In Chapter 1, “Gender, melancholy, and the whiteness of impersonal form in The Great Gatsby,” Greg Forter observes two main points. The first is that Fitzgerald’s feminine expressiveness is connected to Gatsby’s creative responsiveness. However, the author also finds a connection between Gatsby’s ethnicity and Fitzgerald’s ethnicity (Forter 51). At the same time, Forter suggests that Fitzgerald describes his own sense of loss by exploring the destruction of Gatsby. Simultaneously, Gatsby’s melancholy is related to mourning theorists, according to Forter. The author considers that Fitzgerald deliberately used this to explore the theories’ problems (Forter 25). Hence, Greg Forter relies on these theories to explain the book’s mood and specificity. This is especially noticeable during the melancholic response to the loss of Daisy. Nick is the first to drop the charges only a few pages after Gatsby exclaims: “Can’t repeat the past?… Why of course you can!” (Forter 39). Thus, Greg Forter suggests that Gatsby wants to repeat the past in order to return to Daisy, and accordingly, in the novel, his sympathy is identified with a misguided belief in a special connection with Daisy. It is important to note that the fact that the protagonist lived in past memories did not allow them to overcome melancholia (Forter 40). Therefore, Fitzgerald, at the conclusion of the book, emphasizes that the past cannot be recovered or tried to be abandoned. In this way, this is how melancholy is manifested, which significantly affects the protagonist. Thus, Greg Forter attempts to trace and establish the peculiarities of the protagonist of “The Great Gatsby” and argues that Fitzgerald has transferred some of his own peculiarities to him and applied mourning theorists.
Work Cited
Forter, Greg. “Gender, Melancholy, and the Whiteness of Impersonal Form in The Great Gatsby.” Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism, edited by Greg Forter, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 15-52.