Caste, race and blood
The main claim of this part: a barrier of class can be crossed by performance, so Duroy wins. A barrier of birth, of “race,” cannot, so Gatsby loses.
Fitzgerald’s own ordeal
was an Irish Catholic from St. Paul, Minnesota. His mother’s family money came from the grocery business; his father came from an old Maryland family that had lost its fortune. At Princeton he fell in love with Ginevra King, a rich girl from Chicago, and her family turned him away. Zelda Sayre broke off their engagement until his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), sold. Cuddihy, himself an Irish Catholic, later applied his idea to American Catholics too, in No Offense (1978).
Gatsby’s outsider identity
“Gatz” is a German name. Many readers take Gatsby to come from central or eastern European immigrant stock. The novel never says so; this is an , and you should present it that way in an essay.
Gatsby’s business partner is , a Jewish gangster based on Arnold Rothstein. On the other side stands Tom. In Chapter 1 he repeats the ideas of a book called The Rise of the Coloured Empires by “this man Goddard”: Fitzgerald’s version of Lothrop . Tom worries that the “Nordic race” will be “utterly submerged.” The novel appeared one year after the of 1924. In Tom’s America the line between insider and outsider is drawn by birth.
Duroy: an insider by nation, an outsider by caste
Duroy is French and Catholic. In 1885 nobody in Paris would call him a foreigner. But in older France, a Norman peasant and a nobleman were not thought of as the same people at all.
- (early 1700s) claimed that French nobles descended from the , the Germanic conquerors, and that the descended from the conquered . Nobility and commoners were two races.
- In 1789 turned the argument around: if the nobles are foreign conquerors, send them back to the forests of Franconia.
- In the 19th century the historians Augustin Thierry and François Guizot wrote French history as a struggle between these two peoples. built his race theory on the same foundation.
- The historian showed that French peasants became “Frenchmen” only between about 1870 and 1914, through schools, and railways. Many still spoke . Bel-Ami (1885) sits inside that change.
- So the in “Du Roy de Cantel” claims more than rank. It claims the conquering blood.
- The old Norman warrior ethos belonged to the nobility descended from the Norse invaders, not to the peasants. Duroy gets it secondhand: from the army in Algeria, and from fighting a duel.
Why is the caste line so quiet in Bel-Ami?
Partly : polite novels did not say such things aloud. But mainly because the line was moving. After France lost the war of 1870 to Prussia, French racial language moved away from the old line between nobles and peasants. It pointed outward, at the Germans, and inward, at the Jews. ’s La France juive appeared in 1886, one year after Bel-Ami.
Duroy can pass because the new nation was absorbing its peasants. The ethnic mark falls instead on Walter, the newspaper owner, whom Maupassant presents as Jewish. Duroy beats Walter: he seduces his wife and takes his daughter. In Gatsby the pattern is reversed. The outsider is allied with the Jewish gangster, and both lose to Tom.
| The author | The hero | How the story treats him | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bel-Ami | Maupassant: Norman minor gentry, an insider | Outsider by class, insider by nation | Cold irony |
| The Great Gatsby | Fitzgerald: Irish Catholic, an outsider | Outsider by class and by birth | Tenderness, through Nick |
Primary source: Gobineau
Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races gives the theory that Bel-Ami lives inside: nobility is the blood of conquerors, and when careers open to everyone, the old castes dissolve. Duroy’s whole life depends on that dissolving.
Read Gobineau as a historical document. His theory is : modern biology rejects the idea of pure races and of nations declining through “mixed blood.” We read him to understand how people in 1885 thought about birth and rank, not because he was right.
1. Nobility as the right of birth (Chapter V)
Every people, great or small, has begun by making inequality its chief political motto. This is the origin of all systems of caste, of nobility, and of aristocracy, in so far as the last is founded on the right of birth.
2. France as conquerors and conquered (Chapter II)
To go no further afield than our own France, we may say that, in the fifth and sixth centuries, the conquered race of the Gallo-Romans were certainly better than their conquerors from a moral point of view.
3. When careers open, caste dies (Chapter IV)
After a short time, we might truly say that a distinction of castes takes the place of the original distinction of races.
In every other place where there were really any castes at all, they ceased to exist at the moment when the chance of making a fortune, and of becoming famous by useful discoveries or social talents, became open to the whole world, without distinction of origin. But also, from that same day, the nation that was originally the active, conquering, and civilizing power began to disappear; its blood became merged in that of all the tributaries which it had attracted to its own stream.
4. The upstart and the old families (Chapter II, on the late Roman army)
When they had scaled the heights of office, they found confronting them, to their intense annoyance and dismay, the ancient aristocracy of the municipalities, the local senators, who took pleasure in regarding them as upstarts, and would gladly have turned them to ridicule if they had dared.
5. Paris (Chapter V)
When Paris, whose population is certainly a museum of the most varied ethnological specimens, had finally gained dominion over the rest of France owing to the centralizing policy favoured by the Southern character, it had no longer any reason to love, respect, or understand any particular tendency or tradition.
Study questions
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Sources
- Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (1915). gutenberg.org
- John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility (1974); No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (1978).
- Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (1976).