One reason that The Great Gatsby has now become a byword for the East Coast of the Roaring 20s - the decadently extravagant post-WWI era - is that Fitzgerald was amazing at creating memorable settings. Whether it's the sprawling
One reason that The Great Gatsby has now become a byword for the East Coast of the Roaring 20s - the decadently extravagant post-WWI era - is that Fitzgerald was amazing at creating memorable settings. Whether it's the sprawling luxury of Gatsby's mansion, the drunken chaos of Myrtle's apartment, or the suffocating airlessness of a suite at the Plaza Hotel, The Great Gatsby features settings that perfectly encapsulate character, mood, atmosphere, and emotions.
In this article, I'll go through all of the Great Gatsby settings, explain what role settings play in a novel, show how these settings compare with one another, and explore what symbolic meaning they have.
- Why Is Setting Important
- All the Settings in The Great Gatsby
- Great Gatsby Time Period Setting
- Comparing and Contrasting Paired Great Gatsby Locations
- Midwest versus East Coast
- Manhattan versus Long Island
- East Egg versus West Egg
- Gatsby's mansion versus Daisy and Tom's mansion
- The Valley of Ashes: Setting and Symbol
- How to Write About Setting
Why Is Setting Important?
The literary term "setting" means the time and place of a novel's events. If the characters are the "who," then the setting is the "where" and "when." This "where and when" can be very general - for example, "20th century Earth." Alternately, the setting can be each of the many different places where any of the novel’s actions occur, no matter how small. For instance, you could a imagine a domestic drama where different rooms in the same house work as different settings.
Usually, novels feature several different settings, and authors use descriptive language to explain what these times and places look, smell, sound, and maybe even feel like. Using these descriptions, we can learn a lot!
Settings help readers fully understand characters. Character backgrounds, motivations, and the pressures they feel from their environment and surrounding society, are often coded into the places where they are. For example, a 20-year-old woman in a novel set in Victorian England would be under enormous pressure to get married and have kids (this desperation is the plot of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth). Meanwhile, the same woman in a novel set in today’s NYC is going to be more worried about getting a job (the main drama in The Devil Wears Prada).
Settings develop or affect plot. Actions that are commonplace in one setting would be impossible in another. Often this has to do with what is and isn't considered acceptable behavior. Other times, it has to do with the technology, transportation, or means of communication that are available in a particular time. Many bad decisions in G. R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire happen because it takes weeks or months to get a piece of information from one castle to another - the quasi-medieval setting dictates this part of the plot.
Settings contribute to mood, tone, and atmosphere. Many novels use setting as a way of developing a particular mood. For instance, the magical yet desolate and creepy setting of the moors in Wuthering Heights creates the prevailing air of menace, imprisonment, and terror that infects that novel. Contrast this with the cozy setting of Little Women, where the March house represents the loving, close-knit, family atmosphere of the novel as a whole.
Settings are used for symbolic or thematic purposes. Sometimes a particular setting is linked to one of the novel's themes, functions as a symbol, or if used to make moral, ethical, or aesthetic judgments. For example, in The Great Gatsby, the Valley of Ashes – an industrial neighborhood in Queens – symbolizes the desperate circumstances of those who are victims of the capitalist system the novel describes.
There's a reason horror movies aren't typically set in sunny green meadows.
All the Settings In The Great Gatsby
Before analyzing the Great Gatsby settings, I'm going to briefly explain and describe all the different settings that the novel uses.
The Great Gatsby takes place during the summer of 1922. The 1920s are a period that i