How many Gatsby threads do we need?

Only time will tell, young Teo.

The real question is, how many Gatsby threads will be enough to redeem us?

Tom Buchanan voted for Hilary. Myer Rothstein supports Obama.

Anyway, Rauchway's totally right.

Yadda Yadda?

baa, Tom Buchanan was clearly a Republican.

Also, I have won the vital teofilo caucus. The rest of you don't count.

It was Daisy who referred to her white girlhood in Louisville, not Jordan.

His reading wouldn't have occurred to me, but I do remember reading the "our beautiful white girlhood" conversation where Tom interrupts Jordan, and stopping and thinking that something had just happened that I hadn't understood.

Of course, something that may be in play is that 'White' was a much narrower category for Fitzgerald than it is now -- Daisy's 'whiteness' could be questionable even if no one thought she had any African-American ancestry. There's a really funny bit in The Beautiful And Damned where Amory (I think) is going through the Princeton yearbooks to prove that blondes are more intelligent than brunettes. Part of the argument was the existence of the phrase 'dumb blonde' -- no one notices when a brunette is stupid, because you expect them to be. But for a blonde it's an insult.

So Tom could be sweating over the destruction of the true Nordic race by the mindless hordes of, like, Italians. And be suspecting that dark-haired Daisy bore the Mediterranian taint.

You know, I remember the pause he mentions in Gatsby, but (IIRC) I wondered if Daisy might be Jewish. Gatz, Wolfsheim,...it seemed like a thing.

It was Daisy who referred to her white girlhood in Louisville

Gosh, you're right. Thanks, jms.

I am certainly going to re-read Gatsby this weekend, but I like the reading of that scene. And the frequent use of "signifies." Not enough "valences" for my taste, but, as has been pointed out over there, "always-already" works nicely as well.

I wondered if Daisy might be Jewish. Gatz, Wolfsheim,...it seemed like a thing.

Matt Weiner has words for you, Tim.

the frequent use of "signifies." Not enough "valences" for my taste

Talking about literature makes me feel ambivalent.

That scene where Daisy is talking about how she always waits for hte longest day of the year and then misses it - that has always been for reasons have never been able to explain my favorite scene in a novel.

Reading Rauchway's post, it occurs to me that what with the Nordic and all, that Daisy might not be 'white' by having so-called ethnic roots. Italian, Hispanic, anything slightly swarthy and not worthy of a Yale man. (It could also just be her not being from the right people. Louisville ain't Connecticut.)

That she's part African-American would seem plausible, except that it strikes me as something so notable that it would be odd if it were thrown out there, even in the sideways way it was mentioned, without more being made of it.

Ah,ambivalence. I remember the particular seminar in which I realized I began 80% of my comments with "There's a way in which ...."

Rauchway's theory makes sense. But what's up with the comments on that site? I can't figure out what comments align with which commenters. (I'm using Explorer, because I'm at work, but still.)

That scene where Daisy is talking about how she always waits for hte longest day of the year

It's the same scene, you know.

Matt Weiner has words for you, Tim.

Weiner doesn't know from Jews. And my sense was/is that in all cases, we're talking about a tainted bloodline and nothing more.

15: I thought that Rauchway was contending that Tom suspected Daisy of having black ancestry, not that Daisy actually had black ancestry. There is too little textual evidence of the latter, I think.

Yea, I know it's the same scene, that's why I'm thinking of it. But the wrong noun choice there; I meant more 'passage,' I suppose.

Read the comments, folks.

I'm reading the fairly disappointing King of the Jews right now, and Arnold Rothstein comes off as more Nathan Detroit than Meyer Wolfsheim. Maybe Nathan Detroit with a little Tony Montana thrown in.

Daisy might not be 'white' by having so-called ethnic roots

Gosh, Cala, you're always prompting me to do more work. OK. According to the 1900 Public Use Microdata Sample for 1900 (which is to say, around the time Daisy was born) Louisville was around 19 percent black. It was something under 1 percent foreign born. Of the foreign born, .2 percent were from Italy and there were none from any other "swarthy" southern or eastern European countries. (56 percent were from Germany, 25 percent from Ireland.) So just on the numbers, Louisville's much more likely to produce someone with black ancestry than "swarthy" immigrant ancestry. (Caveats about sampling error apply, as do those about human error. But still, this confirms about what one would expect.)

20: Right, but even given that, wouldn't Tom be a little more freaked out?

On the third hand, there was apparently a noticable Jewish community in Louisville, from which came Louis D. Brandeis.

http://library.louisville.edu/uarc/subjects/jewishguide.html

Jews are swarthy and non--white, irrespective of actual physical features.

If I get a bumper sticker about this one, I will squeeeee again!

To balance that, from the introduction of the book Tom cites (page xiv), Nordic is not just white people, but specifically those from the Northwest around the Baltic and North Seas. Tall of stature, light of hair, fair of face, immune to the pull of the One Ring, something like that. Nordic doesn't, say, include anyone in my ancestry. But those Nordics bred! And we would count as European (page xv) or Mediterranean, which might be enough to pass but not count as Nordic.

As a side point, Daisy talking about her daughter's hair could just be her thinking that her daughter's hair is like hers when it was younger.
Lots of people who have blondish hair as kids have darker hair as adults.
-- repost

Yeah, Cala and I have been duplicating comments here as there. I guess we don't need to do that, but I will say more or less what I said there: she doesn't have to be "black" for the reading to work, it's just that she's from a good Southern family, which seems more likely to have "black" blood than any other kind of "swarthy" blood. (Even talking about this at a scholarly remove, squicks me out.)

But she's so associated with "white" I think it's meant to strike a chord. Here's what Jordan does say about Daisy and whiteness:

the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night, "anyways, for an hour!" When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside the curb....

That's three "white"s in two sentences.

Yeah, I don't see anything wrong with the theory that she has some black ancestry somewhere per se. I'm just wondering how that plays with the rest of Tom's reaction (could he be just conscious of going on and on about the Nordic race with a very dark haired wife?)

Well, this is a question about Tom's inner monologue, which is another subject I don't know anyone to have written about. Again, I'm not putting the theory that she does have black ancestry, I'm putting the theory that Tom's worried that she has black ancestry. Which is more or less what you're suggesting there in "going on and on about the Nordic race with a very dark haired wife."

The real question here is, what slogan goes on the bumper sticker?

30: Right. I get that. Would it make sense for someone from a good Southern family to have black ancestry? (White people in the south, yes. Upper class white people?)

Well, I suppose the members of a properly upper-class white family from the South would historically have had more contact (o horrid euphemism) with black people, wouldn't they.

Right, but does the offspring of the horrid contact get to marry into a top family?

I'm not sure that it would take that many generations for a family to become upper class, though. Louisville isn't Charleston.

With the passage of time or the presence of ignorance, I expect so. That's what all the anxiety over "passing" is about, isn't it?

35: I think what happened was that people went underground and reappeared as white people with no visible family -- but that wouldn't necessarily preclude their marrying into a 'good' family, or Tom worrying that that might have happened.

The one thing that I am not seeing here is how this would relate to Tom's later using throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white in his heated response to the "impropriety" of Gatsby openly pursuing Daisy. I understand that this also illustrates Tom's nativist concerns, but clearly (to me) in this case in a way not suspicious of Daisy, and it just does not seem to be where he would go to if he did have suspicions about her. (Unless you think Fitzgerald is trying for something in the realm of subconscious inversion.)

My thinking is, that is what Tom is nowadays afraid of, to the extent that at some level he worries he's already done it. Does that count as "subconscious inversion"? I don't know. Maybe racist hypochondria?

Note Jordan's reply: "We're all white here." But of course, I think we're pretty sure that Tom doesn't think so.

15:Tom Buchanan can't be Nordic, can he?
That's solid Scottish.

Technically, I think it's Scots-Irish. Or a lot of Buchanans are, anyway.

That's Nordic as distinct from Alpine or Mediterranian, and I'm pretty sure Scots and English would count. Irish might not.

Behold, my child, the Nordic man,
And be as like him as you can:
His legs are long, his mind is slow,
His hair is lank and made of tow.

And here we have the Alpine Race:
Oh! what a broad and brutal face!
His skin is of a dirty yellow.
He is a most unpleasant fellow.

The most degraded of them all,
Mediterranean we call.
His hair is crisp, and even curls,
And he is saucey with the girls.

[H.Belloc, 'Talking (And Singing) of the Nordic Man']

"Amongst the Pensylvania(sic) Germans, Buchanan is used as an Englishing of Buchenhain."

On a couple sites I googled. But Loch Lomond mostly...1500s.

One thing about this reading is that it makes one of the discourses re: passing, "you may have lifelong success racially passing, but class passing is a lost cause," which makes the NYT high school immigrants story even more depressing.

Alas, I'm too late. Also posted on Rauchway:

Gatsby, from North Dakota, is highly unlikely to be black or Jewish. Whe ND suddenly stopped being Dakota Native American around 1870, it rapidly became honky. Its population peaked around 1910 and has declined almost ever decade since then. Housing prices are very low! Buy Now! 2-bedroom houses for $7,000! Yes, the decimal's in the right place!

It's true that Charlie Christian was discovered in North Dakota , but he was from Oklahoma. Other jazz musicians from North Dakota include Mary Osborne and Peggy Lee. both honkies. ND swung harder during the days of Late Old West, but it was always white.

Gasby's father at the end of the book is a stereotypical nice old small town white guy.

I think that a more likely theme in the book is the corrupt, decadent Nordics (Daisy and Tom) vs. the pure Nordics (Gatz), mediated by the aspirational corrupt Nordic interloper (Gatsby). Tom was not only a honky but also corrupt, urban old money.

Minnesota, specifically Stearns County, was a major moonshine center during Prohibition. There certainly were real Gatz/Gatsby honky mobsters, though by and large the Minnesota people (Polish and German Catholics) were suppliers and producers and not involved in the high end stuff.

There's a phrase "touch of the brush" used by people from old white families to impugn members of other old white families with suspected secret or distant black ancestry. It'd just an aspect of the way that race or caste, in societies organized according to race or caste, gets tied into other hierarchies, and into various competitive and hostile relationships.

"Touch of the tar brush", isn't it?

The euphemism leaves out the tar, which is understood.