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Although disagreement persists over exactly what role race plays in The Great Gatsby, the issue cannot be ignored, especially in recent critical studies. Yet Gatsby reveals an unexplored angle that intersects with psychoanalysis in relation to Lacan's " fundamental fantasy." The protagonist's object of desire (objet a), Daisy, is the maternal figure in a (self-)destructive adult repetition of the oedipal drama, complicated by her metaphorical associations with the American landscape and her husband Tom's patriarchal and nativist views. Ultimately, the novel's symbolic structure is haunted by a latent desire to reconstitute Gatsby's ambiguous socially-projected racial makeup as only figuratively white.
Keywords: F. Scott Fitzgerald / The Great Gatsby / race / psychoanalysis / subjectivity
Race was the elephant in the room in Fitzgerald studies for decades, but since around the mid-nineties it has been a hot-button issue. A smattering of critics as early as the late 1960s and early 1970s began exploring Fitzgerald's personal racial politics. But it was the likes of Richard Lehan's The Great Gatsby: The Limits of Wonder (1990), Jeffrey Louis Decker's "Gatsby's Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties" (1994), and Walter Benn Michaels's Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995) that set the stage for a thriving discourse on race in Fitzgerald's fiction - and especially The Great Gatsby.
A major catalyst for these seminal readings was the rise of new historicism, which led to a reexamination of the nativist ideology that proliferated following the First World War. "The social climate of the early 1920's," says Decker, "specifically as it is expressed in increasingly racialized forms of nativism, creates the conditions under which Fitzgerald's narrator imagines Gatsby as a figure for America" (56). In sharpening our perception of the social, cultural, and historical conditions that Gatsby grows out of, new historical influence sowed the seed for the recent outcrop of critical attention to the novel's treatment of race. This new cycle of criticism, with noteworthy contributions including Meredith Goldsmith's "White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby" (2003), Benjamin Schreier's "Desire's Second Act: 'Race' and The Great Gatsby's Cynical Americanism" (2007), and Greg Forter's chapter on Gatsby in Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism (2011), has situated the novel's...