I mentioned yesterday the inept reference that Tom Buchanan made in The Great Gatsby to Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color -- which is really a scary book.
Right now I want to focus on something else -- the publisher of Stoddard's book. I've been wondering why Charles Scribner's published eugenics literature (in addition to Stoddard, they published Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race). Perhaps they were publishing whatever they thought would sell? Maybe there's something deeper here.
But then I realized that Gatsby was also published by Scribner's! So now I'm wondering if the reference to Stoddard's book (which Tom incorrectly referred to as written by Goddard, who was another of the writers on eugenics -- though his work was published by MacMillan) was really a product placement in the novel? That is, was Fitzgerald writing an advertisement for his press' book into the novel? I was talking with one of my students, Thomas Thurman, about this -- and he said, quite astutely, if Fiztgerald was serious about a product placement he would have given the author's correct name and the full title of the book. Thomas might have added that he wouldn't have made Tom look like such a fool, too. Though maybe this was Fitzgerald's effort to subtly influence readers?
Update: I see that the Financial Times has the rundown on how the movie's pushing clothes and jewelry. No word yet on whether The Rising Tide of Color appears in the movie.
Update 2: Holy Cow! Later on in the novel, it turns out that Gatsby has the Stoddard Lectures, a series of books on travel by Lothrop Stoddard's father, John Stoddard. (Never read, of course, because the pages were never cut.) And guess what? John Stoddard taught at Boston Latin School and you know what Lothrop's profession was? Legal historian. This deserves some more commentary down the road.
Update 3: You can see the handwritten page from Gatsby that deals with "Goddard" in the Princeton Library collections here.
I been pondering this post for awhile, after first reading in on my Mac. Even now that I've made my through my second Starbucks coffee, I'm still not sure what I think.
Posted by: Michael Teter | May 08, 2013 at 12:34 PM
Hi Michael, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts.
What really interests (and scares) me are Stoddard's and Grant's books. They are shocking in their boldness about the challenges to white supremacy. I'm going to say a lot more about this, I hope this summer, when Elizabeth and I get our paper into shape for workshopping. Eugenics is just one piece of a big battle over white supremacy and how to maintain it. The tragic riots and lynchings in the wake of the "Great War" are another, as was the renewed push for Jim Crow statutes and private segregation (such as racially restrictive covenants). That's the substantive part of this.
The lighter part of the post is about what the heck Stoddard/Goddard are doing in the novel. I think they convey a couple of things -- the ideas of the class of which Buchanan is a representative. (There's some great stuff in a college textbook on eugenics about how upper class white women need to have more children, based on a study of I think it was Smith graduates.) And Fitzgerald makes Tom look even more substance-less by depicting him as mistaken on the name of the people about whom he claims knowledge.
But then there's the twist: is this designed in some way to provide advertising for another book by his publisher? Maybe not -- or maybe it's a subtle jab at his publisher?
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | May 08, 2013 at 02:46 PM
I'd be more inclined to think it was a jab at his publisher for publishing that sort of thing. Product placement, while not unheard of at that time, was not so common as it is now and if it was a placement, it would have been pretty inept not to get the details right. Since Tom is not a likeable character in the novel it hardly seems like the sort of thing that anyone pushing the book would want to see as a product placement. Advertisers tend to want to put their products next to a pleasant or likeable figure, in an agreeable context, etc. There are obviously exceptions but that is the general rule. I suspect though that the most likely explanation is that it was neither a jab nor a product placement but that it just happened to come to mind because this stuff was being talked about at the time. Perhaps getting the name wrong was evidence of his lack of familiarity with the material because of distaste or rejection of it (one hopes). Or maybe it was deliberate misdirection. But he does seem to have intended it to make Tom more unlikeable which is somewhat inconsistent with the product placement idea. But who knows? Interesting question.
Posted by: Tamara Piety | May 09, 2013 at 03:01 PM