Facultad de Filosofa y Letras

Universidad Nacional de Tucumn

Literature of the United States

Francisco Javier Dufour 2009

The American Dream is viewed by many as the success obtained by any person due to hard work and perseverance. It is the freedom that allows anyone regardless their social rank to pursue their goals in life through hard work and free choice, gaining through ability rather than social status. For others, the American Dream is exactly that: a dream, a mirage, a mistaken concept, which shows clearly many peoples failure to achieve it, or perhaps the unrestrained materialism and lack of morality that went with it in order to attain that success by any means. Some pieces have been written to criticize or ridicule the well-known concept of the American Dream showing the immoral steps taken by some so as to achieve it; this is the case of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald which deals with the extreme selfishness of adultery, bootlegging and social climbing. As regards The American Dream by Edward Albee and A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg, the theme of the Decline of the American Dream is achieved by the feeling of senselessness of the human condition after determining events like the two World Wars and a condemnation of materialism as well as consumerism. The Great Gatsby is a novel written by the American author Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. It was first published on April 10, 1925; it is set in the north shore of Long Island and New York City during the summer of 1922. The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed as the Jazz Age, because Jazz, a predominantly Afro-American form of music, was becoming mainstream. Following the shock and chaos of the First World War, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the Roaring Twenties as the economy was booming and the stock market was growing explosively. It was a period of great social upheaval; in November 1920, women had been granted the right to vote. At the same time, Prohibition, the period from 1920 to 1933 when the production and sale of alcohol was forbidden in the United States, made millionaires out of bootleggers and led to an increase in organized crime. Although Fitzgerald, as well as Nick Carraway in his novel, worshipped the riches and glamor of the age, he was not comfortable with the unrestrained materialism and the lack of morality that went along with it. As stated above, the American Dream is seen as the success one attains through hard work. The traditional view of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that any person has the opportunity and ability to be all that they are meant to be. In contrast, Jay Gatsbys idea of achieving the American Dream in the early twentieth century is through illegal money that was not acquired by hard work. Gatsbys only key to success is through his materialistic wealth. He accepts a free ride to the top of society instead of striving to reach his full potential through hard, honest work. What he reaches may seem like the real American dream to outsiders, but actually he is as miserable as before he acquired his fortune. Gatsbys dream is doomed because he tries to buy his way into a society that will never accept him. His house and all the outrageous things in it are main examples of how deeply he desires to fulfill his own personal dream and how skewed his way of achieving it is. Gatsby gets his fortune through the illegal sale of alcohol and bootlegging during the Prohibition era of the 1920s. He buys objects of great monetary value, hoping to give the impression of being totally content. Gatsby thinks that he can make an impact on Daisy by merely the possessions he owns. The lack of real value and moral in Gatsbys dream trickles down to even the guests at his weekend parties; he had house guests but still no real friends until Nick comes along, whom he uses only to get closer to Daisy. The only people at Gatsby funeral were Nick and his father. Daisy, his only reason for doing

anything, did not show up to his funeral. This last step in his life makes his failure in life truly shine through. The American Dream is a one-act play written by the American playwright Edward Albee. It was first staged on January 24, 1961 at the York Playhouse in New York City. The play concerns a married couple and their grandmother. The family in this play consists of a dominating Mommy, an emasculated Daddy and a clever and witty Grandma. The play is a clear satire on the American life, where the author explores not only the falsity of the American Dream but also the American familys status quo. As he states in the preface to the play, an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation and vacuity; it is a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen. Albee points out the emasculation of society, i.e., there is a loss of value and loss of strength as a country probably influenced by the advertising industry, stating that you can buy happiness; though actually there is an existential vacuum money cannot fill embodied by the character of the young man, dubbed by Grandma as the American Dream. He is the key figure of the decline of the American Dream. The author has been influenced by a significant philosophical and cultural movement called Existentialism, mainly through the public work of two French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The existentialists believe that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject, not merely the thinking subject but in fact the acting, feeling, living human individual. In Existentialism, the individuals starting point is characterized by a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. This play can be considered one integrating the so-called Theater of the Absurd, a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin, who made it the title of his book The Theatre of the Absurd. According to Esslin, Absurdism is the inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity and purpose. The Theater of the Absurd tries to express its senselessness of the human condition by the open abandonment of rational devices and discoursive thought; it tries to achieve a unity or integration between subject, matter and form: instead of having a character talking about the absurdity, the absurdity itself is on stage. Language is no longer communicative, it no longer acts as a means of communication; there is no relationship between words and actions to any further extent. This, in turn, contributes to increase the feeling of isolation within that senselessness of the human condition. The American Dream is not seen as Grandma would see it any more, values have changed, it is no longer taken to be from rags to riches; there is that feeling of emptiness, the existential vacuum which money i.e. consumerism cannot fill. A Supermarket in California is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg, published on November 1, 1956 within the collection of poetry Howl and Other Poems, which contains one of Ginsbergs most famous poems, Howl, which is considered to be one of the principal works of the Beat Generation, and other poems. A Supermarket in California is a short poem about a dream-like encounter with Walt Whitman, one of Ginsbergs biggest idols. The image of Whitman is contrasted with mundane images of a supermarket, food often used of sexual puns. Ginsberg references Federico Garca Lorca whose Ode to Walt Whitman was an inspiration in writing Howl and other poems. American consumerism has replaced many things including love of nature; people wander aimlessly looking at objects in stores now, not the beauty of nature. Consumerism has

numbed people and made us forget the value of real human contact. Ginsberg longs to be part of Whitmans America, not his own time. This is why the ending invoking Charon is appropriate; Charon is the person who carried the dead across the river Styx, literally transporting people from the land of the living to the land of the dead. Ginsberg wants to get out of this world of the dead and live in Whitmans time when people actually had meaningful exchanges with one another and consumerism had not completely taken over. A Supermarket in California is a typical meandering poem about an everyday event, shopping in a grocery store. However he uses a seemingly simple poem to get at some more complex issues, such as consumerism and alienation in modern society. As we have seen so far, the American Dream is the freedom that allows all American citizens to pursue their goals in life through their effort. The phrases meaning has evolved over the course of American history. It began as the opportunity to achieve greater material prosperity than was possible in their countries of origin. For others it is the chance for their children to grow up and receive an education and its consequent career opportunities. As historian and writer James Truslow Adams wrote in his book Epic of America (1931) where he coined the phrase American Dream The American Dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century, has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. Nonetheless, the lack of morality together with the senselessness of the human condition, after some devastating events like the World Wars, increased by the general feeling of hopelessness about the future, have enhanced the decay of the American Dream as such, and led some writers of the time to criticize or deride the prime concept of it.

References:

Albee, E. The American Dream. 1960 Esslin, M. Revised and Enlarged Edition. The Theatre of the Absurd. Penguin, 1968. Fitzgerald, F. S. The Great Gatsby, 1925. Ginsberg, A. A Supermarket in California. Howl and Other Poems, 1956. Moore, J. Allen Ginsbergs a Supermarket in California and Condemnation of American Consumerism. Associated Content. www.associatedcontent.com, 2007. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The American Dream (play), American Dream, The Great Gatsby, Howl and Other Poems. www.wikipedia.org, 2009.