Desire and the Twentieth-Century Experience in the Work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald

The early 1920s was a time of increased wealth and prosperity for America. The rise of industrialization produced a working class and a wealthy class that were worlds apart.

While the working class worked hard and stressed morals, the wealthy class lived leisurely and lavishly. Twentieth-century American literature reflected these times, leaving behind the romantic and spiritual world of the past for the harsh realities of modern society.

Literary critic James T. Farrell explained this transformation in literary history in his "Social Themes in American Realism": "From the 1890's to the present, American realistic novelists have tried to tell something of the story of the cost of American civilization in terms of human and personal consequences."

Authors moved away from traditional themes that emphasized morals and values and instead revealed real human fears, emotions and desires of the time so readers could relate to their characters. Novelists such as Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway used themes of desire as fundamental elements that motivated their characters.

In each of their works, these authors presented intricate, self-conscious characters that desired wealth, love and pleasure in order to attain their overarching dreams.

While materialism grew in part due to the media's ever-increasing influence, twentieth-century novels illustrated the human desire for wealth and fame. In The Professor's House, Willa Cather depicted a detached and collapsed family consumed by the powers of materialism and wealth.

After Louie and Rosamond inherited the wealth from Tom Outland's vacuum invention, Kathleen described her desire to earn wealth and material goods similar to her sister: "'I can't help it, Father. I am envious, I don't think I would be if she let me alone, but she comes here with her magnificence and takes the life out of all our poor little things. Everybody knows she's rich, why does she have to keep rubbing it in?'"

While Rosamond attained a higher status in society through her first marriage with Tom, Kathleen became jealous of such undeserved wealth, which her sister freely and openly displays. Thus, Rosamond's obsession with wealth and prominence only caused Kathleen to desire monetary success even more, trapping the family in a state of self-absorption and narcissism.

Similarly, money convinced Rodney to betray Tom and sell away the curios they had discovered on the mesa: "'Rodney explained that he knew I cared about the things, and was proud of them, but he'd always supposed I meant to "realize" on them, just as he did, and that it would come to money in the end. 'Everything does,'" he added."

Rodney's desire for wealth and prosperity destroyed Tom's long-lived dream to continue living on the mesa and preserving Indian artifacts. While Tom believed that these sacred, natural treasures must remain with the land and its people, Rodney viewed them as profitable discoveries.

Literary critic Walter Benn Michaels explained in his "Vanishing American" that "Roddy has thought of their 'find' as 'no different than anything else a fellow might run on to: a gold mine or a pocket of turquoise,' but Tom has come to think of it as a collection of family heirlooms."

These contrasting desires between Tom and Rodney separated them from a lasting friendship.

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway revealed the same twentieth-century desire for money and fame as Rosamond and Rodney.

For example, Nick reflected on his friend in the East and described Jay Gatsby as his idea of the "American Dream": "If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life...it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again."

Just as the beauty and refined taste of Rosamond created a strong desire for wealth in Kathleen, the wealth and fame of Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom all inspired Nick to desire monetary success in attaining status in Eastern high society.

Literary critic Edwin S. Fussel further explained how Gatsby's character represented these desires and dreams of twentieth-century America: "Gatsby is essentially the man of imagination in America, given specificity and solidity and precision by the materials which society offered him."

Author Sam B. Girgus also agreed with this illustration in his Desire and the Political Unconscious in American Literature, claiming "he becomes a powerful personification of an Americanized version of Max Weber's classic thesis that Protestantism serves as an ideological justification for capitalism."

In particular, Nick often became mesmerized by the gaudiness and materialism of Gatsby's large, drunken parties every Saturday night.

Nonetheless, Nick recognized that he can no longer attain these monetary goals when he discovered the corruptible and careless nature that wealth had created in his friends: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

After seeing the demise of Gatsby's dream, Nick realized that money should not surpass his morals and personal values-the desire for money in Eastern could not solve the greater problems in his life. Hence, he returned home to Minnesota to rediscover his personal values, abandoning his desires for wealth.

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway unfolded a story that lacked the theme of monetary desire. The author rather created several American expatriates wandering through life aimlessly throughout Spain and France after enduring the struggles of World War I.

Through his minimalist style, Hemingway demonstrated that these characters were not interested in the monetary desires that were surfacing back home in America.

For instance, Jake and Robert showed their lack of determination to move up in high society and achieve something profound in their lives: "'Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?'...'It's one thing I don't worry about,' I said."

While Nick Carraway modeled his life goals after the wealth and fame of Gatsby, Hemingway's characters revealed no signs of motivation. As products of the Lost Generation, these characters instead drank their lives away without ever discovering any direction or future-this excessive drinking provided an escape from reality and allowed them to avoid confrontation with their inner problems.

Their meaningless lives became filled with inconsequential activities such as drinking, dancing, and debauchery. On the whole, these characters lived a carefree life of leisure which mirrored the life of the rich in America.

Another theme of desire used by modern novelists was a desire for love.

In Cather's novel, Professor Godfrey St. Peter, the protagonist, explained that love had manipulated his life and inhibited him from returning to his boyhood: "After he met Lillian Ornsley, St. Peter forgot that boy [himself] had ever lived...The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the world 'to love'...the design of his life had been the work of this secondary social man, the lover. It had been shaped by all the penalties and responsibilities of being and having been a lover."

This obsessive desire to become a lover left Professor St. Peter leading a life that he never aspired to endure-his desire to love transformed his real life as a Kansas boy, forcing him into manhood. Thus, Professor St. Peter's strong desire to love transformed his life into "the life of another person."

However, this transformation eventually led Professor St. Peter to fall out of love: "'Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love-if once one has ever fallen in.'"

Living alone, Professor St. Peter abandoned his family and his love for his wife to seek solitude and isolation. This overall depression led him to a dysfunctional state of mind that he could no longer control.

Professor St. Peter's obsession with love before Tom's death was similar to Gatsby's desire to fulfill his life-long dream of loving Daisy.

In Fitzgerald's novel, he described Gatsby's desire: "She was the first 'nice' girl he had ever know […] He found her excitingly desirable."

Like Professor St. Peter, Gatsby also focused his life on pursuing his lost love.

In "Fitzgerald's Brave New World," literary critic Edwin S. Fussel illustrated this aim: "Possession of an image like Daisy is all that Gatsby can finally conceive as 'success.'"

In the novel, Jordan discussed Gatsby's relentless yearning to reunite with Daisy again.

She explained to Nick: "'I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night,'" went on Jordan, 'but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her and I was the first he found.'" Author Michael Tratner explained in his Deficits and Desires that these parties "represent the general willingness to spend money that is stimulated and created by the 'promise of money.'"

By spending large amounts of money for his parties, Gatsby believed that his wealth would ultimately attract Daisy to him. Although Fitzgerald's novel emphasized the failure to achieve the "American Dream," he illustrated this theme of desired love through Gatsby's romantic dream. In the end, neither Professor St. Peter nor Gatsby were ever able to become the lovers that they had initially yearned to be.

On the contrary, Hemingway revealed a desire for sex over a desire for love in his twentieth-century novel The Sun Also Rises. This strong desire for sex did not allow Brett to enter a relationship with Jake, who is a victim of impotence due to injuries sustained in the war.

Early in the novel, Jake's injury and the desire for sex became an obstacle in stimulating Brett's love for him: "The street was dark again and I kissed her. Our lips were tight together and then she turned away and pressed against the corner of the seat, as far away as she could get. Her head was down."

Even though she loved Jake, Brett could not stay with him due to her desire for sex and his weakened masculinity.

Girgus explained that Jake's wound symbolized his unsatisfied desires: "The wound, therefore, means psychological separation and incompletion as well as the impairment and catastrophe of physical dismemberment."

With the emergence of women's rights in the 1920's, Brett exemplified a liberated woman-she constantly had sex with various men but never decided to commit to any of them. Furthermore, Brett challenged the customs, taboos, and public opinion of modern society in order to fulfill her desire. While Jake, Cohn, and Mike all had the desire to love Brett, they ultimately failed due to Brett's desire for sex rather than love.

At the end of the novel, Brett expressed her love for Jake but knew that a relationship could never be possible: "'Oh Jake,'" Brett said, "'we could have had such a damned good time together.'...'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'"

After forcing Romero to leave, Brett found herself alone again with Jake. While Brett thought about what could have been, Jake realized that his impotence had created a barrier between love and friendship.

Girgus further clarified that Brett was the other side to Jake's wound of desire: "In many ways, she is the ultimate expression of the inability to cope with the inherent incompleteness of human desire."

All three modernist authors revealed the real-life problems of finding true love-thus, romance was no longer a fairy tale.

Modernist authors frequently explored the desire for pleasure and delight in their twentieth-century novels.

In The Professor's House, Tom Outland's death and inability to complete his dream left Professor St. Peter no longer feeling any pleasure in his life: "He had never learned to live without delight...Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may be even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that."

The passion and romantic view that Tom expressed for the mesa produced the only happiness and hope in Professor St. Peter's life. With his family wrapped in their own affairs of materialism and wealth, Professor St. Peter realized that he must change to rediscover happiness in his life.

In the concluding pages of the novel, Professor St. Peter attempted to rejuvenate his state of mind: "His temporary release from consciousness seemed to have been beneficial. He had to let something go-and it was gone: something very precious, that he could consciously have relinquished, probably...He thought he knew where he was, and that he could face with fortitude the Berengaria and the future."

With no desire for wealth or love, Professor St. Peter sought out these buried pleasures that he lost after Tom's death in Flanders. He realized that resorting to solitude could not return him back to the man he once was and thus, he must find other ways to resolve his problems.

Like Professor St. Peter, Nick in The Great Gatsby searched to find the pleasures in life after seeing the careless acts of Tom and Daisy ruin Gatsby's dream.

At the end of Fitzgerald's masterpiece, Nick understood the happiness that Gatsby had brought him: "I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laugher faint and incessant from his garden and the cars going up and down his drive."

With a new life in the East, Nick learned to live the life Gatsby had exposed him to while enjoying the pleasures of living in the West Egg.

After Gatsby's death and lost dream, Nick tried to rediscover these pleasures for his future. This final search for pleasure was illustrated by Nick's final comments: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning - "

Gatsby's relentless desire to achieve his dream inspired Nick to desire the same pleasures as Gatsby, but Nick realized that these hopes and dreams could not always come true.

While Professor St. Peter and Nick both felt the desire to rediscover pleasure in their lives, Hemingway's characters in The Sun Also Rises constantly desired pleasure.

During their fishing trip to Burguete, Jake and Bill together found pleasure in the beautiful countryside and warm summer weather: "'This is country,' Bill said."

Leaving the dancing and excessive drinking that had often left him frustrated with his love life, Jake searched for pleasure elsewhere. Subsequently, he discovered true happiness in his fishing expedition with Bill. Brett revealed her feeling of desire for new happiness and delight after having an affair with Robert Cohn.

She sought further pleasure when she met Romero: "'I'm mad about the Romero boy. I'm in love with him, I think...I've got to do something. I've got to do something I really want to do. I've lost my self-respect."

Hemingway showed these twentieth-century women's roles as being more masculine but not necessarily more fulfilling.

While modernist literature represented a movement away from romantic and spiritual ideals, human desire became a common theme for those experiencing the realities and changes of twentieth-century America. By highlighting the desires for wealth, love, and pleasure, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway were able to depict the urbanization, industrialization, and consequential impersonalization of modern America.

As Farrell concluded in his essay, "Literature is not, in itself, a means of solving problems; these can be solved only by action, by social and political action. Realist literature should serve as a means of helping people to discover more about themselves and about the conditions of life around them."

These transformations from the nineteenth century resulted in literature that expressed unfulfilled dreams, goals, and desires. Hence, many of these modern novels did not end happily but rather, ended with unresolved issues and realistic consequences.