Compare the Portrayal of The American Dream in The Great Gatsby, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A ‘distinguishing characteristic of post-war American writing’ is the ‘disillusionment with the American system and the efficacy of individual effort.’ For many Americans, there was a growing disbelief in The American Dream and all that it represented: a ‘dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man’, that may have started at the end of WW1, ‘which shattered this vision… [of] individual effort that had been eroding since the industrial revolution’, so that by the time that F. Scott Fitzgerald came to write The Great Gatsby in 1925, this growing disbelief in The American Dream was beginning to dominate society. Although, at the time of Fitzgerald’s writing of The Great Gatsby, most of America was undergoing a period of mass-consumerism and hedonism in a post-World War One society - which is today reffered to as the Roaring Twenties. During the Roaring Twenties, mass materialism and consumerism abounded, and Fitzgerald shows us his distaste for it in the character of Jay Gatsby, who, despite his excessive and frivolous wealth, is never able to marry his love: Daisy Buchanan, which also symbolises Fitzgerald’s challenge to the idea of an achievable American Dream. Likewise, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which, unlike The Great Gatsby, is an absurdist play published and first performed in 1965, the context for the play was also a period of excessive materialism, despite the instability caused by The Cold War, The Great Depression and World War Two. Similarly, Albee’s presentation of George and Martha as a couple who lack the traditional accomplishment of The American Dream: financial, material, professional and familial, reflects his view of it as a delusional concept - typical, of an existential, as Albee believed that no person should follow a common, fruitless ideology, like that of The American Dream, even in all its aspirational, yet hard-won nature.  

Death, in both texts, symbolises the death of The American Dream. Since The Great Gatsby is a tragedy, it is not surprising that the climax of the novel surrounds three deaths - all of which symbolise the death of The American Dream. First and foremost, when Myrtle is run over as she ‘rushed out’(F.p92) into the road, chasing Gatsby’s car, which she believed to be Tom’s, it seems as if she was chasing all the material aspects of The American Dream, and that chase ended both instantly and violently. Fitzgerald then describes her body and her death in bare, graphic language, ‘her left breast was swinging loose like a flap’ (F.p.88) and her ‘mouth was wide open and ripped a little at the corners’. (F.p88). It would seem that Myrtle’s aspirations come to a brutal end, and that The American Dream dies with her. When Gatsby is killed by George Wilson we are reminded again of the futility of The American Dream as Wilson had aspired to it and achieved nothing, and then died in the process.  Indeed, Roger Lewis tells us that ‘The man who kills Gatsby is already dead when he commits the murder; Nick Carraway describes him as ashen.’ Ultimately, Gatsby’s pursuit of The American Dream led to his death, and possibly Fitzgerald’s own unhappy life, his alcoholism, his lack of wealth and his complex and unhappy marriage to Zelda, who ‘started to show signs of serious mental health disturbance in the late 1920's, and in November 1930 she began a 15-month stay at the Prangins Clinic in Switzerland’ could have influenced his disillusion with the idea of The American Dream.

Similarly, the metaphorical death of the imaginary son in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? symbolises the death of The American Dream, as the imaginary son that Martha deludes herself with, is her expression of her ambitions to achieve the familial American Dream. Her failure to produce a son, and have a successful family unit, reveals her failure to achieve the American Dream. Furthermore, Albee uses dramatic irony before the death of the son is revealed by George in order to enhance the climax of the play and in turn his challenge to the American Dream. When George says ‘our son is dead and Martha doesn’t want to know’(A.p96), Albee provides the audience with the knowledge of the news that George will tell Martha, so when George finally tells Martha that their ‘boy is dead’(A.p97) at the end of Act Two, the tension for the audience, in having waited for this moment of Martha’s reaction, is extreme. Indeed the death of the son could also relate to the title of Act Three, ‘The Exorcism’, because ridding the son from Martha’s imagination symbolises the annihilation of The American Dream from George and Martha’s lives. Albee is therefore arguing that life would be better without the pressure of The American Dream.