ESSAY: American literature often depicts tension between social classes
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Course
American Depth Study
Institution
OCR
An in-depth A/A* band essay comparing social class in My Antonia by Willa Cather and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Uses plenty of critics and context, which can be re-used in other essays, and even if you're not studying My Antonia, it could be useful when looking for additional literary...
‘American literature often depicts tension between social classes.’ By
comparing The Great Gatsby with at least one other text prescribed for
this topic, discuss how far you agree with this view. [30]
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby both
depict characters from a range of social classes. The novels were written
and set in a period of great social change in America. Cather’s work was
published in 1918, however it is set in the agricultural Mid-West of
America from the 1880s-1910s, when both the influx of poor immigrants
from Europe looking for a better life in the new world and the beginnings
of industrialisation had a profound effect on attitudes towards class in
rural societies. Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1926, with the
novel being set in the much more urban environment of New York during
the roaring twenties. Fitzgerald shows a much greater range of social
classes in the novel than Cather, with working class characters such as
Myrtle and George Wilson being greatly contrasted with the extravagantly
rich Daisy and Tom Buchannan. Unlike Cather, Fitzgerald exposes the
American Dream as false, portraying Gatsby as a character who is
materially wealthy and yet unable to truly integrate himself into the world
of those born into upper class wealth due to the separation between “Old
Money” individuals whose ancestors had moved and made their fortune in
America for them and those with “New Money” who were recently self-
made either from the 19th century gold rushes or from oil. Due to the
difference in this portrayal of the American Dream, Cather’s novel shows
social mobility to be much more accessible and therefore there is less
tension between social classes, whereas true social mobility to the upper
echelons of society through credible means is shown to be impossible in
The Great Gatsby, and so there is an evident tension between social
classes.
In both novels, lower class characters are shown to be exploited by others
around them. In The Great Gatsby car mechanic George Wilson is
continually informed by wealthy Tom that he is willing to sell his car,
causing a “damp gleam of hope” to “spring into his eyes” when in reality
Tom is only using it as an excuse to see George’s wife Myrtle, who is his
mistress. Fitzgerald’s use of “damp” implies that there is something faded
about George’s hope, as if this is a process that had been repeated many
times before with no success. This rather pathetic image of George is
furthered by historical attitudes towards masculinity and the humiliation
of unknowingly having a wife as a mistress. Furthermore, despite working
in cars which was a lucrative field in this time period, George is unable to
get ahead and be successful, implying that social mobility was not as
accessible in the early 20th century as the ideals of the American Dream
presents it to be. In My Antonia, Antonia and the rest of the Shimerda
family are sold a house by Krajek described as a “cave” for much more
than it is worth. Although Krajek’s trick is not as exploitative as Tom’s
behaviour towards George, it does echo of the plight of many immigrants
in America in the late 19th century and early 1900s who arrived with little
in the way of a support network and fell into poverty. At the time of
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