Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
The Music of Hope
Marginalization and the American Dream in Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible
Man, F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby, and Anzia Yezierska‘s
Bread Givers
Elizabeth Harlow
March 31, 2011
Undergraduate Critical Honors Thesis
Trinity College of Arts and Sciences
Department of English
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Contents
I. Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………2
II. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….4
III. Black, White, and the Blues: Invisible Man…………………………………………………11
IV. Restless Jazz and Incoherent (Un)reality: The Great Gatsby……………………………..…28
V. Incantation and the Voice of the City: Bread Givers………………………………………....44
VI. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...58
VII. Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………60
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Acknowledgments
My first thanks go to my first teachers of English and of hope, my parents. By providing
me with every imaginable form of support at every stage, they have enabled me to become the
person and the writer that I am. I have particularly valued my mother‘s encouragement, advice,
and perpetually open ear as a sounding board throughout the process of writing this thesis.
I appreciate friends both near and far for their various forms of support: Ryan Egan for helping
me in my decision to undertake a thesis, Leif Bergerud for sharing his cultural savvy and
directing me to the Rolling Stone article that helped me clarify my thinking, Jane Jiang for
heartening me with her enthusiastic faith in the critical value of my work, and especially Ashley
Jones, Ashley Chang, and Megan Sherrell for their solidarity and humor in the hours I needed
them most.
Finally, I cannot express enough gratitude to my advisor Tom Ferraro, without whose guidance
over the past fours, and especially this year, this project would never have materialized. I don‘t
know what I would have done without all the time, patience, inspiration, and incisive feedback
he so generously shared. His particular knack for balancing pressure with encouragement—
always pushing me, but never into despair—has deepened my understanding of the process of
scholarly writing just as much as it has expanded the intellectual rigor and nuance of my end
product. He has taught me how to read, how to think, and how to write all over again.
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―Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.‖
-Thornton Wilder
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Introduction
Americans participate in a national mythology of dreaming. We put forth a history and a
vision of the United States as a land of progress and opportunity; as characterized by equality,
`liberty and justice for all; and as a diverse pluralistic democratic republic in which everyone
belongs and anyone may rise from rags-to-riches in their pursuit of happiness.
If these idealistic terms sound slightly preposterous when I parrot them all out together, it
is because they are. A cursory glance at the plights of racial and ethnic minorities, of the lower
class, or of women in America reveals the glaring failures and inconsistencies of our cultural
narratives—that is, it reveals the shortcomings of optimistic belief in ―the American Dream‖ for
those citizens that are excluded from and neglected by the mainstream culture. That American
thought and rhetoric are rife with contradictions is no secret and no new insight, but the fact‘s
familiarity does not diminish its importance. I began this project with an interest in parsing out
the literary relationship between identity and the failure of the American Dream, particularly
those confusing and surprisingly frequent intersections in which optimism, idealism, or hope
seemed to remain intact even in the face of marginalization and defeat. Why do people believe
in the Dream when such real social obstacles bar so many from it?
F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby and Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man attracted me
because, although they are often jaded, restless, and belligerent novels, they strike me with an
unlikely hope that persists despite tension against violence and thwarted dreams.
After
everything, Invisible Man calls the world ―concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful‖
(Ellison 576). In the wake of two murders and one colossally failed dream, Nick still speaks of
Gatsby-like wonder as an American phenomenon that seems inevitable and even beautiful: ―It
eluded us then, but that‘s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms
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farther…And one fine morning—‖ (Fitzgerald 189). The startling juxtaposition of the realities
and the ideals in the texts perplexed and fascinated me.
As I sought to attain a solid grasp on these slippery tensions, I realized a deeper
problem: the vagueness of the terms themselves. Toni Morrison observes accurately that ―a
whole tradition of ‗universal‘ yearnings [have] collapsed into that well-fondled phrase, ‗the
American Dream‘‖ (33). One of the main efforts of this paper is to clarify some of the phrase‘s
different significations, as presented in each novel. The American Dream emerges as involving
desires that are partially economic, partially social, and partially something greater.
Each distinct version of the American Dream involves the struggle of hope against
despair. This dyad crystallized for me when I encountered a Cornel West interview in Rolling
Stone in which he differentiated terms that I had been using interchangeably: ―hope is a
qualitatively different category than optimism[, which is] a calculation of probability…Hope
wrestles with despair, but it doesn't generate optimism.‖ Optimism carries with it a sense of
expectancy that is impossibly incoherent for those who have no basis to expect a positive
outcome; hope, however, does something different. As these central terms clarified, I also found
that West‘s musical metaphor for hope channeled the vague idea of confusion into a more
precise attunement to dissonance in my texts. West describes himself as a ―prisoner of hope‖
because he is ―a blues man‖ in the sense of both the musical genre and the emotional state. Not
anticipating resolution, he persists onward in hope: ―No guarantee, unfinished, open-ended‖
(West).
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West‘s understanding of hope—as persistent, nebulous, and without expectation—is not
uniquely what he calls a ―blues man‖ phenomenon1. One can look over a hundred years earlier
to a white female poet to see the same sensation described just as perceptively by a very different
musical metaphor. Emily Dickinson writes ―Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the
soul,/ And sings the tune without the words,/ And never stops at all.‖ The deliberately vague and
impressionistic language of her extended avian metaphor performs the nature of hope just as
much as it describes it. By calling it ―the thing with feathers,‖ she declines to identify anything
about its appearance or species, or even to name it definitively as a bird at all. This
circumlocution precludes standard interpretations of a more specific bird image, identifying hope
as necessarily obscure. We cannot clearly see it, so we must imagine what it is. What we hear is
equally difficult to interpret: this unidentified bird ―sings the tune without the words.‖ Hope
does not verbalize any expectancy. It may very well have aims—people hope for any number of
specific things all the time—but it‘s more cautious than optimism, resisting fixation and not
taking probability for granted. Dickinson represents hope as elusive, airy, and fluid not only by
the feathered thing‘s unknown appearance and wordless tune, but also by the poem‘s free verse.
Hope is as persistent and powerful as it is malleable: West is a ―prisoner‖ of this thing that sings
ceaselessly, not deterred by even the ―chilliest land‖ or ―strangest sea‖ (West, Dickinson). In
fact, Dickinson notes that it is most gripping in the harshest extremities (―sweetest in the gale is
heard‖), when it is most needed to combat despair (Dickinson).
1
It is not uniquely an American phenomenon, either. Speaking about ―American hope‖ entails
explore the manifestations of hope that are characteristically American, not claiming that they
are exclusively so.
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I discovered later that hope and despair were precisely the terms Ellison had in mind as
he wrote Invisible Man. In his speech accepting the National Book Award for Invisible Man in
January of 1953, he explains the vision that shaped the form of the novel:
Thus to see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and freedom, I was forced to
conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led, after so many
triumphs, to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction.
I was to dream of a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift,
confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting
forth its images of hope, human fraternity, and individual self-realization. (Shadow and
Act 105, italics mine)
Hope confronts precisely the social conditions that hamper optimism and threaten despair. It
clarifies why and how Invisible Man does not give up a fight for recognition he does not expect
to be possible, even to the point of espousing a sense of social responsibility to the society that
cannot see him and from which he is therefore isolated. And although Ellison deals specifically
with the obstacles confronted by an American black man in the first half of the twentieth century,
he aptly identifies hope and despair as broader phenomena that cut across the diverse range of
ever-changing American experiences.
Hope can combat any number of different societal
inequalities and brutalities.
Invisible Man tackles marginalization on the basis of race; The Great Gatsby addresses
the nexus of class background and ethnicity that obstructs Gatsby from crossing threshold to
belonging in the posh society of East Egg. Its version of American dreaming does deal in terms
of optimism: Gatsby is unyieldingly, foolishly optimistic in his idealization of Daisy and his
pursuit of her. Evoking the dissonance and the restless velocity of jazz and the Jazz Age,
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Fitzgerald explores the disjunction of dreams from reality and the disastrous consequences of
their collision. In doing so, he also distinguishes the optimism rendered destructive by Gatsby‘s
marginalized social standing from the hope that Nick so admires in the man who otherwise
―represented everything for which [he has] an unaffected scorn‖ (Fitzgerald 6).
Even as they explore alienation and social obstacle, Ellison and Fitzgerald don‘t get to
the heart of another important form of otherness: being female. American women had only just
been guaranteed full suffrage under the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Women lurk along the
margins of Invisible Man as sketchy, stereotyped characters. They play larger roles in The Great
Gatsby, but they are always filtered and interpreted, often symbolized and objectified, by men.
Anzia Yezierska‘s Bread Givers provides yet another view into the problems of
marginalization and hope by offering a woman‘s voice through narrator-protagonist Sara
Smolinsky. Sara is complexly marginalized not only as female, but also on the basis of her
heritage and class status as a poor Jewish immigrant. As she works to ―lift [her]self to be a
person among people,‖ she is both shaped and limited by her father‘s rigid Old World orthodoxy
and by her removal from the dominant culture of the New World (Yezierska 220).
Yezierska
manifests Sara‘s plurality and the discordances of that plurality through the clashing music and
noise of the city around her, with Father‘s Torah chants resounding first and most pervasively.
Sara roots herself in Judaic hope as she pursues a ―profoundly ethnic version of the American
dream‖ (Ferraro 60).
Together, these three novels demonstrate how broadly the phenomenon of hope extends
across the modern American social landscape, cutting across the boundaries of race, class,
ethnicity, and gender.
Discovering the prominence of hope in this era offers particularly
compelling evidence for its strength in the American ethos. The modernist period, especially the
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space of time between the Great War and the Great Depression, is generally considered a time
marked by profound disillusionment, pessimism, and despair2. Even Guy V. Price‘s ardent
defense of the American legacy of optimism at the end of in the 1930s acknowledges that ―[t]he
post-war literature of devastation and despair does stand out in marked contrast with the
romantic optimism of [the] earlier period‖ (Price 42). This appraisal of the period after the Great
War has held: it is still known as the ―Lost Generation‖—where those ―lost‖ are not the dead war
casualties, but the survivors lost in deadening postwar disillusionment and despair—after a
phrase Ernest Hemingway attributed to Gertrude Stein in his epigraph to the Sun Also Rises
(Hemingway 7).
These novels do, in fact, also cut across time. Although they all fall within the broad
category of the ―Modern American novels,‖ they mark different points within the modernist
moment. Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby (1925) sit soundly in its Lost Generation canonical
center. AnziaYezierska publishes Bread Givers the same year as Gatsby, but her narrative draws
from an earlier naturalistic mode of writing. Invisible Man (1952), published after the elapse of
twenty-seven years that included the Great Depression and another World War, teeters on the
edge of postmodernism in both its date of publication and its style.
I trace in reverse chronological order from Invisible Man through Gatsby to Bread Givers
partially because Ellison offers such a clear inroad into the distinction between hope and
optimism, but also because the novels themselves all engage fundamentally in retrospection. My
set of books cuts across time in their range of dates of publication and modes of writing, but each
text also cuts across time internally by looking backward in time. All three narrators tell selected
2
While these feelings are prominent in the post-war era, they extend beyond it. They are clearly
present in Invisible Man (1952) and Cornel West judged in his 2007 Rolling Stone interview that
―[t]he citizens of the American empire are feeling a profound sense of disillusionment.‖
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stories of their remembered personal histories, and all three invoke remembrances of broader
national and cultural histories and mythologies.
The retrospective mode of narration relates more generally to issues of perspective. As
its title suggests, Invisible Man deals with problems of sight, oversight, blindness, and mediated
vision as fundamental problems. The complex narration of The Great Gatsby, constantly filtered
and disordered, conveys the incoherence and difficulty of sustaining hope in the world after the
War. Yezierska‘s style and structure are far more straightforward than Ellison‘s or Fitzgerald‘s,
but she, too, employs first-person narratation and the tension in Bread Givers centers on the
divide between New World and Old World ways of seeing things.
I hope here to present new ways of seeing these old books. I do so with full awareness
that my readings often cut against the critical grain of interpretation for these texts (The Great
Gatsby, hopeful? Even Sparknotes will tell you that it is fundamentally a despairing tale about
the decline of the American Dream). However, I do not aim to develop idiosyncratic readings of
them by selecting from their idiosyncratic moments: I tackle the familiar, famous passages and
try to read them afresh, because I believe that hope lies in the hearts of these texts and not in
their margins. The acts of seeing it there, apprehending what it is, and parsing out what it does
all enable us to understand how these texts comprehend and wrestle with the inconsistencies of
American thought and ideology in order to perform, deconstruct, and recreate mythologies of the
American Dream in the face of marginalization.
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Black, White, and the Blues: Invisible Man
―Hope‖ is often used interchangeably with other forward- and upward-looking words:
optimism, idealism, dream, aspiration, and faith, among others. These words carry various
shades of meaning—pragmatic, religious, expectant, fatalistic, self-motivated—that imply deep
differences beneath surface similarities. For example, ―faith‖ bears spiritual overtones of trust,
while ―dream‖ trembles with a heady uncertainty between potential and reality, and ―aspiration‖
breathes the targeted energy of ambition.
Cornel West differentiates hope and optimism
particularly well in a 2007 Rolling Stone interview in his response to an offhand, almost
rhetorical, question: ―So you're optimistic about the future?‖ (West). By collapsing the question,
he identifies the subtle, but profound, distinction between apparent synonyms:
The categories of optimism and pessimism don't exist for me. I'm a blues man. A blues
man is a prisoner of hope, and hope is a qualitatively different category than optimism.
Optimism is a secular construct, a calculation of probability. Black folk in America have
never been optimistic about the future -- what have we had to be optimistic about? But
we are people of hope. Hope wrestles with despair, but it doesn't generate optimism. It
just generates this energy to be courageous, to bear witness, to see what the end is going
to be. No guarantee, unfinished, open-ended, I am a prisoner of hope. I'm going to die full
of hope. There's no doubt about that, because that is a choice I make. But at the same
time, the end doesn't look too good right now. (West)
West rejects the task of prophesying: the long and persistent history of abuse and exclusion of
black people from ―Americans‖ makes any rational forecast of optimistic expectation impossible,
or at least blinkered by romantic naivete. The failures of American democratic ideals are in no
way opaque and include injustices as blatant as black enslavement, female disenfranchisement,
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and Japanese internment, among others. Even an openly optimistic white American academic of
the 1930‘s can recognize that ―optimistic idealization tends to cover up in sentiment and theory
the shortcomings of the faith‖ (Price 203). Nonetheless, West doesn‘t confront these problems
with pessimism either, instead taking a stance that is deliberately noncommittal and adaptively
so, given the undefined nature of hope and its role in combating despair against the odds.
In The Real American Dream, Andrew Delbanco identifies hope as an essential coping
mechanism against the psychological threat posed by life‘s chaos. He begins with the premise
that all ―human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days—
pain, desire, pleasure, fear—into a story. When that story leads somewhere and thereby helps us
navigate through life to its inevitable terminus in death, it gives us hope‖ (1). Any variety of
stories will make do, just as long as they give form to life and to death and fight our sneaking
suspicions that either is purposeless. As shorthand, he uses ―the word culture to mean the stories
and symbols by which we try to hold back the melancholy suspicion that we live in a world
without meaning3‖ (23). Either secular or spiritual ideology can create a narrative compelling
enough to direct our actions and make sense of our feelings. Delbanco suggests that God, the
Nation, and the Self have successively served as the orienting poles for the predominant
American cultural narration of hope. He is sensitive to the inadequacies of therapeutic ideology,
however, and to the fact that hope perches precariously always.
Just as desire necessarily arises from a sense of lack and longing, so does hope (the two
often go hand in hand), and Delbanco directs our attention to ―the dark twin of hope,‖ a shadow
that always accompanies and inspires it. We can identify two distinct breeds of ―hopelessness.‖
3
Cornel West agrees with Delbanco that we face a ―crisis of meaning‖ and takes a takes a religious slant on the fight
for hope in even secular contemporary America: ―we're going to see more people wrestling with their isolation and
existential emptiness by turning to religious institutions. These might be entirely new institutions, outside of
churches and synagogues. But the fact is that God-talk will be with us for a while‖ (West). Religion—in traditional
or in new forms—is a primary source of hope, but not the only one.
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The first, if it is humanly possible, originates from perfect fulfillment or contentment: one
already has what all that one needs and wants, so there is no need to hope for anything more.
The second form of hopelessness is much more familiar and more problematic, and it derives
from resignation to irresolvable lack. It is despair uncombated, or unsuccessfully combated. To
understand hope, we must understand this dark Siamese twin. Delbanco observes that ―[a]ny
history of hope in America must…make room at its center for this dogged companion of hope—
the lurking suspicion that all our getting and spending amounts to nothing more than fidgeting
while we wait for death. When I say ‗center,‘ I mean it in the gravitational sense of the word—
the point around which we orbit, and toward which, if we lose velocity, we fall‖ (2-3). Delbanco
attempts to reclaim the term ―the American Dream‖ by implying the falsity of what it is most
commonly understood to mean and offering a ―real‖ alternative.
The task is difficult because, as Toni Morrison notes, ―a whole tradition of ‗universal‘
yearnings [have] collapsed into that well-fondled phrase, ‗the American Dream‘‖ (33).
―Success‖ as a ―universal‖ idea is about as multiply defined (and therefore as undefined) as a
dream can be.
Delbanco seizes in particular on visions of financial prosperity typically
associated with ―the American Dream‖ as incomplete shorthand for the ―real‖ dream: he uses
―getting‖ and ―spending‖ to connote their traditional economic associations, but they also extend
beyond mere materialism. We spend our time in a myriad of ways, and we aim to get friends
and romantic partners. Social currency can carry more weight than just money, and exchanging
conceptions of ourselves means more than exchanging dollar bills. The heart of the hope that
constitutes the true American Dream for him lies in the hopeful power of self-determination. He
declares, ―Here was the ground of hope—the idea that Americans were not fixed in their
circumstances of birth, but were free to become whatever they could imagine.‖ This ideal of
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freedom may well lie at the heart of American hope, but Delbanco mistakenly extends it into
grand imaginings of optimism where none makes sense. He asserts that, except for those living
―in the plantation South, and in the Hudson valley, where Dutch patroon culture lingered for a
while past the Revolution,‖ one might (optimistically) take heart in ―knowing that with a small
turn of fortune‘s wheel [master and servant] may exchange places‖ (60-1). That this revolution
of fortune might ever actually happen has been and remains a patently false delusion for all too
many literal and effective ―servants‖ in America. The fact that even in 1998 a Harvard scholar
cannot see the scope of exclusion exacerbates the problem.
This oversight is the crux of Invisible Man: how is it possible is it for a black man in the
1930s like the protagonist, or like Ellison himself in the 1950s, to attain recognition? Since
social conditions render optimism nonsensical, hope remains the only recourse for mustering the
energy to fight despair, to ―see what the end is going to be,‖ and even to try against the odds to
influence that end. It is a tenacious but tenuous weapon. Although hope doesn‘t require the
expectation or promise of optimism, such a soft and shaky ―ground of hope‖ can only bear so
much weight for so long before the Americans-not-included-in-―America‖ sink into the
quicksand of despair. The questions are how much and how long? How ―sore must be the
storm/ That could abash the little bird‖ that sustains us before it is blown away from its perch in
the heart (Dickinson)?
The storm of marginalization is a tumultuous one indeed, which Ellison describes in
Shadow and Act as a tumbling and disorienting ―gyroscope of irony of which the Negro
maintains a hazardous stability as the sea-tossed ship of his emotion whirls him willy-nilly along:
lunging him toward the shoals of bitter rejection (of the ideology that makes him the sole
sacrifice of America‘s tragedy); now away toward the mine-strewn shores of hopelessness (that
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despite the war democracy is still discussed on an infantile level and himself in pre-adult
terms)…‖ ( 95-96). Blatant racism and exclusion are elements of the storm, but not the only
ones. ―Ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture,‖ but the
convention reinforces invisibility (Morrison 9-10). Skirting the problems does not stop them, but
even well-meaning attempts to discuss them may propagate a set of destructive stereotypes even
while they attempt to rescue people from them. Ellison notes that ―when the white American,
holding up most twentieth-century fiction, says, ‗This is American reality,‘ the Negro tends to
answer…‗Perhaps, but you‘ve left out this, and this, and this. And most of all, what you‘d have
the world accept as me isn‘t even human.‖ (25). All these kinds of blindness buffet Invisible Man
as he struggles to find himself and a place in society where he can be himself.
Invisible Man performs hope in all its brazenness and subtlety, revealing the capacity for
subversion and irony that enable it negotiate a ―hazardous stability‖ in the midst of tumult. The
aural metaphors of blues and jazz capture the energies and tensions inherent in hope. Invisible
Man is undoubtedly a blues man: full of energy, fighting despair, bearing witness and coming
out see the end of things—whether he smells the change of death or of spring in the air (580).
He is not optimistic: Ellison‘s protagonist betrays no flicker of belief that society ever will see
him when he definitively declares ―I am an invisible man‖ (3). He hovers in an unseen limbo,
slightly off beat and without resolution in a world characterized by a blues-like ―refusal to offer
solutions‖ (Shadow and Act 94). In the Prologue, he describes the strangeness of the invisibility
that defines and constrains him in the terms of Louis Armstrong‘s ―What Did I Do to Be so
Black and Blue‖:
Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you‘re never
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quite on the beat. Sometimes you‘re ahead and sometimes you‘re behind. Instead of the
swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where
time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look
around. That‘s what you hear vaguely in Louis‘ music. (8)
Invisible Man lives a life of syncopation, off a beat from the expected rhythms of mainstream
cultural institutions. The slight shift of his world represents his alienation from the structures
that nevertheless inform and direct his action. However, there is also freedom in this disjunction.
The good jazz break has the reckless unpredictability of any ad-libbed jam, unchained to a
prewritten score, but the careful intentionality of a virtuoso‘s craft. It offers escape without a
spiraling loss of control—transcendence without losing touch.
And while Louis‘ lilting music
sings the nature of isolation and the blues, the content of the song lyrics make its source in
racism clear. ―I ain‘t got a friend/ My only sin is my skin,‖ Armstrong sings, ―What did I do to
be so black and blue?‖ The answer is nothing.
This blatant exclusion leaves an invisible man teetering on the liminal edge of threatened
imminent release from hope‘s orbit into the melancholy of purposelessness. Ellison explains that
―[w]hen Negroes are barred from participating in the main institutional life of society they lose
far more than economic privileges or the satisfaction of saluting the flag with unmixed
emotions.‖ They also face the dissolution of the cultural narrative that Delbanco cites as the
origin of hope. What American story can make sense when God allows oppression and the
Nation in which and against which the individual exists is unwilling or unable to see the Self?
Through exclusion, African Americans ―lose one of the bulwarks which men place between
themselves and the constant threat of chaos. For whatever the assigned function of social
institutions, their psychological function is to protect the citizen against the irrational,
17
incalculable forces that hover about the edges of human life like cosmic destruction lurking
within and atomic stockpile‖ (Shadow and Act 299). Even with all their flaws and restrictions,
social institutions at least provide the security of order.
Having been let down by every
institution and ideology from which he seeks support, from the college to the Brotherhood,
Invisible Man drifts dangerously along the frayed margins of order.
He sinks deep into these blues at his victimization, all the way down like Dante into the
bottommost depths (7).
The descent into darkness even proves vital to his ascent to this
enlightenment, as it does for Dante-Pilgrim, who cannot summit Mount Purgatory directly at the
outset of Inferno. He must travel downward before he can rise up. Similarly, at the end of the
poem, he must exit Hell by climbing the back of Satan himself. With as much allegorical force
as literal meaning, Virgil tells Dante ―There is no way/ but by such stairs to rise above such evil‖
(Alighieri 281). After confronting and literally surmounting evil, Dante arrives again at the base
of the mountain where he began his journey, but profoundly changed and newly equipped to
progress farther. It is at literal rock-bottom that Invisible Man‘s existence shifts from darkest to
brightest, illuminated by 1,369 lights that enable him to escape death by seeing himself and
seeing the truth: ―The truth is the light and the light is the truth,‖ he says (7). Just as hope
requires the threat of despair to arise, light exists against dark, and we understand truth in
opposition to what is false. Invisible Man‘s heady, surprisingly hopeful, passion is not destroyed
but made possible by ―that strange mixture of the naïve and sophisticated, the benign and
malignant, which makes the American past so puzzling and its present so confusing‖ and which
Ellison says enables imagination to soar and imparts such exuberance certain types of jazz (xiii).
Against all apparent odds and despite his warranted cynicism, Invisible Man remains
hope‘s restless prisoner. Despite his conviction in his permanent invisibility, he decides to
18
emerge from his hibernation. He declares ―I‘m coming out, no less invisible without [my old
skin], but coming out nevertheless. And I suppose it‘s damn well time…there‘s a possibility that
even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play‖ (581). He feels compelled to act,
even without knowing what exactly his responsibility might be or having faith that this role will
have any tangible significance or visible effect. The importance of this agency is suggested in
the way Invisible Man tweaks Louis Armstong‘s take on his status by framing the narrative as an
answer to the slightly modified question ―But what did I do to be so blue?‖ (14). Invisible Man‘s
blackness is a given, but the bruising and the melancholy implied by the added second color may
not be. The italicized I implies his participation in and, to some extent, control over his
condition that may inspire his action.
He acts most notably through speech, both in narrating the novel and throughout the
course of its events.
Given Invisible Man‘s conviction that ―you will not believe my
invisibility,‖ the emphasis on communicating it seems surprising (580). We frequently see its
failure. Speech and writing derive significance from the interaction they create between the
speaker and his audience; they should be opportunities to be seen and understood. However,
words of promise and of ideals often breathe empty, and expectations of recognition remain
unfulfilled. Invisible Man first tells us of his gift of rhetoric when he becomes ―the triumph [of
his] whole community‖ when selected to ―give the speech at a gathering of the town‘s leading
white citizens‖ (17). The invitation proves to be a brutal, objectifying sham. The Battle Royal
strips Invisible Man and his peers of all dignity as they fight in a brawl that is completely
anarchical and, paradoxically, also completely rigged. They become participants in their own
shame, even with excitement as they are further abused and literally lowered to their knees as
they scramble on an electrified rug for coins and bills that turn out to be fake (24). The white
19
leaders lure them with the promise ―You get all you grab,‖ knowing that they cannot possibly
grab anything of value. The vanity of the effort and fruitlessness of the abasement in this show
represent the tremendous racial barriers that Invisible Man faces wherever he goes, set the stage
for subsequent failures of speech.
One danger of speech is that it may devolve into empty performance, obscuring rather
than elucidating the truth.
Rather than reveal a human being, it may create an inhuman
stereotype or mask. The word has a sinister power to reify othering and dehumanizing as much
as it has an innovative power to challenge and to humanize (Morrison 6). We see both powers in
the novel, and Ellison deliberately harnesses them together as he seeks to ―reforge the will to
endure in a hostile world‖ by reclaiming language and hope, both of which derive their greatest
energy and impact from tensions, ambivalence, and irony (Shadow and Act 302). In Shadow and
Act he writes: ―For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power
to blind, imprison, and destroy. The essence of the word is its ambivalence, and in fiction it is
never so effective and revealing as when both potentials are operating simultaneously, as when it
mirrors both good and bad, as when it blows both hot and cold in the same breath‖ (Shadow and
Act 25).
In Invisible Man, Ellison‘s demonstrates the dual potentials in play with his complex use
of the Sambo caricature4 to portray submission and defiance. The slur was a common slave
name in literature, which morphed into a cultural icon that appeared ―in every nook and cranny
of the popular culture.‖ Typically portrayed visually in grinning blackface, always cheerful but
4
Apart from Ellison‘s nuanced use of Sambo, the caricature‘s long and lively history makes him
multivalent in himself. In ―Sambo: The Rise & Demise of an American Jester,‖ Joseph Boskin
offers a comprehensive account of Sambo‘s many iterations and significations from his birth in
pre-colonial times through his interment into a ―cultural grave‖ in the mid-twentieth century
(Boskin 3).
20
often clueless, ―the American jester‖ was ―accorded the follies of foolishness‖ as his primary
character and mode of entertaining (Boskin 9-11). We first hear the slur at the Battle Royal after
the black boys are told they can have the money on the ground. As the protagonist gazes at the
―gold‖ coins on the ground, ―trembl[ing]‖ with excitement,‖ a blond man (his hair representing
whiteness in its Aryan extremity) goads him, ―That‘s right, Sambo‖ while winking with devious
confidential knowledge that escapes Invisible Man in his naivete (26). He and the other boys
consent to become Sambo: a shallow character in a crude form of entertainment, with the type
mask concealing the individual. His speech is as much a farce as the battle itself, and the entire
scene plays like a cruel cartoon. He delivers it with a bloody mouth to a raucous, mocking
crowd. They keep him running, and he reifies the ideological tools of their oppression. The main
advice he recites—―cast down your bucket where you are‖—is a mere performance of what his
audience wants to hear, the third act in the comedy they wanted to see. Whenever he casts down
his bucket where he is, the water only comes up salty as his ―friends‖ in the distant ship laugh
while he remains thirsty and buffeted at sea.
Sambo‘s shocking reappearance in the willful hands of Tod Clifton raises the stakes of
the show as both the victimization and the victim‘s agency intensify. Invisible Man stumbles
upon his disappeared Brother on a street corner, hawking a grinning paper doll that dances as
frenetically and unnaturally as the electrified boy whom we painfully watch ―literally dance upon
his back‖ at the Battle Royal (27). Just as the boys became Sambo in that Battle Royal, Clifton
and his doll merge merge into a single symbolic character here as well. The flimsy paper toy
upstages its operator, and we are not told ―It was Clifton‖ until we have already made our
impression of the show (433). By denying us our previous knowledge of the character, the
narrator leads us to share his disgust at the sinister implications of abasement without
21
considering the person behind the act. Invisible Man marvels in shock that Tod Clifton could
demean himself so much: ―But he knew that only in the Brotherhood could we make ourselves
known, could we avoid being empty Sambo dolls. Such an obscene flouncing of everything
human! My God!‖ (434-5). We see only vulgar entertainment.
Clifton‘s act is not as ―empty‖ as it seems, however: what appears to be base moneyseeking and people-pleasing is a powerful act of genuine defiance. He actively chooses to use
the Sambo mask in a way that the herded Battle Royal boys do not, and the tone of amusement
here is different. Clifton chants promises of all kinds of pleasure to his Harlem audience: Sambo
will make you ―laugh, he‘ll make you sigh, si-igh. He‘ll make you want to dance, and dance,‖
make your girlfriend ―love you, loove you!‖ and even ―kill your depression and your
dispossession [as he] lives upon the sunshine of your lordly smile‖ (431-2). His lighthearted
language is ironically sharp with subversive sexual overtones (the si-ighs of loove), connotations
of violence (through the murder of despair), and suggestions of power (one can at least be the
lord controlling a doll‘s movement for one‘s pleasure if a real person is not a domitable option).
The doll‘s movement itself is subversive: we see ―the doll throwing itself about with the fierce
defiance of someone performing a degrading act in public, dancing as though it received a
perverse pleasure from its motions‖ (431). Clifton knows the degrading racism of the doll‘s
iconography, but with perverse humor he co-opts the imagery of subjection to distract the
objectified people from heavy despair with light entertainment and to flout the restrictive and
hollow ideology of the Brotherhood. His defense of the doll becomes his last act of rebellion, as
he springs ―like a dancer‖ in attack against the police officer fining him, paying his life (436).
The moment is both a triumph and a tragedy of resistance. It offers hope in the resilience of
individual will, but also a portrait of futility of individual action and the desperation of despair.
22
The epitaph ―OUR HOPE SHOT DOWN‖ means to that Clifton as hope has been shot down and
destroyed, but it also can suggest that Clifton becomes hope because he has been shot down, with
the murder consummating his plunge of resistance. The duality of the act and the questions of its
legacy demonstrate the power of the ambivalence in performance, language, and hope.
The ambivalence makes performance a very subtle and dangerous business, one that
threatens an invisible man‘s delicately teetering position on the hopeful edge between the foolish
optimism of delusion that one‘s self is seen—when really only the mask is—and the despair that
arises from an irresolvable lack of recognized self or social place—when the character too fully
disguises the man. When Clifton performs with the Sambo doll or when Invisible Man performs
by giving a speech for the Brotherhood, for example, they use these personae to partially control
the way they are seen. By influencing what an audience sees, performance can enhance or
diminish the relevance of the ideologies and preconceptions (of black people, of history, etc.)
that mediate their vision and responses. Many of the story‘s prominent ―visionaries‖—the
college‘s illustrious Founder with his veiled statue, the blind Reverend Barbee, Jack at the
Brotherhood with his glass eye—are ironically sightless, trapped within limited confines of sight.
In its selectivity of presentation, narration works the same way, especially from the first person
perspective employed in Invisible Man. Invisible Man becomes a vessel for channeling different
ideologies as they seem to suit him, and he admits to his ―old fascination with playing a role‖
(579). Invisible Man is full of restless sturm und drang which he directs into his performances.
The effort is in a sense, admirable. The identifier ―Invisible Man‖ carries with it a sense of being
every man as well as no man by echoing the idea of the Renaissance Man, which Ellison
identifies as an ideal to which the black boys of his childhood aspired. The ―proper response‖ to
the archetypal heroes presented them was ―to develop ourselves for the performance of many and
23
diverse roles…not only were we to prepare but we were to perform—not with mere competence
but with an almost reckless verve‖ (xvi). However, the mediation of vision works both ways,
and the energetic performance can be too effective.
Invisible Man becomes invisible even to himself by hiding behind the dehumanizing
masks of the roles he plays. Role-playing obscures his real self, making him ―ache with the need
to convince [him]self that he do[es] exist in the real world‖ as a real, living person and not a
formless phantom (4). ―To be unaware of one‘s form is to live a death,‖ Invisible Man says, and
a failure to recognize himself threatens to propel him into insoluble despair (7). He claims ―I‘m
invisible, not blind‖ at the end of the novel, but it takes a long time for that statement to be true
(576). He is blindfolded at the Battle Royal, frequently operates in darkness, and experiences a
vivid dream of being blinded. For most of the novel, he is not only invisible to others, but unable
to see himself through the dark clouds of ideologies. He admits, ―I was looking for myself…it
took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization
everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself‖ (15). As he seeks
out different roles and adopts ones that are thrust upon him, his true identity is obscured: we do
not ever learn his name, even when he is given a new one, and he himself forgets it. He seeks his
identity in the roles he assumes, but cannot find himself until he realizes that he cannot be seen
behind them. ―But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!‖ he exclaims when he
finally understands the distinction between his performance and himself (15).
In his
consummate act of self-recognition, he burns the papers that have kept him running, the labels of
others that he adopted.
Recognizing his performance enables Invisible Man to harness its power rather than to be
imprisoned by it. His mistaken identification with B.P. Rinehart—pimp and pastor, playing a
24
new part whenever and for whomever he wishes— and his temporary assumption of Rinehart‘s
identity serves as a catalyst for this understanding.
The name, half rind and half heart,
encapsulates his callous extortion and benevolent function he serves to his believers. It hearkens
to the contradictions of his performance, and it mirrors the dark side of hope—the ever-present
threat of despair, the intangibility, the lack of solid foundation—that distinguishes it from
optimism. ―BEHOLD THE INVISIBLE!‖ the fraudulent Reverend Rinehart‘s sign promises
(495). ―LET THERE BE LIGHT!‖ declares the church wall (498). And Invisible Man sees.
And it was good. The classic trickster, Rinehart uses his masks as a joke, without the earnest
belief in them that Invisible Man struggles to shake. Although he does not wish to become
Rinehart in all his hard-hearted, socially irresponsible escapism, Invisible Man learns through
Rinehart ―the secret of saying the ‗yes‘ which accomplishes the expressive ‗no‘‖ that his
grandfather tried to teach him (Shadow and Act 56). Ironically, the conclusion of his search for
individual identity comes to serve a communal function. As much and as openly as he is
concerned with his own identity and fighting off personal despair, the notion of social
responsibility compels him. By understanding duality and ambivalence, Invisible Man better
comprehends the ironies and complexities of himself and other men behind their masks, ―the
absurdity of…the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and
hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and
knowing that I not longer had to run for or from‖ anyone and ―the beautiful absurdity of their
American identity and mine‖ (559). He becomes able not only to tackle his absurdity, but also to
make his language ―blow…both hot and cold in the same breath.‖ His understanding enables him
to harness the ―effective and revealing‖ power of words‘ ambivalent potential ―so that he may
25
speak not only for himself but, with skepticism and trepidation, to posit ―Who knows but that, on
the lower frequencies, I speak for you?‖ (Shadow and Act 25, Invisible Man 581).
Invisible Man does not speak for everyone directly; in fact, he marginalizes at the same
time as he reveals marginalization, using language to ―blind‖ as well as to reveal (Shadow and
Act 25). Women are conspicuously absent from much of the narrative, and when they do appear,
they emerge less as fully-fleshed characters than as exaggerated symbols, typically sexual ones.
The one notable exception to the sexualization rule is the supremely maternal Mary, but she, too,
functions as a symbolic stock character, representing the other half of a Madonna-whore
dichotomy that‘s every bit as restrictive as racial stereotypes The vet from the Golden Day
explicitly invokes woman-as-symbol when he warns Invisible Man about the false promises of
an over-idealized Harlem: ―That‘s not a place, it‘s a dream,‖ he says, and getting ―out of the fire
into the melting pot‖ doesn‘t let you escape the heat. Invisible Man will continue to struggle in
New York, and the vet tells him (by telling Crenshaw) that ―most of the time [Invisible Man
will] be working, and so much of his freedom will have to be symbolic. And what will be his or
any man‘s most easily accessible symbol of freedom? Why, a woman of course‖ (152-3). In the
elision of class struggle and ―ass struggle,‖ figures like Sybil or the blonde at the Battle Royal
are highly sexualized and violently so, the former with her rape fantasy and the latter in her
position of objectification on the same stage as the young Sambos. For whatever symbolic
power they may exert over Invisible Man—especially as objects of temptation dangled by the
white man—we see that they are still subject to the brutality and control of men, both white and
black5. Although he seems socially without authority, Invisible Man may always exercise his
5
The doubly marginalized plight of the black woman, in particular, can be heard in the blues of ―What Did I Do To
Be So Black and Blue,‖ which was originally a woman‘s song, performed by Edith Wilson. Invisible Man, by way
of Armstrong, omits lyrics that hit even harder on the blackness of skin and lonesome despair: ―Couples passin' two
by two/ While here am I, left high and dry/ Black, and 'cause I'm black I'm blue/ Browns and yellers, all have fellers/
26
power to objectify and to symbolize; but even this performance of dehumanization is a way of
speaking for the women, albeit one that relies on the dark power of language.
The extent to which Invisible Man is able to speak on his own behalf or for others
depends on the extent to which he is able to grapple with the absurdity of coexisting,
codependent opposites. A concept of heat or whiteness is only as complete and accurate as a
corresponding concept of coldness or blackness and the relation between the two. Knowing
where you are is vital to understanding who you are. A firm grasp on hope requires a sense of
what despair means. So in true Dantean or African inversion, Invisible Man‘s ―movement
vertically downward…is a process of rising to an understanding of his human condition‖ and
Ellison alters our understanding of what descending into the dark means (Shadow and Act 56).
He shifts the terms of typical light/dark imagery by distinguishing between whiteness and
brightness: Invisible Man does not descend into a white hole, but a bright one. He describes his
hole full of light and its significance to him by saying ―I now can see the darkness of lightness.
And I love light‖ (6). Furthermore, he needs the light to see the dark: ―Without light I am not
only invisible, but formless as well, and to be unaware of one‘s form is to live a death‖ (7).
Without light and dark, there is no life for Invisible Man. Ellison also reveals the implication of
blackness within whiteness, not just against it.
It was always there, in the impenetrable,
gleaming, national monument Optic White paint, whose secret ingredient was the black dripped
in, but it was hidden. In a line that redemptively echoes Amazing Grace, Invisible Man tells us ―I
lived in the darkness into which I was chased, but now I see. I‘ve illuminated the blackness of
my invisibility—and vice versa‖ (13).
Gentlemen prefer them light/ Wish I could fade,/ can't make the grade/ Nothing but dark days in sight.‖ The causal
connections between black and blue, in the context of failed romance, likely suggest domestic abuse.
27
His restlessness does not arise from not from blues or sociology but from being human
and being American; by finding an illuminated place, he is able to understand himself in the light
of social relationships. By finding his place in the structure, he can bend and transcend it like
Armstrong. Ellison writes: ―My goal was not to escape, or hold back, but to work through; to
transcend, as the blues transcend the painful conditions with which they deal‖ (Shadow and Act
137).
The blues don‘t resolve problems, but they do reveal them and they offer some
opportunity to step beyond them by understanding them differently. ―The world is just as
concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before,‖ Invisible Man says, ―only now I better
understand my relation to it and it to me‖ (Invisible Man 576). That relation is one of shifting
mutuality and irony: it is one of bright hope always fighting the dark shadow of despair that lurks
nearby.
28
Restless Jazz and Incoherent (Un)reality: The Great Gatsby
While Ellison‘s Invisible Man lives the syncopation of the blues, F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s Jay
Gatsby lives the restlessness of jazz. The Jazz Age upper-crust New York of The Great Gatsby
whirls fast, ringing with music and car horns and flashing bright with ―spectroscopic gayety‖
(49). Every weekend is a modulation: ―[t]he lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from
the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a
key higher‖ (44). The rich synesthetic scene exhilarates, but even overwhelmed senses detect
uneasy discordances in this jazz world. ―Pitches‖ connotes the struggle of boats beating against a
tumultuous current as well as a musical movement, and the ―lurching‖ of the earth from the sun
rapidly shifts a natural pattern of orbit into unnatural and unstable motion.
For Mitchell
Breitwieser, ―This is the image of jazz, jazz understood as energy and velocity‖—and
fragmentation—―that is implied in the term ‗Jazz Age‘ and embodied in Gatsby, the restless, notquite-really-white roughneck with the world‘s most extraordinary car‖ (386) 6. He declares that
Fitzgerald gives Gatsby the epithet ―Great‖ because he is an incarnation of the epoch, not a
―merely particular‖ man, just as Daisy becomes more than a merely particular woman for Gatsby
himself. The presence of symbolism is obvious: for example, when Gatsby desires Daisy, he
really desires whatever it is that she and her money-rich voice represent. However, the meaning
of the symbolism is not: we know that he doesn‘t just want money or just want any woman,
because he‘s already had both and neither satisfied him. Like the phrase ―the American Dream,‖
Daisy and Gatsby function as symbolic shorthand for a collection of less tangible, more intricate
hopes, dreams, and desires. Breitwieser poses the question of how we go about understanding a
I
In understanding the significance of the velocity of The Great Gatsby, it is worthwhile to recall again Andrew
Delbcano‘s statement that ―[a]ny history of hope in America must…make room at its center for this dogged
companion of hope—the lurking suspicion that all our getting and spending amounts to nothing more than fidgeting
while we wait for death. When I say ‗center,‘ I mean it in the gravitational sense of the word—the point around
which we orbit, and toward which, if we lose velocity, we fall‖ (2-3).
29
multifaceted jazz symbol like Gatsby: ―what if the thing that the symbol incarnates—the essence
that makes an epoch an epoch—is not at one with itself, but rather fractured, internally
complex?‖ (362). It may just barely hold together, like the hairline crack in a damaged car
windshield that always threatens to shatter the glass completely.
Gatsby finds himself, with his anachronistic romanticism and the vague ―western
deficiency‖ Nick senses, unable to grapple successfully with the contortion, fragmentation, and
collisions of the fast jazz world that feeds and frustrates his desires (184). He struggles to handle
his own fragmentation as an inevitable product of the age and as a self-willed fusion of his past
with his dreamed future, a combination of person and persona as unexpected as a Russian writing
jazz (but what could be more American?)7. America‘s multitudinous fragmentation becomes his
own, as well as ours, something we may occasionally grasp in moments where we become
―unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we
melt…indistinguishably into it again‖ (184)8. Invisible Man learns to embrace the blues- and
jazz-like absurdity of his clashes and merges with America and within himself through
unexpecting hope. Gatsby, however, cannot tolerate the incoherence of light and dark within
each other, of his liminal existence just outside the borders of the social stratum in which he
seeks full acceptance, or of the possibility that Daisy could love more than one man. In stark
contrast to Invisible Man‘s rise from his bright hole in the ground, Gatsby‘s body is lowered cold
and alone into a dark, inescapable one, with the single murmur of a rather pathetic made-up
beatitude (―Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on‖) and not even a flower from his beloved
7
There are only nine names listed under the category ―Russian Jazz Musicians‖ on Wikipedia, whereas ―American
Jazz Musicians‖ boasts 105 artists grouped into nine subcategories. Neither list is comprehensive, of course, but the
numbers may indicate the prominence of the genre in either country and suggest the comparative rarity of a
(popular) Russian jazz composer, especially in the 1920s. Who knows, however, if Fitzgerald had a Russian
American in mind with the fictional Tolstoff.
8
Song of Myself comes to mind here as a model of American identity as plural, fragmented, and fundamentally
shared. Whitman seems unfazed by the incoherence of his multiplicity: ―Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I
contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes‖ (Whitman 53).
30
Daisy (183). From an objective perusal of their earlier circumstances, this outcome is surprising.
Both are outsiders, but Gatsby achieves successes of socioeconomic standing and social
recognition in a way that Invisible Man‘s skin color will never allow, so what is the difference in
character that drives Gatsby‘s demise but affords Invisible Man the potential to rise? Gatsby‘s
tragic error and fatal flaw in the face of confusion and obstruction is surprisingly not despair; it is
optimism.
Misplaced optimism holds Gatsby captive not to a hope that sustains him, but to an
impossibility that destroys him. No matter what, he never gives up on the promise of the green
light or his belief that he can win his dream of the idealized Daisy. George Wilson murders
Gatsby because he chooses to take the fall for Daisy‘s crime by allowing everyone (except,
apparently, for Nick) to believe that he was driving the car that plowed Myrtle and tore her breast
from her heart without even putting on the brakes. We don‘t even have to consider the dubious
morality of this (more chivalrous or more self-serving?) protection to see that he makes a fool‘s
sacrifice. Nick writes that in the hotel just before Myrtle Wilson‘s death, Gatsby kept on fighting
even in the defeat of Daisy not declaring singular love for him: ―he gave [defending himself] up
and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no
longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.
The voice begged again to go‖ (142). He stumbles on the tenuous divide between hope and
optimism: although the former steels him against despair, the latter prevents him from letting go
of the unhappy struggle. Both figures become abstracted—Gatsby (by Nick‘s language) as a
dream and Daisy (by Gatsby‘s idealization) as a voice—as the grounds for sensible optimism slip
even farther away with the afternoon and Gatsby nevertheless clutches the remaining wisps. The
language of abstraction estranges Gatsby from reality, and he becomes as much of an unreal and
31
collapsing specter as his illusion of Daisy or as the ―men who move dimly and already crumbling
through the powdery air‖ in the valley of ashes (27). He makes a dangerous and senseless effort
to keep nursing a dream that he scarcely realizes is already dead and that perhaps had even been
stillborn from the start.
All the yearnings that collapse for Americans into ―the American Dream‖ collapse for
Gatsby into his vision of Daisy when she becomes wedded to his other aspirations. In this
collapse, his dream provides an example of contemporary academic Guy V. Price‘s declaration
that ―Optimism is a social product; it may, however, be expressed in terms that are most
decidedly personal‖ (Price 17). Gatsby‘s common social desires (e.g. for upward financial
mobility) become coded in the extremely personal terms of a sexual and romantic relationship
with a particular woman.
We are told that long before meeting her, the boy James Gatz
imagined a ―Platonic conception of himself‖ living a life more glamorous than what one might
expect from the son of ―shiftless farm people‖ with a foreign sounding name, and ―to this
[immature] conception he was faithful to the end‖ (104). If Cody‘s yacht initially ―represented
all the beauty and glamour in the world‖ to him, the ―golden girl‖ represents beauty on an
entirely different plane, sparkling like the stars in the heavens (106, 127). ―[F]ull of money‖, her
voice sparkles and, like a pocket full of change, ―indiscreet[ly]…jingles,‖ with the ―inexhaustible
charm‖ of purchasable glamour (127).
Daisy‘s appeal and symbolic significance are undeniably economic, but we know that she
is not merely a stand-in for a fortune, because he makes one and it never substitutes for her. In
fact, he makes it and spends it for her. Part of its inadequacy compared to Daisy has to do with
the legitimacy of her money, compared to Cody‘s, Wolfshiem‘s, Gatsby‘s, and perhaps even
Nick‘s own ill-gotten gains. Gatsby works himself up by his bootstraps in what would be a
32
classic rags-to-riches tale, save for the fact that he doesn‘t come by his success honestly.
Ironically, he ―enter[s] the world of illegitimacy, borrowing both money and identity‖ precisely
to achieve the promise of legitimate money: the ―gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover‖ displays his
wealth for Daisy‘s sole appraisal and approval (Tratner 75, Fitzgerald 1). His fickle company,
especially Wolfshiem, always reminds us of his connection to the gats that his bootlegging
associates almost certainly employed at some level, and his ostentatious use of his money and
rehearsed stories about himself (all slightly off: San Francisco the middle west?) always betray
something about his history as Gatz. He is never free from rumors of fraudulence or secure
against exposure. On the other hand, ―Daisy, always in white, promises clean, white money,
legitimate money‖ and its security (Tratner 75).
But money alone does not explain her
attractiveness to him.
Gatsby‘s desire for Daisy derives intensity from the interaction between her financial and
sexual capital: ―economics describes her sex appeal; sexuality describes her economic appeal‖
and the two appeals fuse to create an even more powerful allure than their independent sum
(Tratner 74). Other characters offer foils to show the comparative weakness of either factor on
its own. Men like Cody, Gatsby, and Tom, with the power of money alone, cannot captivate
their women and are in fact undone by their relations to them. Myrtle Wilson and the women
who spoiled Gatsby as a young man, with their sexual vitality but not economic clout, are not
afforded the same power or the same freedom with men as a woman like Daisy or Jordan.
Gatsby finds Daisy ―excitingly desirable‖ because she is ―the first ‗nice‘ girl he had ever
known.‖ With its quotation marks, ―nice‖ bears the weight of financial status and good breeding
more than of kindness, here. Her economic value is enabled and increased by her sexuality:
Gatsby is also excited by the fact that ―many men had already loved Daisy‖ before him. She and
33
her high class world fascinate him, but he only fixes upon her as his precious grail after
consummating the relationship: he ―took her because he had no real right to touch her hand,‖ not
realizing the consequences of ―just how extraordinary a ‗nice‘ girl could be‖ (155-6). She is
extraordinary enough to handle the incoherence of nineteenth-century romanticism beyond the
Romantic Era, carrying, like Gatsby, ―well-forgotten dreams from age to age‖ (143).
Wealth and sex become mysterious magic against the power of time. Her voice is full of
more than just the charm of money; it is also rich with ―the youth and mystery that wealth
imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe
and proud above the hot struggles of the poor‖ (157). She is permanently frozen in a state of
freshness, yet always able to move on to whatever newest, most gleaming, most romantic
enchantment presents itself. Their October encounter left him, to his surprise, feeling ―married
to her, that was all‖ while she disappeared back into her house without feeling the sort of
attachment that might have prevented her from new parties, new trysts, and finally a marriage to
Tom in Gatsby‘s absence (albeit with at least one night of uncharacteristic drunken remorse)
(81). He never does move on, and he never quite grasps the import of the time that has passed.
When Nick cautiously ventures to suggest that Gatsby can‘t expect too much of Daisy, ―because
you can‘t repeat the past,‖ Gatsby replies with sincere incredulity, ―Can‘t repeat the past…why
of course you can!‖ (116). He traps himself in an idealized conception of the past and a false
dream that he can re-attain something that he never possessed and that never existed. We look
back at the young Gatsby regarding Daisy‘s house as freshly wondrous, seeming full of
―romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and
redolent of this year‘s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered‖
(155-6). But he perceives too much magic and timelessness in the money and the beauty: he
34
owns the most fabulous of this year‘s shining motor cars, and scarcely withered flowers scatter
his lawn after every weekend party. However, these temporarily fresh objects—the former
colossally breakable and, regardless of condition, out of date in a mere twelve months and the
latter fragile, already fading—serve a romance that is, in fact, laid away in the lavender of
memory and of Daisy‘s tea dress9 (90).
Gatsby loses touch with reality both in ―colossal vitality of his illusion‖ and in his
incapacity to adapt himself and his dreams with the passage of time (101). His dogged insistence
on the lost and the impossible destroy him. For Price, optimism becomes dangerous when the
personal and the social lose touch. He defends optimism faithfully—after The Great War and in
the face of the Great Depression, nonetheless—but even he cautions that the ―kind of dreaming
that does result in beneficial social realities [and] is quite different from the day dreaming of
people who have been frustrated and who live in an atmosphere of their own imaginative
creation‖ as Gatsby does (Price 44). He lives in a world in which not only can he theoretically
repeat the past, but in which he actually does reiterate it with every action that maintains his
adolescent creation of ―Jay Gatsby‖ and his inextricable conception of Daisy. The magnitude of
his vision is linked to its inflexibility: when he emotionally weds her, they become one flesh in
his dreams. Nick writes that Gatsby ―knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his
unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of
God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a
star. Then he kissed her. At his lips‘ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the
incarnation was complete‖ (117). He cannot divorce himself from her. Unfortunately, he
9
This scene of reminiscence and re-courtship is the only time the color of Daisy‘s clothing is specified and not
white. She is granted brief reprieve, perhaps, from her role as pure symbol to Gatsby at this moment in which he
draws closest to her as a real woman—in fact, so close that Nick surmises the green light lost its enchantment (98).
Yet even here, the lavender metaphorically betrays that Gatsby does not primarily see her, but his idealized memory
of her.
35
imagines wrongly in thinking the magic in the moment of Daisy‘s kiss to be as permanent as the
stars when she is merely a perishable, if pretty, common flower. Even independent of Daisy, it is
absurd for him to conceptualize things like ―the bought luxury of star-shine‖ or to survey ―the
silver pepper of the stars…to determine what share was his of our local heavens‖ (157, 25).
Starshine need not and cannot be purchased.
Briefly, he over-dreams. Nick surmises ―There must have been moments when Daisy
tumbled short of his dreams‖—even in his own mind—―not through her own fault but because
the colossal vitality of his illusion had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown
himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright
feather that drifted his way‖ (101). His taste for excess manifests itself in his mind as much as in
his mansion, and he can‘t bear to pass up anything pretty. We might psychoanalyze and suggest
he is attempting, through this accumulation, to compensate for earlier years when such things
were in scant and unreliable supply. Tratner declares, ―If Daisy is the embodiment of the promise
of money, Gatsby is the embodiment of immense desire‖ (Tratner 76). After all, desire and
hope—two of Gatsby‘s most defining characteristics—both arise from lack.
Breitwieser
identifies this lack as a key feature of Gatsby‘s symbolism: ―Gatsby, who has only desire, that is
who lacks rather than has, bestow[s] only a sharply focused version of others‘ more diffuse
lacking.‖ In the picture of the ―archaeology of American desire,‖ Breitwieser suggest that the
―common feature of the artifacts…is longing‖ (Breitwieser 359, 376). We share with Gatsby ―an
absence at the core, a vacancy that precedes the fantasms that address themselves to that
vacancy—mystic nationhood, voices full of money, and fresh green breasts‖—visions that feed
hope and optimism, for better and for worse (Breitwieser 376). We, too, dream and over-dream,
so we empathize with Gatsby. His story and ours are connected as parts of a larger narrative.
36
The novel seeks to ―evoke‖ and trace the thread of ―what Fitzgerald called the promise of
life‖ from the Dutch explorers‘ first sight of the forest to Gatsby‘s view of Daisy‘s green dock
light from his manicured West Egg lawn (Breitwieser 359). However, it must do so in a way that
acknowledges the profound obstacles and changes in the nature and attainability of that promise
over time.
Price argues that ―modern industrial development, mass production, improved
standards of living, the growth of population, scientific discoveries and the universalizing of
popular education, have generated a distinctive type of contemporary optimism.
It is an
optimism based on tangible material, social achievement, somewhat precarious and vulnerable,
but quite real‖ (26). It is real, but not quite romantic; it is fragile and fragmented and implicated
in the ills as well as the benefits that accompany modern development. Gatsby lives on the edge
of an epoch. He is a symbol of the jazz age, but specifically of an uneasy entry into it. He
carries himself with a certain detachment at his own parties, not mingling, dancing, and drinking
like the other guests.
He sentimentally retains a kind of Victorian morality and romantic
idealism in his adherence to his childhood aspirations, best emblematized in what he scribbled in
his Hopalong Cassidy: a precise schedule and list of personal improvement goals both expedient
and moral, including to stop wasting time, to save money, to read for self-improvement, and be
better to parents (181-2). Unfortunately, old desires hit trouble when they run into the obstacles
of a new world.
The Great Gatsby acknowledges these problematic and fundamental fractures as it, its
title character, its narrator, and its author wrestle to reconcile the beauty and the discord that
occur in ―the intersections [between race, class, region, and nationality that] provoke, shape, and
frustrate desire‖ (Breitwieser 359). Fitzgerald draws a delicate jazz-like balance between things
coming together and things coming undone at these points of collision. Jazz‘s capacity to
37
deconstruct some forms while unexpectedly fusing others together is like the power of a
collision, and ―[l]ike experiment in general [jazz] seeks to discover avenues of possibility
through the midst of inevitability and to do so without special worry about the survival of
coherence‖ (Breitwieser 371). The ―incoherence‖ of the aesthetic suspends a reader in heady but
uneasy ambivalence10. To describe the tension in the text‘s ―archaeology of American desire‖
and wonder, Breitwieser seizes on Fitzgerald‘s manuscript description of the fictional Vladimir
Tolstoff‘s ―Jazz History of the World‖ (359). The piece inspires perplexed wonder and horror in
Nick and the rest of the crowd at Gatsby‘s party. It incarnates the ―contortion of the familiar
world‖ that pervades Gatsby beneath the thrill of its music and noise (Breitwieser 365). The
topsy-turvy contortions don‘t end with the party, either: Nick tells us that on Sunday morning
―the world and its mistress‖ arrive back at Gatsby‘s house (65). The sun—traditionally male and
symbolic of bright and proper order—is cast in the role of illegitimate lover while the nighttime
world of artificial light and shadows is the wife to whom the earth is bound (but unfaithful). No
matter what the time of day, Gatsby faces a ―twilight universe‖ of ambiguity and incoherence
(158).
To capture this confusion, Fitzgerald fractures his narrative structure deeply: we receive
conflicting information out of order and through the lenses of characters clouded with bias,
fantasy, misinformation, rumor, faulty memory, concern for self-image, and alcohol.
The
rhythm and the mystery of the text often hold more allure than a straightforward account, but the
half-truths can tease, frustrate, and jar. Excerpts and contexts become disconnected, but in the
process gain a deeper dimension of truth despite their disjointed unreality. For example, we
overhear Tom‘s phone conversation with George Wilson about the body of his car not knowing
10
Notably, Breitwieser observes the counterpoint of the Armstrong riffing in the preface of Invisible Man when he
discusses Fitzgerald‘s understanding of the incoherence of the jazz aesthetic (371-372).
38
who is speaking or exactly about what. The one-sided snippet presented initially seems to refer
to the body of a murdered man. This conclusion proves premature and false, but the moment
eerily foreshadows Myrtle‘s and Gatsby‘s deaths in its resemblance to discussion of a dead
human body, and it establishes their intimate relation to Tom and to the automobile (121-2). The
true and the false comingle to the point of becoming indistinguishable; ―the unreality of reality‖
compromises not just Gatsby‘s ability discriminate between truth and illusion, but also our own
(105).
Our judgment is further clouded by the fact that every account and rumor is filtered
through the recollection and interpretation of Nick Carraway, a narrator who is less impartial
than he would have us believe.
Beyond Fitzgerald‘s use of narrative structure to convey
fragmentation, we should also make ourselves aware of Nick‘s potential conscious or
unconscious motives as narrator for those artistic manipulations.
Apart from any specific
analysis of Nick, Stanley Cavell suggests in Must We Mean What We Say? that we must be
skeptical of any first person narrator:
the more a first person account takes on the formal properties of a narrative, a tale, the
more suspicious the account becomes.
For a first person account is, after all, a
confession; and the man who has something to confess has something to conceal. And
the man who has the word ‗I‘ at his disposal has the quickest device for concealing
himself (336)
The word ‗I‘ enables a narrator to obscure who he is beneath a crafted persona of himself.
Confessional words guide listeners to trust him and to regard him as he wishes to be regarded,
regardless of the truth. It is simpler to accept an ―I‖ statement than to parse out character from
actions. And we must ask—why the artifice of narration? A narrator may wish to confuse
39
readers or to distract them from the actions and events from which we could discover what is
being concealed. Nick does not present a simple account of his time in New York and the Eggs:
his narrative is formal and intricate. No stranger to confession from others, Nick employs that
mode frequently and openly. He seeks to gain our trust through the content of his confessions, as
well as their form. He tells us ―Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues,
and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have every known‖ (64). As much as
he suspects this confession is true, he also gives us ample reason to suspect that it is not entirely
so. Rather than granting everyone a cardinal virtue, the cautious phrase ―everyone suspects‖
implies that not everyone‘s benevolent suspicions about themselves are correct.
This
confession‘s juxtaposition with another is also revealingly ironic: it immediately follows his
report of signing weekly letters to his girlfriend ―Love Nick‖ while seeing Jordan Baker and,
when he does remember the carefully unnamed other girl, being able to think of nothing but the
perspiration on her lip when she played tennis. He later tells Gatsby‘s father ―we were close
friends,‖ a stretch of the truth even under the most charitable interpretation (176). In a silent lie
respecting Gatsby‘s wishes, he tells no one within the narrative— not the police, not Tom, not
George Wilson, not Henry Gatz—the truth about who drove the car that killed Myrtle. He
displays a clear capacity for dishonesty, even if it is the product of confusion, ambivalence, or
even empathy rather than active maliciousness.
His attitude toward the trait in others is
indifferent: he refuses to blame Jordan for her ―incurable dishonesty‖, feeling only ―casually
sorry‖ about it (63).
As a reader, I find myself responding ambivalently to Nick‘s narrative, as to gossip:
sometimes Nick lures me into trust and wonder, and sometimes he provokes skepticism. He
claims he desires ―no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart,‖
40
but the entire novel voyeuristically and sensuously indulges in them (6). Although he opens the
novel by telling us that he is ―inclined to reserve all judgments‖ as a consequence of his
preoccupation with father‘s early caution against criticism, he loads his narrative with them—
some trustworthy, others not, many contradicted (5). He declares that ―the intimate revelations
of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred
by obvious suppressions,‖ and the statement applies to his own confessions as much as to anyone
else‘s (6). Since we can‘t take Nick‘s explicit statements at face value, one of the best ways to
get at the heart of the text is to look at the indirect reflections that emerge. He inevitably allows
us to glimpse into his own heart as he tells us his story along with Gatsby‘s. When Nick says
that ―[r]eserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope,‖ and credits himself with the trait of
reserving judgments as well as with honesty, he identifies hope as a virtue (6). Whether he is
accurate in his self-assessment here does not matter: what matters are the values he reveals in his
self-presentation.
Through Nick, Fitzgerald extols Gatsby‘s hope as his greatest virtue even as he criticizes
the consequences of its extension into unwarranted optimism. Despite the failure and flaws of
Gatsby‘s particular desires, Nick does not condemn dreaming in general; if anything, he praises
it while lamenting the conditions that thwart it so violently. Nick‘s lush accounts of Gatsby‘s
dreaming approach the sublime, and his assessment of Gatsby‘s persistent hope and capacity for
wonder betrays appreciation that verges nearly into awe: ―there was something gorgeous about
him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life….it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a
romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I
shall ever find again‖ (6). Gatsby ―could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable
milk of wonder‖; Daisy‘s mere presence in his house leaves him wholly ―consumed‖ with it
41
(117, 97). Although Nick claims that Gatsby ―represented everything for which I have an
unaffected scorn‖ and describes the fatal failure of Gatsby‘s illusory dreams, he slips into tones
of deep appreciation for them and often empathizes (6). At some level, Nick recognizes a need
to distinguish between the reprehensible ―corruption‖ of a man who willingly consorts with
Meyer Wolfshiem and the often admirable beauty of ― his incorruptible dream‖ (6, 162).
Gatsby‘s money may be swindled and his public persona may be a lie, but he possesses sincerity
beyond the other characters‘ insofar as he is perfectly honest in his desire and insofar as he
strives toward his unchanging ideal with unswerving loyalty. Nick stops himself in his scorn,
deciding ―No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul
dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive
sorrows and short-winded elations of men‖ (6-7).
The real problem is not the dreams themselves, however lofty; it is the remains of their
violent collision with the world. Gatsby‘s fatal tragedy occurs not in the longing itself but in the
moment at which Nick supposes he realized that his dream no longer had a place:
he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too
long with a single dream.
He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through
frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw
the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being
real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitiously about… (169)
The dream is not what becomes grotesque and raw and unfamiliar here, but the world that
opposes the dream yet, incoherently, seems unreal without it. Breitwieser interprets: ―only the
ideal confers reality on material things, and lacking it they become nightmares‖ (Breitwieser
365). Not merely nightmares, but haunting ghosts of death, like the ashen figure of George
42
Wilson, the approaching agent of Gatsby‘s death, or the unreal shadows in the valley of ashes.
The phenomenon, while perhaps especially acute in the age of modernization, is not particular to
the fabricated material world. The objects of frightening unfamiliarity are not manmade, but
natural: the sky, leaves, a rose, and the sun on the grass, all things typically described, and
previously described in the book, as beautiful. Breitwieser‘s analysis resembles Delbanco‘s
assessment of hope: without that kind of ideal, the world becomes an inescapable,
incomprehensible terror and our existence a tumble into chaos. Fitzgerald poses the dilemma of
which terror is greater: should we choose the unreal chaos of a real world without dreams or the
very real dangers of dreams that are, by definition, unreal? Both threaten death: metaphorically,
the first kills Gatsby and the second kills Myrtle11.
The Great Gatsby transitions explicitly into collective language at its conclusion that
expresses a need for hope even if the age of optimism has passed. It seems that we must dream,
but not with fatal, even murderous, inflexibility of Gatsby‘s over-dreamed dream. His hope,
distorted and narrowly fixed, merely gestured at or ―pandered in whispers to‖ what Nick
supposes the Dutch sailors experienced for the last time in history as they faced the ―fresh, green
breast of the new world‖ when they first arrived on the shore of the future New York:
―something commensurate to [man‘s] capacity for wonder‖ (189). Nick himself fancies that he
has seen the last echoes of such a capacity in Gatsby, who didn‘t realize that his dream ―was
already behind him,‖ in his past and in America‘s, somewhere ―in that vast obscurity beyond the
city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night,‖ in the frontier that Turner
11
There are other terrors of witnessed and recounted violence in this text, almost always classed, that perhaps
suggest only the rich can afford to choose dreams. Poor Myrtle is not only murdered, but she also gets her nose
broken by her lover Tom after she mentions Daisy, and she gets beaten and imprisoned at home by her husband
George after he begins to suspects her infidelity. Her dream of getting upward mobility through Tom (if only Daisy
weren‘t supposedly Catholic) collapses into brutal reality. Unlike the Buchanans, she cannot buy her way away
from the consequences of careless disregard for her circumstances as they are, rather than romanticized.
43
had already declared gone in 1893 (6). And yet, Gatsby does not seem to persist alone. Nick
himself, perhaps, at moments, approaches the sensation of the Dutch sailors himself when he
sees present New York: ―The city seen from Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the
first time,‖ he tells us, ―in its first wild promise of all they mystery and the beauty in the world‖
(73). So may we all. Note the shift from third person singular to first person plural in the
novel‘s last few sentences:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.
It eluded us then, but that‘s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms
farther…and one fine morning—/So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past. (189)
As Breitwieser suggests, Gatsby is just a particularly notable example of qualities we all possess
to degrees: emptiness and desire, an attachment to the past that we can never lose no matter how
determinedly we fix our eyes on the future, and the drive to pursue happiness regardless of the
obstacles that beat back against us. Even disillusioned Daisy‘s voice is earlier described as
―struggl[ing] on through the heat, beating against it, moulding it senselessness into forms‖ (125).
There is a sense of inevitability in our hopeful push against the current. More than that, even,
there is something aesthetically lovely about beating against the current toward a past imagined
more purely than it ever was. But we must beware the incoherence of our efforts, lest we run
and stretch and beat past the breaking point. We must beat on, but to a new beat in a new age,
one that allows syncopation. We must beat on without losing our velocity as we are beaten back,
pushing forward, not against the current of time that washes us toward the future but against the
current of nostalgia that beats our forward-looking hope backward into a static shore of dead and
dangerous optimism.
44
Incantation and the Voice of the City: Bread Givers
The blues color Invisible Man and jazz drives The Great Gatsby, but no single genre
exclusively defines Anzia Yezierska‘s Bread Givers, although noise and music permeate the text
with melody and discord just as prominently as in the other two novels. The mesmerizing sound
of ―Father‘s voice chanting‖ the Torah is the first melody we hear in the text and the one that
haunts it most pervasively, but the strongest dissonances in Bread Givers lie not within a single
song, as in blues or jazz, but in the clash of different types of music played and performed
against each other. An eclectic assortment of music fills the world of narrator and protagonist
Sara Smolinsky: Hebrew chanting, the ―old tunes of the hurdy-gurdy‖ on Hester Street, Jacob
Novak‘s piano, songs at vaudeville shows, ―the fiery rhythm of jazz‖ in a nightclub or at the
college dance, heart songs like birdsongs that recall Dickinson‘s buffeted, singing ―thing with
feathers,‖ and the collected sound of the streets of Lower East Side New York themselves12
(Yezierska 269, 193; Dickinson).
Sara regards the collection ambivalently. Sometimes she takes joy in the sounds of the
place that has shaped her, describing the ―singing in [her] heart [of] the music of the whole
Hester Street. The pushcart peddlers yelling their goods, the noisy playing of children in the
gutter, the women pushing and shoving each other with their market baskets—all that was only
hollering noise before melted over [her] like a new beautiful song‖ (22). Nevertheless, attaining
a quiet (comparatively, at least) room of her own marks a significant milestone in her process of
―working [herself] up‖ in the world: it is ―[t]he bottom starting-point of becoming a person‖ on
her own (38, 159). Even there she tries her best to shut out ―phonographs and pianolas blar[ing]
against each other‖ and against gossiping and jabbering in a ―terrible racket‖ (164). In the rare
12
Note one possible etymology for the term ―vaudeville‖: Fr. voix de ville, or "voice of the city." Yezierska offers
the sounds of yet another slice of New York City, along with Ellison and Fitzgerald.
45
silences, the record of Sara‘s memory plays on; Father‘s voice and the voice of the city keep
singing.
The miscellany of the music in Bread Givers and of Sara‘s reactions to it reflect the
complexity of her position as a poor (rising to middle-class) Jewish female immigrant from
Poland. Jay Gatsby strives to surpass his class background13, and Invisible Man‘s race adds a
tremendous barrier to his struggle for social recognition. Sara and the other Smolinsky women
fight from and against a position that is even more nuanced and at least equally difficult, if not
more so: they face ―the complexities of triple marginality‖ as they navigate ―a terrain of
authentic otherness removed from the dominant culture by ethnicity, gender, and class‖ (Ferraro
54). Further roughening the terrain: as Father says, Sara ―is not a Jewess and not a gentile‖
either (294). She lives in a place ―between two worlds‖ (as the second section title phrases it),
partially removed not only from the dominant culture of mainstream America but also from
culture of her family‘s homeland, an equally dominant weight in her life. Both in person and in
the haunts of Sara‘s mind, Reb Smolinsky embodies this culture, imparts its teachings, and
imposes its demands. When she turns at the end of the novel ultimately to face again the ―the
shadow of the burden…always following [her],‖ or when Bessie and Mother are identified as the
family ―burden-bearers,‖ we understand that the burden of Father is not simple, but that these
women are—in a variation of the previous phrasing—―triply burdened by heritage, gender, and
class‖ (295, Avery 49).
Yezierska stresses Sara‘s difficult relationship with Father, even
subtitling the novel ―A struggle between a father of the Old World and a daughter of the New,‖
to capture the challenging intersections of her triple marginality in double worlds.
To briefly label Sara‘s vision of the American Dream with a still common turn of phrase,
she hopes and desires to be somebody. She consistently frames her strivings in the terms of the
13
His German birth name ―Gatz‖ suggests ethnic complexity, as well.
46
pursuit of a personhood that is not granted to her by either the world, but that she must fight to
earn. Each world sets its own standards for what constitutes personhood and each imposes its
own restrictions from it, but achieving status as ―somebody‖ is undoubtedly tied up with
economic progress according to both New and Old conceptions. Yezierska integrates secular
American promises of opportunity and mobility with Jewish conceptions of divine promise in a
―profoundly ethnic version of the American dream‖ (Ferraro 60). While packing to leave
Poland, Father envisions America with poetic Biblical imagery as a rich Promised Land, a ―new
golden country, where milk and honey flows free in the streets‖ (9). Although the immigrants
find that their new ghetto home fails to live up to their idealizations of America, they do not
abandon their hope. The terms of Promised Land riches—gold, milk, and honey— all reappear
in the envious responses of the Smolinsky family‘s neighbors to Fania‘s upwardly mobile (if
privately unhappy) marriage to Moe Mirsky (81). As Sara embarks for college and moves
farther upward in the new land of promise, she compares her journey not to Moses and the
Israelites leaving Egypt for the Promised Land, but to legendary journeys at the beginning of
American history: ―I felt like Columbus starting out for the other end of the earth. I felt like the
pilgrim fathers who had left behind their homeland and all their kin behind them and trailed out
in search of the New World‖ (209).
She seeks to dissociate herself from the Old World traditions, but this moment of
American history reiterates the pattern of the Biblical history, and it closely mirrors her own
family history. Although the analogies of Columbus and pilgrims claim distance from the
Jewish tradition, the triple parallels it invokes affirm Sara‘s inseverable connection not only to
America, but to the heritage and experience of her immigrant family. All three histories imply
the costs—some explicit and some unspoken —of seeking fortune in an unknown land. The
47
economics of personhood crosses the social boundaries of the Old World and New World
traditions and powerfully shapes her sense of self at every stage of her story.
She first
experiences the sense of being ―independent, like a real person‖ as a ten-year-old selling herring
on Hester Street, ―[e]arning twenty-five and sometimes thirty to fifty cents a day‖ that make her
feel ―[r]icher than Rockefeller‖ (28, 22). Her sense of triumph is partially that of a child gaining
autonomy as she grows older, but the financial terms of personhood remain current in her
adulthood. After finally completing college, she returns triumphantly to Hester Street as a
teacher—able to purchase a ride and dinner in Pullman car, a new suit on Fifth Avenue, and the
services of a real estate agent, ―anything‖—declaring herself finally and truly ―[c]hanged into a
person!‖ and not only that, but ―a person among people‖ (238, 237).
Although money matters, it alone does not constitute success and it alone cannot buy
personhood.
The phrase ―a person among people‖ suggests the critically important social
component of being somebody. Yezierska uses it two other times in the novel, and the term‘s
social dimension conveys the relationship between financial capital and social capital (75, 220).
In its first appearance, Father employs the phrase as an expression of status as he complains
about Morris Lipkin and the poverty that makes him an unsuitable suitor for Fania: ―I‘m a person
among people. How would I look before the world if I introduced such a hunger-squeezed
nobody for a son-in-law?‖ (75). Father regards Lipkin as unsuitable because of his poverty,
which signifies he must be failure and ―fool‖ in the American landscape where, Father believes,
―there is no need to be poor, if you only got brains and money to begin something‖ (112).
Money is not a be-all, end-all in itself (after all, Father also preaches ―‗Money lost, nothing lost.
Hope lost, all is lost.‘ The less money I have, the more I live on hope. And hope is the only
reality here on earth‖) (126). It matters not primarily for the consumption it affords, but as a
48
mark of merit that generates social currency. The social component of a socioeconomic rise to
personhood resounds even louder when the phrase appears again as Sara laments her loneliness
after finding herself an outcast—―like a lost ghost…nothing and nobody‖—at the freshman class
dance. Despite her rise, her background renders her a marginalized other, ostracized by her
peers. ―Even in college I had not escaped from the ghetto,‖ she realizes, and she asks herself and
heaven, ―Was there no escape? Will I never lift myself to be a person among people?‖ (219-20).
Sara‘s one-sentence narrative slip out of the past tense suggests not only the powerfully present
emotion of that moment, but that she is still questioning and still struggling to lift herself even as
she writes.
Elevating oneself to become a person is a multidimensional endeavor that involves
achieving both independence and social membership. This twofold task is hard enough in any
social context, even more so in two that position themselves as mutually exclusive. Sara is
stymied by the problem that she cannot be a Jewess and a gentile at the same time. The
problematic interactions of her heritage and mainstream American culture constantly pressure
her from both sides as she engages in self-making and in place-finding on her ―quest for
Emersonian self-determination‖ and for ―varieties of ‗incorporation‘‖ into the complex social
body of America (Ferraro 59). Despite economic similarities, the Old World and New World
prescribe drastically different requirements for a woman‘s social incorporation as she rises in the
world. As such, Sara‘s quest for personhood has roots in her family‘s striving and traditional
ideal, but it is also the heart of her rebellion against her father. At five pivotal moments in the
text—including the first of his many Torah teachings—we hear various echoes of his repeated
preaching that women cannot be anything except through the husbands and fathers they serve: ―It
says in the Torah, only through a man has a woman existence. Only through a man can a woman
49
enter Heaven,‖ and not only that, but ―a woman without a man is less than nothing‖ (9, 137, 205,
270, 294). She is ―a blotted out existence. No life on earth and no hope of Heaven.‖ According
to Reb Smolinsky‘s Old World ideals, Sara‘s femaleness precludes her from becoming anything
on her own and denies her hope of independence not only in this world, but also the next.
Sara flatly rejects this teaching in favor of American individualism, channeling her
father‘s inherited stubbornness into the defiant strength of Emersonian self-reliance. She resists
dependence even when it would mean rapidly rising in financial status and securing a social
position. In turning down Max Goldstein‘s proposal, for example, she opts to continue the
private struggle of working herself up from the bottom to attain knowledge and a living of her
own because he ―see[s] the differences between having access to wealth through men and
commanding that wealth and position on one‘s own‖ (Ferraro 72). She does not wish to lose her
agency by becoming ―only another piece of property‖ as his wife, so she chooses to ―pay the
price‖ for ―daring to follow the urge in [herself]‖ (199, 208). The cost is steep, involving not
only physical poverty, but also relational poverty in her home and the world beyond it that she
enters: ―No father. No lover. No family. No friend.‖ (208). Transition sentence plus clean up
next one
The New World environment allows her greater leeway of possible mobility and selfdetermination, but obstructions still block her every step: she finds herself disadvantaged
compared to men even in a cafeteria line, actively ostracized even by the teasing factory girls of
her own class background, and only a little more passively rejected by the college students who,
even if they regard her with ―not an unkind glance,‖ do not accept her as one of their own (214).
Her gender, her ethnicity, and her class all play into her isolation. Discouraged and puzzled, she
asks her college dean, ―Why is it that when a nobody wants to get to be somebody she‘s got to
50
make herself terribly hard, when people like you who are born high up can keep all their kind
feelings and get along so naturally with everybody?‖ (231). He encourages her in plowing
onward with the hard strength demanded of all pioneers: she must accept that ―[f]or
nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure,‖ always forbearingly and sometimes
even with ―exaltation‖ (Emerson 34, Yezierska 232).
When Sara realizes that ―[e]ven in college [she] had not escaped from the ghetto,‖ she is
thinking most clearly about the inescapable way that her ethnicity affects the way others respond
to her and the acceptance it precludes from them. She does not realize until the novel‘s final
chapter that her entrapment is internal as well as external. Sara can never escape the echoes of
Reb Smolinsky‘s voice in her head or run away from ―the shadow of the burden following [her]‖
(295). Even if she could, on some level she may not want to. She responds to the ghetto‘s
inescapability by willingly turning back to its tradition: ―All that was left of me reached out in
prayer. God!‖ she cries, ―I‘ve gone so far, help me to go on. God! I don‘t know how, but I must
go on‖ (220). The plea recalls the Smolinskys‘ response in an earlier moment, when the family
loses all their savings after Father is foolishly swindled into buying an ―empty fake of a [grocery]
store‖ (128). Although the empty boxes and empty shelves may seem to represent the American
dream as a false front or hollow sham, Thomas J. Ferraro interprets them as suggesting ―not the
vacuity of the American dream but the cost of participating in it‖ (Ferraro 65-66). This cost is
the same as the one Sara pays in not marrying Max and as the one the Smolinskys pay in leaving
their home country. It requires willingness to separate oneself from everyone and everything to
begin at the bottom, trusting that something better waits in store. The family picks themselves
up to move to Elizabeth, New Jersey and start again from scratch. They do so with a cry to God
to make the impossible possible, to bring something out of virtually nothing, like manna or one
51
day‘s worth of lamp oil: ―Hoping with nothing to hope with, our fainting hearts still prayed for a
miracle to happen and save us‖ (128). Trust that God will comfort his people and, in His time,
make them into people among people makes survival possible for pioneers in rocky new terrain.
The power of hope in Father‘s Judaism captivates Sara just as powerfully as other facets
of his orthodoxy and rigid orthopraxy hold her captive. Tuning to the inescapable cadences of
his voice that reverberate in her mind, Sara remembers Father singing Isaiah in his private space,
as she and her mother and sisters, ―[s]ilent, breathless…peeked in through the open crack in the
door‖ to listen (16):
‗When the poor seek water, and there is none, and when their tongue faileth for thirst, I,
the Lord, will hear them. I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them….and I will bring the
blind by a way that they know not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known; I
will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do
unto them and not forsake them.‘ (15-6)
This passage and the women‘s response (―His voice flowed into us deeper and deeper.
We couldn‘t help ourselves. We were singing with him‖) set the tone for Sara‘s persistence and
prophesy Sara‘s path: she is her Father‘s daughter and cannot help but sing his song, for worse
and for better (16). No matter what, she continues onward, and she is rescued from every literal
famine and thirst of the soul, sometimes by methods that one might criticize as deus ex machina
in another text (e.g. Mother‘s impeccably timed visit with the herring and feather bed) but that
Yezierska clearly intends and even labels as divine provision (―people doubt that there‘s a God
on earth that orders all the events of our lives?‖) (27). Though Sara knows not where she goes,
venturing blindly into unknown terrain, she always finds herself able to navigate through it. In
52
the process, her father‘s orthopraxy often casts a tyrannical shadow over her, but the heritage of
belief provides her with illuminating, nourishing hope.
The Lord does not deliver her with ease to unequivocal success, nor does she trust He
will (―Is there a God over us and sees her suffer so?‖ (252). It isn‘t to be expected: the Tanakh
chronicles the Hebrew history of trials that prompted even King David to plead ―How long wilt
thou forget me, O LORD? for ever?‖ and the Smolinsky family history is defined by the violence
of pogroms, only hinted at by Mother, that prompted their emigration (Authorized King James
Version, Psalm 13.1).
Like her predecessors, Sara earns every moment of her survival and
every inch of progress she makes by working with passionate verve. ―Determined to survive
with dignity, Sara acquires an education, career, and husband, and finally achieves partial
reconciliation with her authoritarian father,‖ but these achievements do not constitute the simple
or tidy happily-ever-after that typically concludes an up-from-the-ghetto-story (Avery 49).
Yezierska foreshadows the un-clean ending in the novel‘s first chapter through the
subtleties in her presentation of the fragments from Isaiah 41 and 42. For her translation, she
chooses the King James Version, making only one change to it: ―I will bring the blind by a way
that they knew not‖ becomes ―a way that they know not‖ (Isaiah 42.16, Yezierska 16, bold
mine).
Yezierska‘s use of the definitive Anglo-Saxon Protestant Bible highlights Sara‘s
inevitable exclusion from the male privilege of Hebrew scholarship and the fullness of her
father‘s tradition. This denial of access prompts Sara to translate her Father‘s and forefathers‘
words through a Christian lens, although it is unclear whether by choice or necessity.
Yezierska‘s alteration of that lens to the present tense furthermore implies Sara‘s blocked
insight; her path remains shadowy, unknown to her even as she travels it and even
retrospectively. Success and illumination for her can only be partial.
53
Scholars disagree whether the partial reconciliation that concludes Bread Givers is a
triumph of compromise for Sara or a tragedy of capitulation. Yezierska deliberately denies
resolution. The subtle note of current struggle that she earlier sounds in Sara‘s present-tense
speech resonates more loudly in the last paragraph, which ends the book with the fading echoes
of Father‘s chant and Sara‘s ambivalence toward him and her heritage in him:
So there it was, the problem before us—the problem of Father—still unsolved. In the
hall, we paused, held by the sorrowful cadences of Father‘s voice. ―Man born of woman
is few of days and full of trouble.‖ The voice lowered and grew fainter till we could not
hear the words any more. Still we lingered for the mere music of the fading chant. Then
Hugo‘s grip on my arm tightened and we walked on. But I felt the shadow still there,
over me. It wasn‘t just my father, but the generations who made my father whose weight
was still upon me. (296-7)
Pitted against each other are the burden and the beauty of Father‘s teachings, alternately
illuminating and darkening to Sara. His chant rings with compelling melody of sorrow and
comfort that holds Sara and Hugo to listen, but the oppressive words against women still weigh
on her. However, this sorrowful song of Job is a far cry from his earlier sayings on female
inferiority: although woman is still associated with the burdens of trouble and grief, these
weights rest on man. He is the one pressed low, not she. The chant fades—suggesting the
fading influence of Father‘s Old tradition as his short days near their end—but it fades not only
because his voice quiets, but also because Hugo grasps Sara‘s arm and pulls her away from it. He
frees her from her father‘s words and pulls her farther into the New World with this gesture, but
he also asserts his own masculine influence upon her with it. For all their differences, the two
men resemble each other almost uncannily: like Reb Smolinsky, Principal Seelig is a teacher and
54
authority figure. The similarities extend even to their origins from from nearby villages, and he
even goes so far as to say to Sara, ―You and I, we are of one blood‖ (278). We must wonder if
Sara, like Bessie, has simply shifted from submitting to one authority and bearing one burden to
locate herself beneath another, or even to shoulder the weight of both men. In fact, the last thing
she tells us is that she bears the weight of all the generations that made her father (297). This is a
heavy statement, but the fact that these generations also made her nuances its meaning.
Sara shares one blood with Father even more than she does with Hugo Seelig, and this
blood means that he and the tradition he embodies are in her and are her. We learn who she is
through her family: they are featured first in the novel, and we learn Sara‘s nickname ―Blut-undEisen,‖ blood and iron, even before her given name. Blood represents her vigorous passion for
the ―living life‖ and it represents her lineage—the blood of her father running through her veins,
which is both literally and metaphorically rich with iron (181). Iron represents Sara‘s strength,
her determination, and her unyielding will: ―When she begins to want a thing, there is no rest, no
let-up till she gets it‖ (20). Father provides Sara her burden, but also her tenacity, her desire for
wisdom, and her zeal; some of the very traits that make him so overbearing take on new life in
her, and she could not live without them. Sara‘s fighting spirit enables her to make herself her
own person, independent, and yet it is Father‘s. The fact that this spirit is his may imply that
perhaps she does gain her existence through a man after all, an idea that may be a more
American than Sara perceives, since Jewish lineage is determined my matrilineal descent. In fact
it is not Father‘s but Mother‘s spirit, after it ―literally [enters Sara‘s] soul like a miracle,‖ that
eventually compels and enables her to undertake the burden of her traditional Jewish duty as
55
―bread giver14‖ for her scholar father (252). Yezierska‘s choice to feature the re-Germanized
Yiddish name first, rather than the English translation, offers insight into the paradox of Sara‘s
multiply channeled spirit and blood. ―Blut-und-eisen‖ suggests Chancellor Otto von Bismarck‘s
famous 1862 speech of that title, in which he uses the phrase to describe the necessity of force to
unify the German territories: ―it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great
questions of the time are decided – that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and
blood‖ (Bismarck). We see that Sara does not fight a war for separation, like the American
Revolution against its parent Britain, but a fight to draw together separate but related entities into
one land of united states.
Succeeding in a fight of unification demands an acceptance of plurality, even though
plurality involves discord. Sara must come to terms with her father in order to come to terms
with herself as a plural body, the product of double worlds and triply marginalized in both. She
is impossibly Old and New, Jewess and gentile, her Polish father and an American woman. She
asks, ―Can I hate my arm, my hand that is part of me? Can a tree hate the roots from which it
sprang? Deeper than love, deeper than pity, is that oneness of the flesh that‘s in him and me.
Who gave me the fire, the passion, to push myself up from the dirt? If I grow, if I rise, if I ever
amount to something, is it not his spirit burning in me?‖ (286). She may push herself up from the
dirt, but she cannot uproot herself and remain alive. Andrew Delbanco‘s proposition that ―the
idea that Americans were not fixed in their circumstances of birth, but were free to become
whatever they could imagine‖ is the ―ground of hope‖ may very well be true, but in order not to
remain fixed in one‘s birth circumstances—that is, to grow and rise—one must remain grounded
in them (Delbanco 60).
14
The ethnic term of the novel‘s title is far more selfless in its connotations than its American counterpart
―breadwinner,‖ emphasizing the donation of what one possesses rather than the process of earning and acquiring a
prize.
56
To lose either rooting or hope, in Bread Givers, is nothing less than to die. Sara remarks
of her beaten down sisters as lifeless because they are hopeless: ―Poor Bessie! with her pitiful
thin face squeezed dry of hope or happiness‖ visibly loses her vitality, and Mashah ―was like a
bird with its song for ever stilled,‖ her hope swept away by too sore a storm (176, 64). The
temporary despair Sara experiences when Seelig confronts her with father‘s letter makes her no
longer a person, but a ―thing‖ without existence: ―I wanted to tear the roots of my father out of
my flesh and bones, force my heart and brain to blot him out of my soul. But through that night
of suffering, even hate bled out of me. I was a ruined thing without purpose—without hope. I
was no more‖ (274). Seelig helps revive her by restoring, in the context of the New World, the
orthopraxy of her Father‘s Old World song when she needs it most. When Hugo corrects her
vernacular pronunciation of ―sing‖ with his voice and his fingertips, ―softly,‖ he seems to work
as a force of forgetting, enacting ―a version of Americanization as a self-transformation that
requires the obliteration of historical memory‖ (272, Wexler 167). What he actually does is help
her to translate the Old incantations to the New World by reminding her how to sing in an
American context. Sara opens to him ―all the secret places of [her] heart‖ only after he opens up
the memory of Poland for her (278). Together, they open their home to Father.
When Sara finds the American Dream of personhood difficult to believe in the face of the
burden of her double-half selves and her triple marginalization, the restoration of her history
enables her not to lose hope. Laura Wexler explains that ―Hugo Seelig is the hero of Bread
Givers not because he is unlike the heroine‘s father but because, like the unforgiving old man,
and against all the efforts of early twentieth century American society to make him conform to
the status quo, he does not choose to forget‖ (Wexler 177). He turns as avidly to learning
Hebrew as to mastering English pronunciation, ―one of his special hobbies,‖ and he counts life as
57
―richer‖ with both (296). Sara knows well the cost of earning these riches; she knows that
―Godliness and an easy life‖ can no more live together than fire and water; she knows also that
Yahweh gives her the ability to bear the burdens He demands she carry. Despite all his flaws,
Sara always still finds herself ―drawn to [Father in her] great spiritual need,‖ commenting, ―How
rich with the sap of centuries were his words of wisdom! I never knew the meaning of his
sayings when I had to listen to him at home. But now it came over me like half-remembered, faroff songs, like music and poetry‖ (203). So she listens, and she sings along.
58
Conclusion
I acknowledged earlier my awareness that my readings of Invisible Man, The Great
Gatsby, and Bread Givers often beat against the mainstream critical current. I should also
acknowledge that I am equally aware of the absence of many of my key issues and terms from
the current critical radar15. So why do I pull these terms—hope and despair, optimism and
pessimism—out from their dusty disuse on the old humanist bookshelf in the first place? Doesn‘t
Gatsby caution us against remaining fixed in old visions? And doesn‘t traditional humanism
indulge naïve assumptions of universalism that that blind us to very real and particular social
struggles that marginalized individuals16? True and true. But, there is something to gain by
developing revitalized senses of what these terms mean and why they matter in a post-humanist
age.
In this study of hope, dissonantly developed, I distinguish the term from the other terms
of ―‗universal‘ yearnings‖ into which it has been allowed to collapse and, in that collapse, to lose
its meaning just like the ―well-fondled‖ phrase, ‗The American Dream‘‖ (Morrison 33). Rather
than gloss over the problems of particularity, I seek to identify at least some of them: hope arises
in response to specific and particular threats of despair and it manifests itself in specific and
particular ways. To re-appropriate Price‘s phrasing to describe optimism, hope emerges as
―social product…expressed in terms that are most decidedly personal‖ (17).
These three novels portray some of those personal terms, with hope providing a new lens
into what different things ―the American Dream‖ is for different people along with the defining
features that hold across a variety of social circumstances. Hope emerges consistently as a
15
Making my first ever journey to the Perkins Library subbasement, in order to retrieve a book that had not been
checked out since 1941, made this vividly clear.
16
To speak in the abstraction of ―marginalized populations‖ is also a way blind ourselves to the real humans that
populate the spaces of marginalization.
59
phenomenon with class affiliations, aligning with pursuit toward upward socioeconomic
mobility. The protagonists struggle not only for money, but also to develop, present, and locate
themselves in a way that they can attain certain kinds of recognition and belonging, despite
obstacles. Hopeful dreaming is linked to social status as well as to self-creation—whether in the
form of Invisible Man‘s performance personas, Gatz‘s construction of Gatsby, or Sara
Smolinsky‘s efforts toward a personhood that is both individually authentic and socially
recognized—because the self inevitably exists in the context of society.
Thinking in terms ―hope‖ gains us access into the complex influences and tensions at
play when personal thoughts and identities interact within a field of national and cultural
ideologies and identities.
It helps evoke and explain apparent and actual inconsistencies,
idiosyncrasies, and perhaps even universals. I do not think that it is the only ―humanist‖ term that
has the potential to shed light on literature and its cultural context in such a profound way, and I
am interested in the potential role that humanist revisionism such as mine could play in future
literary scholarship.
60
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