Julia Schwartz

October 15, 2004

In the Aftermath

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House both depict characters living in the years directly following World War I. Though the characters express many fundamental similarities with each other, their differences are what define them and the attitudes toward the Great War that each author is presenting through his or her story.

There are three overarching similarities that pervade the novels’ identities. First, both sets of characters live in reaction to the war. This is not surprising; the impact of the war was so great upon everyone that indeed it was termed “the Great War.” Though the direct references to the war by characters in the stories are relatively low, those that are made are clearly distinguished.

The characters that were on active duty in the war – Nick and Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, and Tom in The Professor’s House – clearly were impacted in some way by the war, and obviously had motivations for going. All three men went as a part of the mass movement that their demographic made to the European front at the time, and none seems to have given a great deal of thought to that decision. These men hold the pivotal roles in The Great Gatsby and The Professor’s House, Nick as the narrator and Gatsby as the title character of the former, and Tom as the point of contention or, at times, the narrator of the latter. That these central characters partook directly in the war underscores its relevance to the tales told.

The third commonality between the treatment of World War I in The Great Gatsby and The Professor’s House is that through their characters and their own decision to limit the verbal focus the war gets, Fitzgerald and Cather downplay not the significance, but the necessity of the war. It is not to be denied that the war played a great part in the lives of everyone who lived through it, but these authors scoff at its need and its gravity. Instead of necessary and gallant, they portray the war and the substantiation for those who fought in it as frivolous.

That both stories concern characters living in the aftermath of one of the most important and progressive world movements ever – World War I – is where the similarity stops. The war changed the world, for it was both the first time so many nations of the world came together in organized alliances to defend a particular cause and the birth of the global community, giving rise later to such international forces as the United Nations.

In The Great Gatsby, the characters live up to the idea of the “Roaring Twenties.” Their lives are a rebound to the downing effects of war; they are of the school that is celebrating the return of troops and the triumph of the Triple Entente. The wild partying that goes on and the indulgent lifestyle in which many of the characters in Gatsby live is a reaction to the limits that were placed on their lives during the war. Wartime efforts like food rations and the obligations of men to fight and women to join the Red Cross organizations eliminated the ability to go wild, for people to live as though they were in “amusement parks” (Fitzgerald 45). Though it is unknown whether the women of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece worked toward the war effort, Gatsby and Nick went to war, serving in the “Third Division” (Fitzgerald 52). The war thus had its effect on all, including Gatsby, Nick , Jordan Baker, and the Buchanans. Their attitude in the 1920s is to separate themselves from the war, and to celebrate its end -- and the renewal of their social liberation.

For those in The Professor’s House, however, it as though they are still living in the shadow of the war and the dissonance it wrought. For the St. Peter family, the war killed Tom Outland and prompted the need for his now extensive estate to be executed. This function parallels the general mess and dissonance that the war caused for all who were touched by it. The struggles between the different members of the St. Peter family and others like the Cranes regarding the distribution of Tom’s posthumous wealth would not be present if he had not gone to war and been killed in action.

The tone of the life the St. Peters live after the war seems bland and quiet in comparison to the vivid, colorful life that existed for them before the war. Instead of being full of “dullness” (Cather 20) as it is now, life used to be filled with “triumphs (Cather 20) when the girls were still girls and when Tom was there to play with them and bring them together, and to inspire St. Peter. Now all that remains of these happy times for St. Peter is memories of those times that “were really the best of all” (Cather 107). St. Peter’s frequent longing to be free and his fixation with the lake outside his attic window which is “like an open door that nobody could shut” (Cather 20) is prompted by his realization that his life used to be like the lake, a very long time ago, when he was young and first impassioned by his wife-to-be, Lillian. His life slowly wound down, until the day Tom Outland walked into his garden. The war changed all that: it took Tom away, and sent St. Peter back into his dull world.

Though Gatsby, Nick, and Tom Outland all follow their generation of young men off to the Western front, they each do so for a different reason, and the effect on each is varied. Gatsby goes to the war a masochist, finding it a “great relief and try[ing] very hard to die” (Fitzgerald 70). For Gatsby, the war is his one redeeming quality, his only integrity through his life of deception and imagination. His war medal from Montenegro is the only proof of anything from his storied past. His medal proves that he is not “just some nobody” (Fitzgerald 71) with a lot of money to throw parties, and it “reinforces [his] heroism” (Bruccoli 210) as a character. His specific position in the military, as a leader, alludes to his once being in control, which is in sharp contrast to the way his present life seems to be uncontrolled, both in the rapid-fire pace at which he lives it, and the lack of control he has over his dreams (Daisy) and his death. Though Gatsby hoped the war would be a death sentence for him, it was not: it elevated his position for the first time in his life, and set the groundwork for his later rise in stature.

For Nick Carraway, however, the war was a joke. He doesn’t afford it respect by calling it “the Great War” as others do, instead, he calls it “that delayed Teutonic migration” (Fitzgerald 7), as if it were naught more than a social fad. He expresses an odd sense of enjoyment of violence, “enjoy[ing] the counterraid so thoroughly that [he] came back restless” (Fitzgerald 7). Nick is both slightly sadistic as a result of this, perhaps alluding to his later ability to watch the degradation of the lives of the people around him, and shifty. Nick doesn’t seem to care about much of anything he does, be it his job in the “bond business” (Fitzgerald 7) or his relationship with Jordan Baker, toward whom he expresses not love but a “curiosity” (Fitzgerald 62). The war, for Nick, laid the stage for apathy. The desensitization that many men go through as a result of the experience of being a soldier ultimately desensitized Nick to true emotion and causes him to live his life without realizing the significance of events around him.

As for Tom in The Professor’s House, his jaunt off to the fronts of Western Europe is largely unexplained, yet highly significant, for it kills him. It would appear that Tom’s life was happy before he left for the war: he was working in the lab with Crane and “had worked out the construction of the Outland engine that [revolutionizes] aviation … [and] had taken pains to protect it by patent” (Cather 30), and he was in love with Rosamond and engaged to marry her. The two passions of his life were his work and Rosie, in whom he “saw nothing else [other than her beauty]” (Cather 47), yet he gave them both up to go to war. Tom’s going to war seems natural, as it was for the other two men; this decision was something that appealed to “another side of him” (Cather 49), a side that yearned for adventure, the same side that propelled his exploration of the mesa in the West when he was with Roddy.

Both Fitzgerald and Cather downplay the validity and the importance of World War I as a cultural and social phenomenon. They do both identify its existence, but they do not identify its depth. Both authors also show the mass movement of young men to the front through the characters they sent to the war, but there is no sense of integrity in the decision to go to war for any character, nor is there any worth garnered by the war for the characters in either The Professor’s House or The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald’s depiction of the war, aside from its sense of achievement for Gatsby, is that of another social event. The divisions of the war serve as a recollection for Nick and Gatsby of their first meeting, their treatment in this instance just as they might be recalling a cocktail party in the city. Neither Gatsby nor Nick suffers at all physically from the war, and they do not know or mention anyone who was lost as a result of it. As a result of this, neither takes the war seriously; consequently, the war in The Great Gatsby is simply a part of the past, instead of something that is shadowing the future.

Cather’s characters do, however, find themselves in this position. The war, mainly through Tom’s death in it, dictates much of the characters’ present, from Tom’s estate and the controversy surrounding it to that darkness in St. Peter’s life. Yet, as it is presented by Cather, there is no validation for all this struggling. Tom is said to have “dashed off to the front” (Cather 30) in a rash decision that didn’t consider his legacy or his intelligence. Tom’s life was, in many senses, worth a lot due to his academic prowess. The attitude in The Professor’s House is that Tom threw his life away, sacrificed everything he had to “nothing… but death and glory” (Cather 31), glory which has no meaning to him because he is now dead.

This sense of the frivolity of war that Cather presents is reinforced by Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby with the light he makes out of the war and the parallels he draws between it and another social event of the new age. World War I was an undeniable symbol of modernism for the world; indeed, it launched the modern era. Cather is against modernity, rather preferring a venture to the past; Fitzgerald’s distaste for the modern is expressed through his condemnation of the ways his characters live their lives. Cather’s argument for the futility of war is underscored by the lack of a reason for Tom’s death – it brought no benefits to anyone, instead, it just created a mess for those who remained at home to muddle through. Where Fitzgerald accepts the movement of young men to the front, Cather rejects it, but both deny any reasoning for it.

As a symbol of modernism, World War I in The Great Gatsby and The Professor’s House is a beast which really has no purpose. Both Fitzgerald and Cather suffocate any substantiation for the war’s merits and simply focus on its demerits and by doing so, reject the new age it ushered in. Though Fitzgerald paints a picture of the war as a sham, Cather portrays it as a waste, a slaughterhouse for promising young men whose lives were wasted for an unknown cause. The effects of the war on the characters of each author are different, with Fitzgerald depicting a rebound effect and Cather a mess left behind for others to clean up. Despite the few words which World War I is afforded in the texts, its impact is truly endless, as it is a defining characteristic of both the characters’ lives and the authors’ intended messages to their readers.