The Great Gatsby as the denouement to my American Studies Year

As we wrap up our junior themes and close out the year with the final few pieces of literature, I can’t help but notice the synchronicity of symbols in my research for American Studies and The Great Gatsby. My junior theme was titled, Suburbia: America’s Green Carpet and I tried to examine why some Americans are so obsessed with keeping up their green swards (expanse of short grass:). You’ll have to read my paper to find out why, but it turns out Fitzgerald’s novel is loaded with references to lawn (and “greenness”). I wonder if anyone else noticed or was it just me.

From the beginning of the novel, lawns were on the foreground of wealth. Nick says his little house was “squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season...with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden (5). On the very next page Nick’s first description of Buchanan’s elaborate mansion says the “lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens--finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run (6)”. It is in these descriptions that we find the basis for suburban American’s dreams and aspirations.

To clean-up and impress Daisy for their first rendezvous at Nick’s house, Gatsby tells Nick he will send over his gardener to cut his lawn. Once again, the tight and tidy grass defines beautiful. The color symbols are thick, but green- hope, envy and money in The Great Gatsby are also echoed in endless summer lawn setting. Establishing the divide, Nick describes, “crossing the lawn (147)” to meet up with Gatsby. After the murder, when Nick goes back to Gatsby’s house he says, “the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine (179)” as if to say the party was over, the wealth/life was no longer living--everything was back to wild, messy, nature.

In contrast to the wealth of opulent lawns was the grey, “valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens (23)” where the working people labored. No lawns there only misery, murder and dirty manual work.

The lawn seems to be a representation of the status a person holds. It is a reflection of the character, showing that the lawn is a symbol of the idealize American Dream of making it to the top. If you have a green lawn than you are a success. One of our greatest American novels reinforces this "ideal".