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89 Chapter Four Keatsian Echoes and US Materialism in The Great Gatsby In Blood Meridian McCarthy focuses on the violence associated with expanding the US westward, making the human and cultural costs brutally apparent. F. Scott Fitzgerald likewise considers the costs of US empire, but he is concerned primarily with socioeconomic and political commentary. Instead of revisiting the 1800s, Fitzgerald writes on the age he made famous, the Jazz Age, a time when the US was emerging as the world's superpower. In his retrospective essay, "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (1931), he examines this shift in power and discusses the symbol he uses in his fiction to critique the shift's effects. Fitzgerald begins "Echoes of the Jazz Age" by "look[ing] back with nostalgia" on the era he named, chronicled in his fiction, and personified in his very public private life. He quickly shifts, however, toward a more ironic critical examination of why this period represents a turning point in US history , claiming that it marks the passage of "the style of man" to America: It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. A Stuffed Shirt, squirming blackmail in a lifelike way, sat upon the throne of the United States; a stylish young man hurried over to represent us to the throne of England. A world of girls yearned for the young Englishman; the old American groaned in his sleep as he waited to be poisoned by his wife, upon the advice of the female Rasputin who then made the ultimate decision in our national affairs. But such matters apart, we had things our way at last. With Americans ordering suits by the gross in London, the Bond Street tailors perforce agreed to moderate their cut to the American long-waisted figure and loose-fitting taste, something subtle passed to America, the style of man. During the Renaissance, Francis the First looked to Florence to trim his leg. Seventeenth-century England aped the court of France, and fifty years ago the German Guards officer bought his civilian clothes in London. Gentlemen's clothes—symbol of "the power that man must hold that passes from race to race." We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun? (15) 90 Chapter Four Fitzgerald suggests that because gentlemen's clothes historically symbolize "the power that man must hold that passes from race to race," the US's acquisition of "the style of man," while seemingly "subtle" and superficial, signifies a much more meaningful transfer of global power from Great Britain to the US. Belonging to "the most powerful nation," Americans now had the prerogative to decide "what was fashionable and what was fun," but nonetheless they sought clothes produced by Bond Street tailors and continued to fashion themselves—in terms not only of garments but also of identity more broadly—after British models. Fitzgerald characterizes the US during the Jazz Age as a "whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure," which with its newfound prosperity "attempt[ed] to adapt English customs to American conditions" (The Crack-Up 15). Claiming that US leaders were not immune to the impulse to associate themselves with the British aristocracy and leisure class, Fitzgerald's double pun parodies the US President (Harding, in this case) as a "Stuffed Shirt" that sat "in a lifelike way . . . upon the throne of the United States." The "throne of the United States" represents a curious emulation of the original "throne of England," serving as a metonymic parody of the monarchy at the height of the British Empire. Although Fitzgerald's satire operates on multiple levels in this passage, his focus rests at least in part on American postures of class and authority that, ineptly modeled after British manners, rely on materialism at the expense of substance. Critiques of this type, involving in this case the "Stuffed Shirt," appear throughout Fitzgerald's work and almost always are emblematized by gentlemen's clothing, Fitzgerald's symbol for projections of power. In the early short story "May Day" (1920), for example, Fitzgerald gives a "minute examination" of the "shabby" suit of Gordon Sterrett in comparison with the luxurious wardrobe of Phillip Dean, whose "great English travelling bag" produced a "family of silk shirts littered on the chairs amid impressive neckties and soft woolen socks" (Best Early Stories 123-24). The contrast between Gordon's and Phillip...

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