Jordan Baker, the novel’s most liberated female character, pushes against some of the restrictions still constraining women by the early ‘20s: She’s athletic, single and goes out with various men. We all picture them in knee-length dresses. Also, Churchwell says, “skirts in the novel are a lot longer than we think they are. For one thing, the Charleston didn’t even emerge until 1923. But while later Hollywood versions of Gatsby channeled flapper style, the novel itself actually captures a comparatively conservative moment, as 1922 could be considered closer to 1918 than to the heyday of the Roaring Twenties later in the decade. The flapper was emerging.īy 1925, when Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, flappers were out in full force, complete with bobbed hair, shorter skirts and cigarettes dangling from their mouths as they danced the Charleston. “Fitzgerald is reflecting a preoccupation at the time that there were these upstart-as they would have said-these nouveau riche people who came from dubious backgrounds and then suddenly had all this money that they were splashing around.”Ī 1925 flapper.

“One of the many unintended consequences of Prohibition was that it created this accelerated upward social mobility,” Churchwell explains. In The Great Gatsby, Prohibition finances Gatsby’s rise to a new social status, where he can court his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, whose voice (as Gatsby famously tells Nick in the novel) is “full of money.” This, in turn, provoked anxiety among upper-class plutocrats (represented in the novel by Tom Buchanan). Prohibition creates a ‘new money’ class.Īs their wealth grew, many Americans of the 1920s broke down the traditional barriers of society. “The only way in which Jay Gatsby becomes wealthy overnight is because Prohibition created a black market,” allowing bootleggers like Gatsby and his partners to amass staggering quantities of money in a short time.

“The whole plot is really driven by Prohibition in an important way,” says Sarah Churchwell, professor of humanities at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study and author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (2014). government began enforcing the 18th Amendment, which banned the sale and manufacture of “intoxicating liquors.” But banning alcohol didn’t stop people from drinking instead, speakeasies and other illegal drinking establishments flourished, and people like the Fitzgeralds made “bathtub gin” to fuel their liquor-soaked parties.

Speakeasies flourished when Prohibition failed.īeginning in early 1920, the U.S. The Marlborough House, a speakeasy haven for drinking socialites during prohibition.

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