The character of Jordan Baker in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has long resisted interpr... more The character of Jordan Baker in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has long resisted interpretation and critical analysis; but a close reading focused on descriptive detail and historical context suggests that Baker is central to the novel’s concern with identity. Amid the racial and sexual upheavals of the 1920's, she may be the novel’s most successful imposter – a light-skinned, mixed-race woman “passing as white.” Fitzgerald touches extensively on Baker’s skin, which is repeatedly described as both “brown” and “wan” – like the complexion of many mixed-race African-Americans, known as “high yellow” in Harlem slang. Like Nick’s homosexuality, Jordan’s race is never fully revealed in the novel, perhaps in deference to conventional mores of the time. If Gatsby is a novel about the homosexual closet which is itself in the closet, it is also a novel about passing for white which itself passes for white.
The character of Jordan Baker in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has long resisted interpr... more The character of Jordan Baker in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has long resisted interpretation and critical analysis; but a close reading focused on descriptive detail and historical context suggests that Baker is central to the novel’s concern with identity. Amid the racial and sexual upheavals of the 1920's, she may be the novel’s most successful imposter – a light-skinned, mixed-race woman “passing as white.” Fitzgerald touches extensively on Baker’s skin, which is repeatedly described as both “brown” and “wan” – like the complexion of many mixed-race African-Americans, known as “high yellow” in Harlem slang. Like Nick’s homosexuality, Jordan’s race is never fully revealed in the novel, perhaps in deference to conventional mores of the time. If Gatsby is a novel about the homosexual closet which is itself in the closet, it is also a novel about passing for white which itself passes for white.
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