White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby

This essay argues that The Great Gatsby may be fruitfully read against African American models of identity formation of the late teens and Twenties. Like Gatsby, passing and Americanization fiction render racial and national identity theatrical. Gatsbyʹs parties, given minimal attention in Fitzgerald scholarship, miniaturize the process of identity formation that characterizes the novel as a whole. Theatrical modes of identity formation are not limited to the novelʹs parvenus, however: showing how even the novelʹs elite are fully implicated in the culture of imitation, Fitzgerald refutes the possibility of any identity as "the real thing."