This Great Gatsby Cover Tells It All

A powerful snowstorm in January 2018  permitted me the opportunity, as the Coordinator of the Classic Book Club near Richmond, VA, to re-schedule our discussion of The Great Gatsby to January 4, 2019.  I felt this was fortunate, as I have a keen interest in this book and have either previously participated in or led many groups considering F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Classic. Each time I have approached this book, I have discovered new insights into its characters, themes, writing style, dialogue, cultural context, and textual history. It has often been said that you can’t judge the greatness of a book by its cover. But in the case of this book, you might ask if you can judge the greatness of its cover by the book it helped to inspire. Thus, one focused way of unlocking some of the keys of The Great Gatsby is to reflect on the symbolic meanings of the images of its iconic book cover ( see the lead photo of this article and below).

As the theme of our book club and this site is, “A Classic Book Keeps Speaking to Us Long After It is Written, “I started off of our discussion with a look at how Gatsby’s book jacket, by the Spanish artist Francis Cugat still speaks to us. I  think that the cover reveals almost everything we need to know about the tone,  the fate of the characters, and the major theme of this book. The Scribner publishing firm decided to bring the book cover back at the same time they decided to republish the book, in the early 1960s, after it had gone out of print for nearly 40 years.  In a 1991 essay, publisher, Charles Scribner III called Cugat’s cover “the most celebrated and widely distributed jacket art in twentieth-century literature, and perhaps of all time.”  What is most remarkable about this is that “Fitzgerald saw the cover before his manuscript was finished” (Chris Eder, Bookstr.com, 5 Oct 2017).  Eder writes that when Fitzgerald first saw Cugat’s artwork, he was interested in using it for his book. Consequently. he asked his editor, Maxwell Perkins, to secure the rights to use it exclusively for him. Since it has been re-issued the cover has been part of over 25,000,000 copies sold worldwide.  Matthew J. Bruccoli, in his introduction to the 1991 “Authorized Text,” speculated that Fitzgerald may have taken key ideas from the cover and written them into his novel. Since the cover came before the book was published, it would be hard to explain how it couldn’t have influenced Fitzgerald’s writing – since there are several key story elements and themes that can be observed on the dust jacket.

Our book members jumped into this discussion by noting that the blue background took up the largest area of the cover, suggesting that the disembodied eyes and mouth are somewhat ethereal, just like they are floating in space. The heavy blue background, perhaps suggests that this book will emphasize the blues, or characters down on their luck. The eyes are gigantic in proportion to the face and they are looking down on the amusement park in the lower part of the book cover. A central idea of the first half of the book is the glamorous, amusement park-like parties Gatsby held to attract the beautiful society people of New York. However, his motive was to recapture the interest of his lost lover – Daisy. On the left side of the amusement park, we can view a green light at the end of the dock. Those who have read the book, readily recognize that the green light is symbolic of Gatsby’s longing for Daisy’s love. The amusement park could also be a representation of the dazzling, but fleeting unchecked hedonism of the jazz-age of the 1920s.

The bright red lipstick confirms that the character depicts or symbolizes an incomplete woman, without ears, nose or a body. Yet, she is undoubtedly glamorous and made-up with heavy eye shadow. Her bright-red lipstick presents a striking contrast to the blue background. Despite her intense beauty and power, the enormous teardrop she is shedding from one of her eyes suggests that she is experiencing some profound sadness and suffering in the midst of the background celebration.  Beneath the teardrop, there is the is another faint image of a green light, Our book club participants speculated that this character is a symbolic representation of the beautiful and tragic heroine of the novel, Daisy Buchanan. Referring to her newborn child, she proclaims that the best a girl could achieve  in this lifetime is to become “a beautiful little fool.” Fitzgerald later stated that he put this line in his book after his famous wife, Zelda, blurted it out it after their daughter, Scottie was born.

                                             “That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful fool” (Daisy Buchanan/Zelda Fitzgerald)

I  suggest that this teardrop and the line spoken by Daisy about her daughter is a central theme for all the female characters of this book. From her point of view, women are only valued in this world for their beauty, and they are happiest when they are ignorant of how mistreated they are. Thus, the teardrop surrounded by a blue background symbolizes the profound sadness and foolishness that each beautiful woman will experience in her life: Daisy is trapped into marrying a man she could not love or leave; Myrtle is trying to take away Daisy’s husband to bring more excitement into her life, but she is then killed by a car that recklessly driven by Daisy. Another beautiful, but shifty central female character in the novel is Jordan Baker, who was ultimately “put aside” by the narrator, Nick Carraway. After a close reading of the dialogue between Nick and Jordan,, readers might agree with Jordan when she accuses  Nick of being just as careless of a driver as she is.

It’s hard to find a character in this book, male or female, who is not flawed and foolish. It becomes increasingly harder to find any character that readers can sympathize with through the end of the story. One of our participants thought that a major theme exhibited by all the characters is self-deception. They all hold themselves as being more important than we initially estimated them after we consider their deficiencies. It is most difficult to support Nick’s conclusion that “Gatsby turned out all right in the end,” when everything that happened in the story ultimately “preyed on” him. We had a major discussion about whether Gatsby was really Great, or whether his supporters are blinded by his lavish lifestyle? If he was so great, why did so few of them bother to show up for his funeral? One of our members noted the plot ended like a Shakespearean tragedy, with its twists and the mixing of humor, coincidences, and misfortunes.  Whether Gatsby was great is also a separate question than whether the book is Great. I think it is! What do you think?

In reconsidering the major themes of this novel, I now conclude that the disembodied face also on the jacket cover also suggests that the sad eyes on the cover represented a witnessing higher entity that is continually looking down on the immoral actions of these characters. Throughout the action, as they travel by train from Long Island through the Valley of Ashes to New York, and then return, they could not escape the judgment of the ever watchful eyes of the billboard of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. Though his office no longer exists, his sign still stands. Why? Perhaps those eyes and his partial eyeglasses are symbols of a once-powerful God looking down in sadness over the wasteful, immoral, and destructive behavior of society in the “Roaring 20’s” (See my earlier Litchatte.com blogs on the Roaring 20s).  Though Gatsby “believed in the green light and the orgastic future that recedes before us,” perhaps, the very Catholic F. Scott Fitzgerald could not entirely believe in it or totally reject it. His contradictory position in the novel is best represented by the narrator, Nick Carraway. I am considering writing a future article about Nick’s shifting positions. Please send any ideas to me about this or any literature related topic via this site in the reply box below. Thanks.

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