Passing for White in The Great Gatsby: A Spectroscopic Analysis of Jordan Baker

-- By Tom Phillips and Lucie Hopkins 

This is an edited version of our article published in The Explicator, Vol. 76 No. 3, November 2018. 

The character of Jordan Baker in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has puzzled readers for nearly a century.  She is glamorous and opaque, her “pleasant contemptuous expression” (23) so polished it deflects interpretation and critical analysis.  However, a close reading focused on Fitzgerald’s descriptions of Baker puts her at the center of the novel's concern with identity. Amid the racial and sexual upheavals of the 20s, she may be Gatsby’s most successful imposter -- a light-skinned, mixed-race person “passing for white.”

Such suspicions were directed at Gatsby himself by Carlyle V. Thompson in a 2000 essay, “Was Gatsby Black?”-- an argument quickly dismissed for insufficient textual evidence (Manus). In Jordan’s case evidence runs throughout the text, obscured by her proximity to Daisy and Gatsby, and Fitzgerald’s deceptive style, in which significant detail can “pass” as merely decorative.

Twentieth-century critics typically wrote Baker off as an enigma; Lionel Trilling found her “vaguely guilty, vaguely homosexual” (243). In this century, Maggie Froehlich has taken a closer look.  Building on Edward Wasiolek’s case that Nick is a careful homosexual, she concludes that Jordan is one too -- that the bond between them is a dissent from sexual norms (Froehlich 83ff; Wasiolek 14-22). This is a reasonable reading; the “hard demands of her jaunty body” (63) may well go beyond her cool affair with Nick. However, an accumulation of detail marks her also as a person of color, presenting herself as white. In Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, a lead character describes it as a “frightfully easy thing to do …  If one’s the type, all that’s needed is a little nerve” (15). The “type” in this context clearly refers to complexion. 

In at least eight passages, Fitzgerald touches on Baker's complexion; no one else's skin is mentioned, save one reference to Gatsby as "suntanned" (54). In a novel of "spectroscopic gayety"(49) she occupies an arc of color from yellow to brown, corresponding to that from white to grey on the black-and-white scale, and she is described extensively on both spectra. 

Her hands are brown (57) or tan, "powdered white" (122). Her arms and shoulders are "golden" (47), her face "the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee." (185). This could be just the year-round tan of a golfer. But the rest of her palette is pale, even ashen.  Her eyes are grey and "sun-strained" (15, 63) -- lacking protective pigment -- and the word first and most often used for her face is "wan" (15, 53, 84, 143). It might seem contradictory to describe skin as both brown and wan. But this is the complexion of many mixed-race African-Americans -- tinted toward brown, but without the ruddiness associated with tan or tanned "white" skin.  It could fit the "pale, well dressed Negro" who identifies Gatsby's car at the crash scene (147). In her 1942 "Glossary of Harlem Slang," African-American author Zora Neale Hurston called it "high yellow" (1008), a term still common in Harlem today.    

Jordan oscillates between yellow and white: the sun and moon, Gatsby's vehicle and Daisy's, the inside and outside of an egg, and of a daisy. At the Buchanans' in East Egg, she is uptight and guarded, a "silver idol" (122) motionless in her white dress. But she is willing to risk a little spontaneity at Gatsby's in West Egg. And she hints of a libertine life in Manhattan: "there's something very sensuous about it," she says, speeding to the city in Gatsby's yellow automobile, "..as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hand." (132) 

This was Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, a new culture mixing black, white and yellow, gay and straight, documented by Ann Douglas in her cultural history of Manhattan in the 1920s, Terrible Honesty. Black people migrating from the South established their cultural capital in Harlem, and whites flocked there to be entertained, to take in an earthy, sexy music, dance and humor that shook their Victorian sensibilities and forever changed the city's flavor. (Douglas, 73ff). As Chad Heap documents in Slumming, it was a new kind of urban exploration, an opportunity for whites to cross racial and sexual boundaries and return with changed identities of their own. Fitzgerald hints at the tension inherent in this cultural shift in a scene on the Queensborough Bridge, as the suburban party crosses over into Manhattan: "... a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry" (73, italics mine). 

Race comes up early and often in Gatsby, with Jordan always present. She first appears as Daisy Buchanan’s childhood friend, protegee, and virtual twin, both women dressed in white at the Buchanans’ estate in East Egg. She regards Nick, a visitor, with “grey, sun-strained eyes … out of a wan, charming discontented face” (15). The master, Tom, an all-American athlete with old money, is distressed by the changes underway. “Civilization’s going to pieces,” he claims, and wants everyone to read a work of scientific racism, “The Rise of the Coloured Empires” (17). His wife repeatedly teases him, mocking his obsession: “’We’ve got to beat them down,’ whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.” Tom persists. “The idea is that we’re Nordics,” he tells Nick and Jordan, then includes Daisy, but only after an “infinitesimal hesitation” which causes her to wink again at Nick (18). That “hesitation” ostensibly refers to Daisy, but it could be displaced to avoid embarrassing a guest.

Things go “from bad to worse,” Jordan notes archly (18), as Tom leaves the room twice to talk to his mistress on the phone. Each time, Daisy launches into what seems like a nonsensical tangent – each time, however, touching on a relevant color (18ff). The first is about a butler whose nose was affected by polishing silver. The next is a gushing comparison of Nick to a rose. These hints of gray and red introduce a background color motif for Jordan and Nick. Their intimate scenes will be in shadows: sunset, dusk, twilight, moonlight; their dates are over tea (47ff; 83ff; 143). Jordan’s last appearance in chapter one is in a “crimson room,” reading to Tom with “the lamp-light bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair” (22). This is an unusual shade of blonde, and Jordan soon demonstrates a keen eye for dyed hair.

As soon as she goes to bed, the others start talking about her. Daisy tells Nick they grew up in Louisville. "Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white ---" At this, Tom becomes suspicious.  He asks Nick if Daisy had a "little heart-to-heart talk" with him earlier on the porch.  "I think we talked about the Nordic race..." teases Daisy. "Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," is Tom's advice (24).  Actually, Daisy had been lamenting to Nick about Tom's infidelity. But Tom is obsessed with racial fears. 

Jordan reveals more of her true colors in chapter three, in the "spectroscopic gayety" of a party at Gatsby's.  Having arrived with a staid, standoffish group from East Egg, she dumps her date and plunges with Nick into the moonlit revelry.  Interestingly, we are not told what she is wearing this time.  But she and Nick become semi-attached to two girls in yellow dresses, the mirror image of the white dresses she and Daisy wore at the Buchanans'. "We met you here about a month ago," says one of the twins, and Jordan remarks, "you've dyed your hair since then." (47).  Naturally it wasn't polite to point this out, and Nick "started" at his companion's slip. No matter. The girls had moved on, and "the remark was addressed to the premature moon..." (47).   

Later Jordan elaborates on the timing of her “little indiscretions” (82). Her persona is tailored to get away with selfish behavior: rude remarks, contemptuous looks, careless driving, cheating on the golf course, lying about the damage she caused to a borrowed car, and more. Nick sees her as “incurably dishonest,” but he gets where she's coming from. “She couldn’t endure being at a disadvantage,” he says, and so “she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool insolent smile turned to the world…” (63). This begs the question of what disadvantage she felt so early in life.

Jordan’s coloration provides the clues, and her history the context.   She was raised in Kentucky, a slave state until the end of the Civil War. There as everywhere in the South, white masters fathered a class of white-looking descendants officially classified as black – “quadroons” and “octaroons” consigned to second-class citizenship unless they could pass for white.

Daisy and Jordan’s “beautiful white girlhood,” culminates in a series of bizarre incidents around Daisy’s wedding, related by Jordan. "Drunk as a monkey" before the bridal dinner, clutching an unidentified letter, Daisy breaks into "Negro" dialect, shouting "Tell 'em all Daisy's change her mine!" (81).  Jordan rushes out and finds Daisy's mother's maid --almost certainly black -- to give her a cold bath and hook her back into her dress and pearls. The wedding ceremony is then disrupted by the impostor Biloxi, who faints in the heat and is carried to Jordan's house, to be kicked out three weeks later by her "Daddy," who then suddenly dies (134). This is Jordan's only mention of a parent; her mother is a missing link. One candidate could be Daisy's mother's maid, the woman she instinctively rushes out to find in a crisis. That would account for the conspiratorial closeness between Daisy and Jordan, and the hints of a racial secret between them  It could also cast light on Jordan's behavior during the tumultuous afternoon at the Plaza.  When Tom rails against racial intermarriage, she murmurs, "We're all white here"(137).

If Daisy’s mother’s maid were indeed Jordan’s mother, who might the father be? In the Old South, the prime candidate would be the master of the house, Daisy’s father. And that would make these two co-conspirators half-sisters.  Fitzgerald puts textual evidence for this in the mouth of a babe, Daisy’s little daughter Pammy. In her one appearance before the grownups, she coolly observes, “Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress too”(123). This notes both the family secret -- Jordan is her aunt -- and its elaborate coverup, represented by the white dress like Daisy's.     

In the end it is impossible to know Baker's ancestry or racial heritage, just as it is impossible to prove Nick is gay; the evidence is all indirect. Froehlich argues that Fitzgerald had to write it that way, given the social codes of the era. She calls Gatsby "a novel about the homosexual closet which is itself in the closet" (99). But as Heap shows in Slumming, sexual and racial barriers were closely linked, and many people crossed both. Gatsby is a novel about passing for white which itself passes for white. 

Jordan Baker is one of its many "passers," slipping past the color line into the lily-white, country-club world of golf, and from there into white society. She, Nick, and Gatsby form a triad at the center of the novel, each drawn East by ambition and desire. It's a world that bears more than a little resemblance to the war zone where machine-gunners Gatsby and Nick won their stripes just a few years earlier -- a killing field where enemy lines must be crossed with the utmost stealth.

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                                                             Works Cited:

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, 1995.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby. 1925. Preface and notes by Matthew Bruccoli. New York:     Scribner’s, 1995.

Froehlich, Maggie Gordon.“Jordan Baker, Gender Dissent, and Homosexual Passing in The Great Gatsby.”  The Space Between, 6.1 (2010): 81-103

Heap, Chad. Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940. U. of Chicago Press, 2009.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Story in Harlem Slang.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories. Ed. Cheryl Wall. New American Library, 1995. 1001-1010. First published in American Mercury, July 1942. 

Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York, Knopf, 1929.

Manus, Elizabeth. “Was Gatsby Black?” Salon. 8 September 2000. https://www.salon.com/2000/08/09/gatsby/

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

Wasiolek, Edward. “The Sexual Drama of Nick and Gatsby.” The International Fiction Review 19:1 (1992): 14-22.