagonist, having lost his identity, is starting over, once again. He is back where he started, and he may end up back where the book began.

The fear of insecurity drives Fitzgerald and McInerney's male characters. The failure to maintain social standing, a stable construction of self, a human relationship with the world, or a sense of individuality apart from the masses are the result of the process of modernity, which in promising "adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world" also "threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are." The most destructive force is the operation of the economic system upon people's understanding of their relationships to their environment. Capitalism shackles the ideal of the self to material objects in place of any stable root such as tradition. The only way to survive is to essentially be material without being real, to exist as a projection of self only, and to desire in excesses of the possibility of satisfaction; basically, to exist in a state of perpetual need only remedied by the temporary and fleeting satisfaction of material goods. Understanding the world in its superficial images only, the self searches for distinction but finds only disintegration. And when the self disintegrates, personal relationships follow suit.

Marilyn Maxwell states that Fitzgerald is yet another author who "seems quite comfortable in positing woman as a metaphor for many of the frustrations and ills that plague twentieth century America," an observation also applicable to McInerney.[66] A woman's rejection is the most frequent and obvious plot device for explaining the downfall of their male characters. But their destruction is not just the loss of a woman, but also an entire disintegration of self. In The Great Gatsby and Bright Lights, Big City, the breakdown of romance forms a critique of the "frustrations and ills that plague twentieth century America," namely the corrosive influence of capitalist commodity culture on self and society.

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.

The twentieth century, according to historian Harold Evans, is "the American century" and belongs to the United States by virtue of "the triumph of its faith in its founding idea of political and economic freedom."[91] In 1931, James T. Adams defined this founding idea as a shared dream, "The American Dream" of a

land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement . . . It is not a dream of motorcars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.[92]

But as Fitzgerald and McInerney's works show, motor cars, high wages, and the other trappings of a life lived through style can form impediments to the process of recognizing others for what they truly are. The 1920s and the 1980s were two extreme decades when the ideology of materialism was at its height. These eras enlarge the modern American cultural tendency to define happiness and even personal identity through the consumption of consumer goods. Fitzgerald and McInerney both focus on the effect such definitions have on the minority group most suited to following such styles of living, namely wealthy, white, young men and their female counterparts. Their insecurity and isolation from each other is the harsh reality of an existence based upon self-gratification and perpetual desire. The flood of the new has buried the body of tradition, but endless hedonism results in a soulless pursuit of fun, without depth or meaning. And yet, the absence of desire is equally destructive, equally as empty. To subsist without a dream is a form of living death, and the ultimate form of isolation. But the dream must be real, not based in material expression or an ideal that does violence to the self and others. The individual self must be rooted in a sense of connection with others as subjects and not as objects or ideals. Living in a material world requires loving in a real one.

Fitzgerald and McInerney form their critiques of the American dream partially from their experiences of romance. Although Benjamin Spencer is discussing Fitzgerald, his observation holds true for McInerney as well: "As for the American dream, he seems to cherish it as the indispensable root of a living culture whose flower will always be blighted. The disillusion, the vulgarization, the exploitation are inevitable; but better these than the sterile and corrupt despair of its absence."[93] The same can be said for their belief in the power of love. Of course, the breakdown of heterosexual romance in the culture of affluence is not these authors' only focus. Both deal with social issues regarding incest, the loss of personal potential, the effects of self-abuse, the destructive nature of families, the difficult treatment of homosexuality, and other subjects that deserve study. "F. Scott Fitzgerald . . . felt that writers have one or two truly powerful experiences in their lives and [then spend their] careers telling the story of the resulting emotion over and over. McInerney's most powerful experience to date has been, apparently, being dumped by a model. Proof of his skill and artistry is found in the fact that from this personal trifle he has written some of the most relevant literature of our time."[94] Romance and its destruction are simply one important factor in these authors' most beautiful and most telling critiques of the modern age.

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