Hundreds of thousands of students read The Great Gatsby without understanding what it's really about or how it diagnosed the disease of the modern world. 1917-1926 were the years of the most aggressive Soviet feminism, and Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel explores the flaws in the movement towards sexual liberation that had already started in the US in the 1920s but wouldn't take full form until the 1960s — long after Stalin had tried to steer the Soviet Union away from its disastrous effects.
The story is familiar to most people, but a brief look at the outline reminds us that it focuses on the fact that sex isn’t private. It’s a liberal delusion that what people do in the bedroom stays in the bedroom and is nobody’s business because it’s not hurting anyone. No, Fitzgerald says, sex has public consequences — and people can easily get hurt.
Nick Carraway, in his mid-twenties, has taken a job as a bond salesman in Wall St. After returning from the Great War, Nick’s home in Middle West felt ‘like the ragged edge of the universe’. Now he lives on West Egg — a spit of land off Long Island populated by new money — and thinks of himself as ‘a pathfinder, an original settler’.
Nick’s house adjoins Gatsby’s. Is Gatsby a gangster? A war hero? A foreign aristocrat? Nobody knows for sure, but he throws big parties. He was born the son of a poor farmer, but Dan Cody, a ‘debauched’ mining magnate, took him under his wing at first, and then a Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfshiem did. ‘Foul dust’ floats in the wake of his dreams.
The other spit is more exclusive and old money: East Egg. Tom lives there, Nick’s classmate at Yale and a star footballer there. He cheats on his wife Daisy (who knows it) and only cares about his polo ponies and mistresses — the most recent of which is Myrtle.
Daisy had been engaged to Gatsby before marrying Tom after Gatsby was delayed in Europe several months after the war ended. And now Gatsby thinks his money will help him get Daisy back now that he’s now a high-value man. So while Nick has an affair with Daisy’s friend Jordan, Gatsby has an affair with Daisy.
After it’s revealed, Tom and Gatsby confront each other, and Daisy can’t say which man she loves for sure. Daisy then hits Myrtle while driving Gatsby home after the confrontation because Myrtle thought it was Tom’s car and ran out to elope with him.
Gatsby won’t say Daisy was driving, so Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, Wilson, that Gatsby was driving. Wilson then shoots Gatsby before shooting himself. Nick knows the truth but won’t say it, and Tom and Daisy move on with their life together:
‘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.’
Each main character thus explores an aspect of the dysfunction of sex at the outset of modernity. Gatsby, for example, is the man-child who refuses to grow up because he wants sex without responsibility. He doesn’t really love Daisy. He’s just in love with the idea of love. He can’t commit, and Daisy’s daughter with Tom terrifies him.