Gatsby's Gaffe

[steepholm]

Okay, I'm still on The Great Gatsby with my first-year students, and this is a question that came up today that I couldn't answer. I'm throwing it over to my US friends, to contemplate over the turkey.

At one point, Nick asks Gatsby which part of "the Middle West" he comes from, to which Gatsby replies "San Francisco". "I see," replies Nick, though in what tone of voice I can't say.

According to the note in one edition this reply shows Gatsby up as a liar, because of course San Francisco isn't in the "Middle West". But, given that neither Gatsby nor Nick is Mr Dumb from Dumbland, this doesn't seem very satisfactory. After all, they are in fact both Mid-Westerners, so why would Gatsby make such a stupid and obvious mistake? It would be a bit like someone from Winchester asking which part of Hampshire I came from, and my replying "Edinburgh".

So then we wondered whether "Middle West" had a wider geographical application in 1924 - one that stretched as far as the West Coast. Alternatively, maybe Gatsby was trying to make a mistake, for complex psychological reasons of his own - but even then it seems too obvious. That the mid-Western Fitzgerald thought San Francisco was in the mid-West seems still less likely; that he goofed in giving Gatsby such a stupid line, unthinkable! The only other possibility we came up with was that there's another San Francisco, possibly in Minnesota.

Which is it, Pumpkin Eaters?

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

I have always read it as Gatsby saying something patently ludicrous as a way of telling Nick to mind his own business.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of that! That's rather persuasive - although there's no particular reason for Gatsby to be sarcastic at that point. He seems willing enough to offer information about his past (albeit inaccurate) in other parts of that conversation, and the question isn't particularly intrusive.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

But of course Nick is a MidWesterner and connected to Tom and Daisy - to reveal too much is to create all sorts of hostages to fortune, simply because Nick might turn out to have his own connections to whatever place Gatsby came from.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

True. I suppose the question is then whether he arouses more suspicion by making an unnecessarily aggressively sarcastic response to an innocuous question, or by risking exposure by naming the next-door town. Since I can't decide it sitting here at leisure, I forgive Gatsby for not being able to decide on the spur of the moment.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I can't speak to 1924 geographic appellations, but it might be useful to point out that, in the early 19th century at least, the Ohio/Kentucky region and points west and north of it (and sometimes even south and southwest) were called the West, tout court. Henry Clay, for instance, who hailed from Lexington KY, was considered a Westerner. I presume "Midwest" (the usual term nowadays) gradually grew up later on as areas further to the west came to be called the West.

I haven't actually read The Great Gatsby, but from your description I'd guess that Gatsby is being sarcastic, misapplying the term deliberately. After all, San Francisco is in the West, and it's in the Middle of the West, being neither too far north nor too far south. For that matter, having noted that the Great Lakes region is actually east of the median, I sometimes jokingly refer to it as the Middle East. (Which in turn reminds me that there's a long-unsettled question of whether the real Middle East should be called that or the Near East.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

As so often, it depends where you're measuring from! Home Counties, Mediterranean, Near East, all carry their implications of what's normal. I did wonder whether there might be a difference between "Middle West" and today's Midwest, though, rather on the lines you mention - i.e. middle between north and south.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

The north/south "Middle" is not a usage I've heard. There is an old custom to refer to the region between North and South (basically MD, WV, KY, and MO, roughly the slave states that did not secede in 1861) as the Border states. But this may be fading; though I've seen it used in many older books, even to refer to much more recent periods than the Civil War, I also now find there are many people today who do not know the term.

[dru-marland.livejournal.com]

It is possible to be in one place and feel that you belong in another, just as the young me very much wanted to be not-where-I-was. A California state of mind, as it were.

[thinkum]

I like rozk's suggested interpretation.

I can't claim to be authoritative about 1920s nomenclature, but I've spent a fair chunk of the past few years working with the 1000-letter archive of my grandparents' correspondence from that period. As Minnesotans, in the late 1920s, their letters regularly refer to California as "out West", or part of "the West".

Strictly from the personal experience perspective, I've never come across the usage "Middle West" in place of "Midwest". (Although, oddly, when I read Gatsby a month or two ago as part of my letter archive research, that passage didn't catch my attention as it apparently should have! ;-))