Gatsby's Life: A Vaudeville Show

     On October 24, 1881, a circus manager named Tony Pastor staged a revue in uptown New York City. This revue was wildly successful, and most historians regard it as the beginning of the Vaudeville sensation. Vaudeville was a genre of theatre in which each show was a series of completely independent acts placed one after another. The point of the show was pure entertainment and nothing else. This type of theatre was incredibly successful circa 1880-1930, and at the peak of it's popularity, a vaudeville venue was third in the nation's most used gathering places, after schools and churches. By observing the inner workings of Vaudeville, we can make sense of the ways in which Jay Gatsby from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby achieved his fame and fortune. In many ways, Gatsby worked his way to his "American Dream" the same way a hopeful Vaudeville performer would have.

    In order to understand the similarities between Gatsby's life and Vaudeville, it is important to understand the way in which the Vaudeville business worked. Producers and managers owned certain Vaudeville "circuits", which were collections of up to 45 theaters that performers would cycle through, with every theater always having a full show of acts, but something new every time. Performers were never any one of note at first; they would literally walk in off the streets, show a producer their act if they could get them to sit down for five minutes, and if the producer liked them, he would throw them into his circuit. The rest was an upward battle for the performer. If the audience liked them, it would go noticed: they would get opportunities to play the bigger cities more, and often, they would be bought out by bigger and better producers to perform in bigger and better venues. However, the process truly was about who put on the best show.
   
     In a way, Gatsby's rise to fame is similar to that of a Vaudeville performer. He began as a no one with only a dream. The beginnings of his rise to fame can be observed during his first interaction with Dan Cody: "It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon..., but it was already Jay Gatz who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour" (98). This scene is equivalent to an actor seeing an opportunity with a big producer and taking the charge, for Gatsby puts on his "act" before approaching Cody and getting his attention. This is what sparks his entrance into the Vaudeville circuit, for Dan Cody teaches Gatsby how to perform the part of a wealthy man and entertain the crowd.

   Another important way Gatsby is like a Vaudeville performer is the way in which his "American Dream" lies in the east, not the west. Most Vaudeville performers were not from the city, or even the East; the majority were picked up from small towns out west to join the "small time", from which they worked their way up. In Vaudeville, circuits were either known as being "the small time", "the medium time", or "the big time". "The small time" usually consisted of small venues that weren't actually theaters, and the circuits included mostly western cities and rural areas. On the other hand, the "big time" consisted of circuits that ran through theaters in New York City, Chicago, Boston, and other large Eastern cities. In the same way, Gatsby started out with humble beginnings on a farm in North Dakota, and he works his way to a wealthy bond trader in New York City. However, the novel suggests that perhaps this is not where the true American Dream lies. The last line of the novel, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," suggests that going east to pursue one's dreams in the 1920's is the wrong way to go. This line seems to even be prophetic in light of the decline of Vaudeville in the early 30's; as the film industry grew in New York City, Vaudeville died out. Historians believe that if more money had been invested into these "small time" and "medium time" circuits, the lifespan would have been stretched, perhaps even through the Depression. The middle class of the west, with little access to the cinema, would have willingly payed the cheap fee to see a Vaudeville show, even if cinema was a rising industry in the east. In the same sense, there is something sadly ironic and, as the novel suggests, inherently backwards about Gatsby's dream of going east.