Sisters Under the Skin: "The Great Gatsby" as Jazz and Racial History

 -- By Tom Phillips                        

This is an edited version of my essay published in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Vol 19, 2021, pp. 189-202.

Amid the cacophony of Jay Gatsby’s garden party in chapter three of The Great Gatsby, a bass drum booms and the orchestra conductor announces a request from the host, for “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World.”  The title is all we learn of the piece.  It disappears, “tossed off” into the evening, a passing joke. However, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s intricately patterned novel, as in jazz, things take on meaning even as they disappear.

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 African American “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.