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Papers > Novels > American Dream A Scenario of Conventional Social Myth
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American Dream A Scenario of Conventional Social Myth |
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Introduction The American dream is interwoven and deeply embedded in every fabric of American life. It has also been the focal point of many novels under the genre of American literature. This dream as I understand it, is associated with rugged individualism, generous enthusiasm and idealism in the pursuit of success, fame, power and glory in their supremely possible ways. It trends from old puritanical American culture, the affirmation that Americans everywhere are a special people, “a city upon a hill” like the old puritans of New England called it, a land and place formulated by divine providence and right to be a beacon of hope, promise and freedom to the rest of the world. The basic tenet of this dream for the puritans was an all inclusive affirmation that everyone should belong and get a chance to be treated fairly and justly; that no insignificant person was ever born and that America should be a land where by sheer dint of hard work, pluck and trust in God, any person, regardless of their background and history, can pursue their life commitments and avocations devoid of monarchical control, demagoguery and the rigid social and class stratification that once characterized the old world. Through much of the colonial era, the neoclassical to the post- modernist years, this feeling of idealism and cheerfulness about America and Americans has evolved, today adding secular and capitalistic overtures to its propositions, perpetrating a hegemony of class and social privilege. ... Scott Fitzgerald and the American Dream, defined the ‘dream’ as it connotes today. For Fahey, this dream involves “a rise from rags to riches, of amassing a great fortune that will assure a life of luxuriant ease, power, and beauty in an ideal world untroubled by care and devoted to everlasting pleasure with nothing to intervene between wish and fulfillment (70).” In my essay I bring into discussion issues arising from the pursuit of this dream by examining the lives of the protagonists of two important American literatures: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser and The Great Gatsby by F. ... By examining the symbolic representations of the causes and actions of their lives, I found out that the reality of the American dream today is the fact that it is only a dream; it has no objective reality or a moral center; only purely an ideological construct in disembodied abstraction for which individuals are continually engaged in an endless or goose chase of their self- interested pursuits, ramifications of which almost, always culminates in sense of regret and sorrow, moral complexity, dissatisfaction, identity struggle and void in the soul. Carrie Meeber and the American Dream For Carrie, her version of the American dream involved a movement away from the grinding poverty and the drudgery of life in her small town of Columbia City, Wisconsin, into Chicago’s glitterier. ... An important theme that would run throughout the novel to show how dehumanizing and depersonalizing social relationships became in the consumer society that Chicago was transformed into, is first evident on the fact that Minnie and Hanson invited Carrie to stay at their house not out of a desire for the companionship of a close family relative, but so they can make profit from her labor by charging her for board. ... Carrie does not love them; she compromised the Victorian idea of social morality of her time, engaging in a sexual and cohabitating relationships with these men, only because of her needs and desires for material goods and comfort and wealth that these men came to personify to her. ... Also worth noting in Sister Carrie is the fact that the women in Carrie’s world have social standing only when the men want them to. ... In this regard, Carrie quickly learned the importance and role of artifice and performance in social relations. ... We can see notions of these evidently at work when Carrie got a pseudonym in the play at the Earl, to perform the role of a poor girl who got elevated to a higher social standing. The renaming of Carrie here is a metaphor and subtle reminder by Drouet and Hurstwood of their role and influence in her social elevation. ... We see that Julia is dissatisfied with her husband’s relative wealth and social standing. ... Just like Hurstwood’s earlier decline from a privileged position of family and work in Chicago, his decline with Carrie also came at the cost of him not fulfilling his social responsibility and traditional male functions. ... Whereas she once lived in an illicit marriage and cohabiting relationship with middle class men she didn’t really love, compromising conventional social morality for financial gains, she now receives letters and gifts from wealthy men who are trying to capture her heart but she doesn’t desire them. ... Carrie’s end culminated in great social and material success. ... As much as she started the pursuit of her dreams in Chicago, rocking every evening on a chair, pondering on how to gain material success, now she was successful and still found herself rocking on a chair, still pondering even more on the endless mazes of her life, staring into its skies, trying to find hope and vision in the otherwise illusive dream she had lived and pursued. Jay Gatsby and the American Dream For Jay Gatsby the protagonist of The Great Gatsby, the pursuit of his American dream took the path of amassing of great personal wealth and social success that will capture the heart of a beautiful lady called Daisy Buchanan. ... In 1919 however, Daisy broke her promise to Gatsby when she married Tom Buchanan, a rich, arrogant, sexist, and racist man, with the social and financial ties to obtain her parent’s approval. ... On hearing the news and upon his return home, Gatsby rededicated his life with even more fervor towards attaining wealth and social status that will recapture the heart of Daisy. ... However, he had no idea what the ramifications of his dream will entail to its end. ... New York’s West Egg residential section in Contrast to its East Side is symbolic of the social hierarchies in America of the 1920’s. ... While both the new and old upper class came to occupy the same economic ladder, the difference and tension among them still reigned supreme- in contrast to the old rich, the new rich lacked social graces- refinement, manners, and connoisseur. ... More than mere hope for his cousin to get out of an otherwise unhappy marriage and the superficiality of her life, Gatsby’s sheer optimism to win Daisy’s love as seen in the idea of the mysterious green light that extended from Gatsby’s dock to the end of Daisy’s window, I believe represents the true American dream. ... Stripped of the core monetary and material content of his optimism, Gatsby’s dream is the true American dream. ... ” This is also what made Nick to arrange for a reunion between Daisy and Gatsby-Nick’s believe in the true America dream. ... It is worthwhile mentioning here the symbolism that weather played in portraying the ominous and ever illusive nature of Gatsby’s dream and love affair. ... For Gatsby it signified a decline because the dream that revived between him and Daisy had suddenly gone sour. ... In saying this, I think what Nick means is that the conventional social idea in the world about a rose connoting atheistic beauty is because people give it that symbolism. ... Gatsby gave all he had, even severing his ties totally with his true persona and heritage for a dream that had little promise. Gatsby’s life, death, sparsely attended funeral, how he started alone and ended alone, are all metaphors to the hollowness of the American society and the ever- illusive nature that the American dream has come to symbolize today. ... Gatsby’s failure however in not gaining acceptance and achieving his dream of capturing Daisy’s heart, which would have entailed his penetration of the rigid aristocratic class, tells us that this ‘dream’ has vied from its path of humble beginnings. It also brings into serious question if whether by just sheer dint of hard work, one can achieve his/her dream in America. Gatsby’s story clearly tells us that the problems with the ‘dream’ now is that money has now come to occupy the moral center of American life as all of its historic past and heritage lay forgotten in Europe. ... In as much as Gatsby’s failure could be attributed to his allowing money and status to occupy the center of his dream, Tom and Daisy and upper class America in perpetrating a caste system that alienates and refuses to accept new comers, are also guilty of the failure of the American dream today. ... It is worth noting that in contrast to Gatsby who severs his connection with his ‘past’ in bid to get social acceptance, Nick attributes his ability to reserve judgment on others as a quality that he had learnt in the ‘past’ from his father. ... Gatsby’s fundamental failure like the American dream lies not in only in the mistake of his making wealth the center of its universe, but also in his lack of courage to acknowledge and accept that the past is inextricably linked to future. |
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Title: American Dream A Scenario of Conventional Social Myth
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