Contextual Understanding (DP IB English A: Language and Literature: HL): Revision Note

The Great Gatsby: contextual understanding

Context involves facts and details about the author’s life and the socio-, political, historical and cultural realities of a given time and place. In each of these realities, you can consider how culture and identity influence the author’s choices in how they produce their text, and the audience’s perspective and interpretation of those texts. 

Knowing and understanding contextual details can also provide insight into the themes and purposes of texts and allow you to make informed and convincing analytical claims.

Authorial context

The Area of Exploration (AoE) Readers, Writers, Texts asks you to reflect on how meaning is constructed and interpreted. In your Theory of Knowledge (ToK) class, you will likely have had discussions on how meaning in the Arts is formed through a dialogue between the artist and the audience. As such, it can be useful to know details of the author’s life to infer reasons for their artistic choices as readers interpret their work years after their death.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born in Minnesota, America

• Fitzgerald’s successful debut novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920:

  • His novels The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender Is the Night (1934,) have become keystones of modernist fiction

•  Throughout his career as a novelist, Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism, financial difficulties and his wife Zelda’s mental illness:

  • Whilst initially celebrated, his reputation declined during the 1930s

• Renowned for popularising the term Jazz Age, his novels can be considered semi-autobiographical:

  • His work examines hedonistic lifestyles and romances complicated by social status and financial circumstance

Social and historical context

The social and historical context is the events, changes, morals and values of the time and place in which the text was written. The Great Gatsby was published in America in 1925. Some key details of that time and place are explored below to help aid our analysis of how Fitzgerald represented, and challenged, the society in which his audience lived.

The Jazz Age 

• Following World War I, America enjoyed a period of prosperity stemming from new business ventures driven by industrial technological advancements

• With higher wages came increased spending, and a "new money" consumer culture driven by credit and mass production, challenging the established social hierarchy

• Fitzgerald’s novels can be considered critiques of American society during the 1920s, a period of time known as the “Roaring Twenties” or “Jazz Age”:

  • The 1920s was an era of significant cultural shifts, including the rise of jazz music, changes in fashion, and new forms of entertainment

• It is widely accepted that Fitzgerald coined the term “Jazz Age” to describe the superficial and decadent culture of the time, and its obsession with music, art, and wealth:

  • The Great Gatsby captures the spirit of the era through its depiction of extravagant parties, fast cars, and a culture of excess

Gender 

• The aftermath of World War I saw a shift in gender roles

• This was largely a result of recent suffrage for white women and war-time participation in the workforce:

  • Jordan Baker, a professional golfer in The Great Gatsby, embodies the newfound female economic independence

  • Nevertheless, only a small minority of women worked outside of the home

  • The novel’s Daisy Buchanan embodies the traditional role that was still expected of upper-class women

• The New Woman challenged traditional standards of female morality and domesticity:

  • Women embraced a new era of social freedom, notably through fashion, smoking, drinking and, in line with a boom in motorcar production, driving

• The flapper became a cultural icon for female partying and greater sexual autonomy:

  • Fitzgerald’s "girls in yellow" at Gatsby’s parties embody the flapper archetype (opens in a new tab)

The American Dream

• The American Dream can be defined as the idea of opportunity for all:

  • Particularly, it describes the hopes of early American settlers to find independence and self-sufficiency

  • While the term was coined in 1931 (at the time of the Great Depression,) its ethos can be traced back as far as the Declaration of Independence in 1776

• By the 1920s, the American Dream was defined by aspirations of social mobility and financial security:

  • Fitzgerald’s character, Jay Gatsby, represents this ideal in his characterisation as a self-made man

• In 1920, Prohibition came into effect: this acted as a catalyst that reshaped the American Dream:

  • America became plagued by rampant organised crime, bootlegging, corruption, and a materialist culture

• The Great Gatsby can be interpreted as a critique of the American Dream in its presentation of the pursuit of wealth, manifesting in superficial extravagance:

  • Indeed, Myrtle Wilson is killed by one of the fast cars that epitomised the idea of wealth

• While the American Dream ostensibly represented freedom and happiness for all (including, and particularly, immigrants), it was often undermined by systemic racism:

  • Fitzgerald critiques the racial prejudice and white-supremacist anxieties of the era via his character Tom Buchanan, the novel’s antagonist (opens in a new tab) 

Lost Generation

• Lost Generation defines American writers who came of age during World War I and lived for periods of time in Europe, particularly France:

  • Key figures include Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald

• The term, coined by Gertrude Stein, an American writer, describes the sense of disorientation and cynicism resulting from the death and destruction of World War I

• Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays this via characterisations that embody ideas of disillusionment, boredom, moral decay, and the end of the American Dream

Literary context

The Area of Exploration (AoE) Intertextuality asks us to think about how texts adhere to and deviate from conventions associated with literary forms or text types, and how conventions evolve. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is an interesting text with which to think about these questions. Fitzgerald’s novels can be interpreted as key modernist texts that represent aspects of realism. The tables below explore features of realism and modernism and where we can see them in The Great Gatsby.

Realism

Modernism

Context of reception

In the AoE Time and Space, questions revolve around how audiences “then and now”, or “there and here”, might read/interpret texts differently. Paper 2 questions may ask you to compare texts that make you think about this, and in the IO, you might compare how two different texts in different contexts explore the same Global Issue; therefore, it is useful to know and understand how the audience of the time reacted to Fitzgerald’s work. 

Audience reception

• F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925 

• Upon publication, The Great Gatsby received mixed reviews by literary critics and did not sell well

• Edwin Clark of The New York Times wrote that the novel was a glamorous story about the Jazz Age

• Lillian C. Ford of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the novel "leaves the reader in a mood of chastened wonder"

• However, Harvey Eagleton wrote in The Dallas Morning News on May 10, 1925, that Fitzgerald showed a lot of promise but it was likely “to go unfulfilled"

• The New York Herald Tribune referred to the novel as "a literary lemon meringue"

• In his memoir A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway praised The Great Gatsby, calling it a "very fine" book that offered proof of Fitzgerald’s talent

Exploring critics

Below are two notable critics who have commented on The Great Gatsby:

Barbara Will: “The Great Gatsby and the Unseen Word” (2005)

• In Barbara Will’s essay, she references the narrator’s line that “Gatsby turned out all right in the end”:

  • For most of the novel, he is a “force of corruption: a criminal, a bootlegger, and and adulterer”, which does not fit the image of Gatsby that Nick portrays 

• Will suggests the narrative deliberately incorporates the process of “forgetting” into its structure:

  • She refers to the penultimate scene when Nick erases an obscene word scrawled on Gatsby’s steps

  • She suggests that by erasing the “obscene” word, he erases a version of Gatsby portrayed in the rest of the novel

• The "whitewashing" of Gatsby's reputation must occur, Will writes, in order for “Gatsby's story to become the story of America itself”

• Will suggests that it is Gatsby’s ability to hope that allows him to embody the collective American narrative

Peter Gregg Slater: “Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby” (1973)

• Peter Gregg Slater is a specialist in American intellectual and cultural history

• In his essay, he states that the 1920s marked a period of heightened ethnic concern in American culture

• He suggests The Great Gatsby comments on this through the characterisation of Tom Buchanan:

  • Tom, who Slater calls “a man devoid of originality”, refers to a “fine book", Goddard's “The Rise of the Colored Empires”

  • Slater refers to Fitzgerald’s heightened awareness of race issues at the time

  • To this point, he refers to Tom’s attitude regarding the “superior white race and the inferior colored races” 

• Slater also comments on Tom’s focus on Gatsby’s heritage, which portrays his concerns with class:

  • Slater raises the fact that Tom objects to being introduced as "the polo player" but can “offer no alternative”

Sources:

Chatila, Amanda. “The Lost Generation and Millennials.” Looking Glass, https://glass.hfcc.edu/2017/05-01/lost-generation-and-millennials (opens in a new tab).

Clark, Edwin. “Scott Fitzgerald Looks into Middle Age.” The New York Times [New York], 19 April 1925. Accessed 19 April 2026.

Eagleton, Harvey. “Prophets of the New Age: III. F. Scott Fitzgerald.” The Dallas Morning News [Dallas], 10 May 1925. Accessed 19 April 2026.

Ford, Lillian. “The Seamy Side of Society.” Los Angeles Times [El Segundo], 10 May 1925. Accessed 19 April 2026.

Hemingway, Ernest. A moveable feast. Scribner, 1996.

Hemingway, Ernest. A moveable feast. Scribner, 1996.

Slater, Peter Gregg. “Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 19, no. 1, 1973, pp. 53-62. Hofstra University Stable, http://www.jstor.org/stable/440797 (opens in a new tab). Accessed 19 April 2026.

Wills, Barbara. “"The Great Gatsby" and the Obscene Word.” College Literature, vol. 32, no. 4, 2005, pp. 125-144. The Johns Hopkins University, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25115310 (opens in a new tab). Accessed 19 April 2026.