[WJMCR 6:3 June 2003]
This content analysis of a sample of advertising from Time, New Yorker, and Saturday Evening Post during the 1920s and 1930s examined the impact of the national economic conditions on advertising and its visuals. This study suggests that the impact of national economic conditions in the 1920s and 1930s on the use of ad visuals in the mainstream magazine advertisements seemed visible. Photographs were more prevalent in the 1930s. Also, the use of literal visuals was dominant in the 1930s. The difference in the use of advertising visuals was statistically significant between the two periods of time in the early twentieth century. This study supports cultural historian�s argument that advertising is viewed as mirrors of society, being influenced and shaped by the culture and society.
Advertising visual and its graphical components have long been the target of studies since marketers began to adopt full-scale marketing activities in the late nineteenth century. The important theme was how the visual appeal could be translated into an effective selling message.1 The role of advertising visuals includes obtaining attention, creating impact, and stimulating interest from an indifferent audience through conveying a main selling point of products or brands.2 Advertising visuals perform two main functions – literal and symbolic.3Literal visuals provide factual information on products or services, and symbolic visuals perform an indirect role to connect the images of products or services with the meanings that are appropriately assigned to them.
Advertising is part of the changing social, economic, and cultural environment, and its visuals might have been created in a way that could reflect those changes that people would want to adjust themselves to.4 Another way of linking advertising and its visuals to society and culture is the cultural approach to advertising. Cultural historians argue that advertising is an important window through which different aspects of society and culture can be explained.5 But also, the advertising itself can be explained to determine how it might have been shaped by society. This approach recognizes advertising not only as a window to culture but also a mirror that reflects the culture, or the cultures.6
For any specific period of time, this approach viewed that prevailing social and cultural values could have dictated how advertising and its visuals evolved around them. Based on this approach, the two economically contrasting periods, the �Roaring Twenties� and the �Great Depression� were compared through a content analysis of visual forms in the magazine advertisements to see if the ads and its visuals had reflected the underlying economic conditions in them.
Visuals in Advertising. Visual appeal always had a prominent place in advertising. The old saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words, so many advertisers usually try to visually communicate messages, rather than bog down the receiver in heavy text. Hecker & Stewart state:7
Visual recall is becoming increasingly important, and corporate symbols and advertising will need to be stronger and eye-catching to capture consumer attention. Nonverbal communication will not only become a means for drawing attention to a verbal message, but it will also become the message itself in many instances � The use of imagery, visual associations, drawings and paintings, models, visual memory devices, product and corporate symbols � are pervasive in advertising.
Visual imagery is used to command attention, stimulate curiosity, demonstrate product features and benefits, establish a personality for a product, associate the product with certain symbols and lifestyles, and anchor the brand identity in the minds of the target audience.8 Additionally, advertisers use visual imagery to enhance or strengthen the message about their product. For instance, when something neutral (the product) is paired with something that elicits a positive affective reaction (a visual), the neutral stimulus may come to evoke a positive response to the ad.9 In other words, visuals can add meaning (and subsequently a positive response) to something that is basically neutral (the product).
Rossiter & Percy10 divided visual communication in advertising into two categories of stimuli � static and dynamic. The three elements that determine static stimuli are picture size, exposure duration and number of exposures. An increase in any of these variables has been shown to increase recognition, encoding of details and development of denotative images among viewers. Although the attributes of static stimuli do not fit perfectly in measuring dynamic stimuli, this latter type also has resulted in high viewer response.
Communication by visual image is easily the most important dimension of an advertising message. Even in a medium like radio, the images produced by the listener still carry an important function.11 Visual imagery also can have an effect on textual components in advertisements, which affects brand awareness or liking. Edell & Staelin12 found that very different processing occurs depending on pictorial and verbal message congruencies in advertisements. Advertisements were more effective when the picture �agreed� with the textual message.
In 1987, Moriarty offered an effective typology of visuals in a content analysis of magazine advertising. The first category of visuals determines whether a visual is photographic or an illustration. At the next level (the crux of the current study), it is determined if visuals are literal or symbolic. If literal, they can be further subcategorized into identification (brand, logo, package), description (what it looks like, parts attributes, schematics), comparison (between two competitors, before and after) or demonstration (how to do, make, use, etc.). Symbolic visuals can use association (lifestyle, typical person, situation), association with a character or celebrity, metaphor, storytelling or aesthetics. (See Table 1)
In general, literal visuals are used to communicate factual information, so their role is to identify, describe and report details of a product. Symbols communicate through meaning. They present concepts through the use of abstract associations.
Cultural approach to the history of advertising. While much of the early history written about advertising has supported one side or another in the dispute over the direct effects of advertising on consumers, cultural history has tended to say more about American culture than advertising per se.13 In this approach, advertising is viewed as mirrors of society, being influenced and shaped by the culture and society. Technological developments, social, economic, and political conditions influence the society and, as a consequence, impact what is contained in advertising. For example, economic conditions have been regarded as important historic forces that have influenced society, industry, educational system, politics and religion.
America has symbolized �economic abundance� during the last three centuries, and that force has helped shape the American society through an institution of modern advertising.14 Potter stated, in his landmark work on cultural history of advertising, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character:
Advertising should be recognized as an important social influence and should be identified with one of the most pervasive forces in American life, the force of economic abundance. The most critical point on the functioning of society shifts from production to consumption. So, the culture must be reoriented to convert the producer�s culture into consumer�s culture. Advertising appeals primarily to consumer�s desires.
This is what he called �the social effect of advertising,� which is, in parallel but broader sense, �to make the individual like what he gets � to enforce already existing attitudes, to diminish the range and variety of choices, and, in terms of abundance, to exalt the materialistic virtues of consumption.� He argues that advertising should be directed to the stimulation or even the exploitation of materialistic drives and then to the standardization of these drives as accepted criteria of social value. In other words, advertising is part of the social, cultural and business milieu, and its achievement depends on the ability of the advertiser to predict and react to a changing society.15
Advertisements contained in the media respond in similar ways to external circumstances, so the content of advertising reflects how advertisers delivered their audiences to the world.16 As such, advertising can be an important window through which different aspects of American society can be explained. But also, the advertising itself can be explained to determine how it might have been shaped by American society. This approach, called cultural history, recognizes advertising not only as a window to culture but also a mirror that reflects the culture, or the cultures.
In summary, advertising is part of the changing social, cultural and business environment, and its success depends on the ability of the advertisers to predict and to react to a changing society. In this sense, advertising reflects the society�s economic and political conditions,17 so its visuals would be created in a way that could appeal to consumers who were concerned with and affected by those societal variables.
Advertising and its visuals in the early twentieth century. Stimulated by the automobile industry, the American economy took off on a period of prosperity in the 1920s. Factory assembly lines multiplied, the stock market soared, and industrial production nearly doubled between 1921 and 1929. Americans enjoyed the prosperity, and this affluence led the emergence of mass market over a decade. Faced with a robust economy and relaxed regulation, advertising would never again have so positive a climate in which to operate. The total volume of advertising expenditures reached up to $3.4 billion in 1929 and this was almost 60% increase from that of 1919.18
During the decade, people showed an evangelical fervor in advertising appeals.19Trend showed greater emphasis on image projection in regard to copy style and visual approach, and the common theme of advertising in this era revolved around issues of lifestyle and image.20 Particularly, the Art Deco movement had a significant impact on advertising style and visuals and diversity of advertising styles became identified with this movement. Advertising visuals in this period, by and large, comprehended lifestyles of people and images of products to create impact.
The end of the �Roaring Twenties� was signaled by the stock market collapse of October 29, 1929, a day known as �Black Tuesday.� Even though few Americans had stock market holdings, most of them were greatly affected by the Great Depression that followed.21 Between 1929 and 1933 the Gross National Product (the sum of all goods and services produced in the U.S.) fell from $103 billion to $55.7 billion. Also, the advertising budgets fell from $3.4 billion to $1.3 billion, a drop of 62%. Bank failed, factories closed, railroads went bankrupt, farmers fell into desperate straits, and the white-collar group was deeply impacted. Advertising was considered a tyranny of waste from top to bottom, especially intolerable in this era when everybody was going to tighten his belt.22
The Depression affected people and the society in many ways. It caused higher rate of unemployment and, in turn, low disposable income. The hardest hit was that the Depression threatened American beliefs in the future of the country and the capitalist economic system.23 Even though many advertising agencies and corporate advertising departments increasingly engaged in a struggle for survival after the market crash, even steeper declines in advertising expenditures and revenues were brought in this era.
The look and content of advertising in the early 1930s were affected by economic and professional concerns.24 Advertisers eventually replaced color and illustrations with extensive text in a multiple of typefaces to grab attention. Louder headlines, strident hard-sell copy, and gross exaggerations appeared as pseudoscientific arguments and appeals to emotion. Advertising capitalized on consumers� intensified economic and personal insecurities with this hard-sell approach. Ads looked depressed compared to lavish, colorful, and imaginative ads of previous decade. This trend had been prevailing until World War II, which ended the Depression.
The criticism argues that creative leaders in the 1920s pursued their own nonrepresentative tastes, and they often made the mistake of trying to escalate the public�s taste of using artistic language that was too toney and abstract for their audience. However, it seems that advertising creative had employed some generalizable visual strategies in their advertisements to create impact on the audiences. Similarly, in the 1930s, which can be represented as the time of depression, it is suggested that economic and professional concerns largely affected the style and content of advertising.25
A consideration of the function of advertising visuals in conjunction with the social and economic changes during the 1920s and the 1930s suggests several research questions about the types and functions of visuals in print advertisements in the 1920s and the 1930s, the following research questions are suggested:
RQ #1. What were the main categories of products advertised with visuals during these periods?
RQ #2. What type of advertising visuals (photographs or illustrations) dominated these periods?
RQ #3. What were the important functions of advertising visuals in the 1920s and the 1930s?
RQ #4. Was there any relationship between the type of visuals and their functions?
RQ #5. In each category of the function, what were the prominent uses of visuals? (e.g. for literal visuals, identification or demonstration, and for symbolic visuals, association or metaphor)
It is hypothesized that the economic and social conditions that prevailed in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s will be reflected in the visuals used in magazine advertising. Specifically, advertisements in the 1920s are expected to perform more symbolic functions while those in the 1930s did more literal functions. Consequently, the use of visuals for each of the two categories, symbolic and literal, is expected to be significantly different between two eras, 1920s and 1930s. The literal functions, such as identification, description, comparison, and demonstration, are expected to be the focus of advertising visuals in the 1930s, while the 1920s� advertising visuals performed more of such symbolic functions as association, metaphor, storytelling, and aesthetics.
To study the most interesting and challenging research problems, which are those about the causes and effects of communication, content analysis, a research tool for making inferences about the meaning of communication messages, is a powerful device to assess �average� of a culture or a social system in general.26 Berg27also suggests that content analysis may focus on either quantitative or qualitative aspects of communication messages. Especially for the study of advertising, a quantitative content analysis can move beyond counting to deal with the meanings that advertising attaches to prevalent culture by including latent variables such as contextual and societal variables that are not physically present and countable.28In this regard, quantitative content analysis may be one of the appropriate approaches to assessment of the cultural impact of the societal changes on advertising.
This study applied content analysis to chart functions of visuals in magazine advertisements of the 1920s and 1930s. The goal of developing sampling frames was to select magazines that would represent a wide range of readership and demographic categories. Three mainstream magazines were, therefore, selected; Time, New Yorker, and Saturday Evening Post (See Table 2 for the most recent target audience, circulation and editorial content of these magazines).
Time, which Henry Luce and Briton Hadden started in March 1923, was chosen for the study, because it was felt that it was a �mainstream� publication that was extant almost 80 years ago and still on newsstand today. Because of the change in frequency of publication by Saturday Evening Post from a weekly to a bi-monthly in recent years, it was not at first considered. However, this problem was outweighed by the fact that Saturday Evening Post was probably the strongest weekly magazine29 and was almost symbol of the country itself.30 Also, New Yorker was examined for this study, because it was felt that �it is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience and thereby will escape an influence which hampers most national publications. It expects a considerable national circulation, but this will come from persons who have a metropolitan interest.�31
To analyze approximately the same number of advertisements from each magazine, we employed a quota sampling procedure. Four issues of each magazine from the years 1927, 1928, 1929, 1935, 1937, and 1939 were selected for a total of seventy-two issues. Since Time and New Yorker did not deliver enough advertisements until the latter years of the 1920s, advertisements appeared in the 1927, 1928, and 1929 were collected to represent the 1920s. For ensuring enough time difference between the two periods, years of 1935, 1937, and 1939 became the sampling frame years of the issues for the 1930s. Beginning with a random selection of January, February, or March, the first issue of every third month was systematically included in the sample. Similarly, every fourth full or double-page display advertisement was included, counting from a randomly chosen starting point. A total of 334 advertisements was collected.
Advertising visuals were grouped together in three ways: by product category, by its execution type (photograph or illustration), and by function in advertising. In order to sort them by types of product, we established nine segments of product categories: auto or auto-related (including tire, gasoline, and motor oil), financial service (including bank, insurance, and other financial services), home electronics, food, beverages (including beer and other liquors), cigarette, clothing, household miscellaneous goods and others (including personal care, furniture, travel, etc.). Illustration and photograph were the two main categories of visual type while some of them used a combination of illustrations and photographs. The functions of visuals were divided into two broad categories: literal and symbolic. Literal visuals were divided into identification, description, comparison, and demonstration. Symbolic visuals included association, association with a character or celebrity, metaphor, storytelling, and aesthetic. The author of this paper, who had worked as an advertising manager for several years, coded all ads. For checking coder reliability, we used Scott�s pi. Twenty-five ads that were not included in this study were coded twice to get the Scott�s pi. The coder reliability of each coding category ranged from 78% to 87% (i.e. 87% for functions of visuals, 82% for type of visuals, and 78% for sub-function items).
Advertising both in the 1920s and the 1930s was led mainly by automobile industry. Table 3 summarizes types of product categories examined in this study.
Automobile ads, combined with tire, battery, and motor oil ads, accounted for about 31% of all advertised products in three magazines in the 1920s and the 1930s. Auto or auto-related ads were seen on every other page of magazines in this era. Ads of Plymouth, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Cadillac, and other brands frequently appeared in a classical style along with Kelly Springfield tire ads, which was one of the outstanding tire campaigns that ran from 1918 to 1931. The second most frequent product type was insurance and financial services. Particularly, in the 1930s, when people suffered substantially from shortage of disposable income, several types of financial services often appealed to those who needed financial aids.
In response to dramatic increase of demand for radio and refrigerator, home electronics business owners became one of the dominant advertisers in this period, as were food marketers. Of course, our indispensable necessities for everyday life, such as clothing, food, and drinks, which were not much sensitive to the changes of economic condition, followed home electronics. As with the financial service industry, a significant change in advertising volume between the 1920s and the 1930s was identified in the category of household miscellaneous goods, such as chair, desk, furniture, heater, watch, clock, lamp, carpet, and the like. The ad frequency within this category radically dropped from 16% to 9% of the total volumes. As disparity in wealth became severe problem, the relative poor had to reduce their consumption of goods or services that were not always required for their everyday lives. Interestingly, the liquor ads increased from 5% to 16% (moving from tied for last to second) during this period, indicating a considerable shift in the type of products advertised between these two periods (Spearman�s r = .39, p<.20). This might reflect a desperate affective state, which could be explained by the surge of financial crisis in the 1930s.
Table 4 and Table 5 crosstabulates the two periods of time with types of ad visuals used.
There was a significant difference in the use of photographs and illustrations during the 1920s and 1930s (Chi-square=17.295, d.f.=1, p<.000). The percentage of ads that contained photographs rose during this period. In the 1920s, photographs appeared in only 28% of all ads while illustrations were used in 72% of ads. But the ratio changed to 50 to 50 in the 1930s.
Two factors, at least in part, may explain to this ratio change: the increase in importance of realistic impression and spread of the use of photographs in ads. In the 1930s, advertising capitalized on consumers� intensified economic and personal insecurities with hard-sell approach, which emphasized louder headlines, strident hard-sell copy, and identification and description of the product.32 The result was a dramatic increase in the use of photographs rather than illustrations because the focus shifted to real impressions of the product rather than depiction of product personality or image. Another factor contributing to the increased use of photographs could have been an effort to reduce production costs because illustrations would usually take more time and labor, and, in turn, more cost than photographs. A recent study shows that almost 97% of print ads used photography rather than illustrations for realistic description of impressions of products or brands.33 The percentage change in the use of illustration in Saturday Evening Post was tremendous, declining from 83% in the 1920s to 38% in the 1930s.
Typical uses of photographs and illustrations in the 1920s can be seen in the Chrysler ad in the May 7th 1928 issue of Time and the Plymouth ad in the July 10th 1937 issue of Time. Chrysler tried to appeal to consumers� feeling, showing its �72� Sport Roadstar in an artistic illustration, while Plymouth wanted to demonstrate the actual scene of an inspector�s careful scrutiny of all door pulls and window-lift handles.
Table 6 shows that there was a significant difference in the role of visuals between the 1920s and the 1930s (Chi-square = 12.704, d.f. = 1, p < .000). A two-step comparison attempted to determine the difference in the use of literal and symbolic visuals in the 1920s and the 1930s (See Table 6). First, in the 1920s, literal visuals only accounted for 43% while symbolic visuals made up 57%. In the 1930s, literal visuals increased to 59% while symbolic visuals decreased to 41%. The other way is to compare among segments of role of the ad visuals. Association took the first rank with its usage level of 28% of the total visual ads in the 1920s. It decreased to 12% in the 1930s. On the contrary, in the 1930s, description increased to be involved in 33% of the total ads examined in this study although it only made up 22% of total ads in the 1920s.
In addition, Table 7 shows that the percentage of illustrations used in literal advertisements was less than those used in symbolic advertisements. This suggests that illustrations were more appropriate visual type for symbolic functions. A Chi-square analysis of the difference in the use of illustrations and photographs for literal and symbolic visuals found that there was a statistically significant difference between literal and symbolic visuals (Chi-square = 3.954, d.f. = 1, p < .049).
The association function of the visual represents an effort to relate the product with consumers� lifestyle, typical person�s character, and everyday use situation. It is an indirect way of identification or description of the product to persuade consumers to try their products. It never wants to directly describe or identify product characteristics or its usage, but it usually entices consumers to try the product through indirect explanation of potential consumers� lifestyle and situations in which the product is certainly tried. In the 1920s, when a typical person had disposable money, the advertisers could not successfully persuade them to buy only with direct explanation or description of the product. Rather, they needed to appeal to their consumers with much more sophisticated use of language or visuals. Hard copy or big headline was never better than soft copy and artistic visuals because consumers were fully supplied with various kinds of products, with which they could enlarge their choices of decision.
An illustrative example using association function of visuals is the Camel ad in the first December issue of Time magazine in 1927. This ad tried to associate Camel with a group of people who were enjoying the beautiful rural scenery in the winter season. It was stingy in using copy and never tried to use all the space reserved for visuals and copies. Rather, it just tried to maximize the effect of minimal use of copy and picturesque illustration.
The soft sell approach, however, faded when the stock market collapsed in 1929. In the 1930s, demonstration and identification became the two main functions of advertising visuals in part because consumers might have considered product characteristic and price more than anything. This may be due to their lack of money to buy, time spent on decision and enthusiasm toward search for upscale and sophisticatedly advertised products. Advertisers wanted to give a direct message. They had to identify what their products were, describe as may advantages as possible, and distinguish the features of their products from competitor�s products.
In the 1930s, advertising creative directors became more concerned with literal roles of visuals such as identification, description, comparison and demonstration. Table 8 shows this point very well. Out of 157 visuals, sampled from the 1930s ads, almost two thirds contained literal visuals.
Such hard-sell approach dominating advertising space in the 1930s can be exemplified by the Plymouth De Luxe Four-Door Touring Sedan ad, which appeared in Time, in the second week of May 1939. The visual of this ad was primarily used to show advantages of lower mileage, space advantage and low price, using hard copy and actual photographic description.
When advertisers thought that they needed to appeal to consumers� rationality, they used literal visuals, and, conversely, when they thought that they needed to appeal to consumers� emotions they used more symbolic visuals. This is how the contrasting application of two conflicting role of ad visuals looks like. When this result is connected to the types of ad visuals, photograph vs. illustration, it becomes evident that the rational approach employed more photographs while the emotional approach embraced illustrations more. In other words, in the 1920s, when advertisers felt that it was better to make mostly emotional appeals to consumers, symbolic visuals using illustration could accomplish the goal better. On the contrary, in the 1930s, literal visuals using photographs better served advertisers� goal to make rational appeals to more practical.
This study suggests that the impact of national economic conditions in the 1920s and 1930s on the use of ad visuals in the mainstream magazine advertisements seemed visible. As expected, photographs were more prevalent in the 1930s than the 1920s. Also, the use of literal visuals was dominant in the 1930s, when advertisers wanted to speak in detail about the product advertised to persuade the obstinate consumers. In particular, rather than providing image or feeling associated with products, extra efforts had been made to identify and describe their product and their characteristics. All these were found significantly different between the two contrasting periods of time in the early twentieth century. Presumably, one of the fine indicators of social condition, the economic condition dictated how advertising uses its visuals to persuade consumers. This was particularly predictable during the period of prosperity in the Roaring Twenties or the nationwide economic crisis, the Great Depression.
One of the key arguments of the cultural history of advertising contends that advertising should be viewed as mirrors of society, because it is influenced and shaped by the culture and society.34 The society is influenced by technological developments as well as social, economic, and political conditions and, in turn, the societal change is reflected in advertising. In line with the arguments from the cultural history viewpoint, this study supports the thesis that the influence of the economic conditions was reflected in mainstream advertising. The increase in the use of literal visuals and illustrations in the 1930s suggests that advertising reflected the changing need of consumers and society during the national economic crisis. This result was also supported by comparison of the two periods.
However, interpretation of the results of this type of content analysis always requires a special caution. Rarely are there single-cause phenomena. Obviously, there would be some other factors that might explain the changes in the use of visuals in advertising. New movement of design might have contributed to this trend in that they emphasized simple forms, quality materials, sound construction and, importantly, adding colorful decoration only to satisfy prevailing tastes in the 1930s. Technological development and new social values would also be considered as important variables.
While this study could not completely attribute the changes in the use of visuals exclusively to the economic conditions, nevertheless it appears reasonable to conclude that at least part of the changes were attributable to them. The function of advertising can be explained in two ways: economic effect and social effect.35 As far as the latter is concerned, the changes in nationwide economic status are worth considering as historical forces that would have affected the society and, as a result, altered what had been contained in advertising.
Daechun An is an assistant professor of Journalism at the University of North Texas. Note: This paper has been presented to the Magazine Division of the 2002 AEJMC National Conference in Miami Beach.


The Worimi have been on ‘Country’ since time immemorial.
The Dreaming is a complex network of knowledge, faith and practices that derive from stories of creation, and it dominates all spiritual and physical aspects of Aboriginal life. The Dreaming sets out the structures of society, the rules for social behaviour and the ceremonies performed in order to maintain the life of the land. It governed the way people lived and behaved. Those who did not follow the rules were punished.
The Dreaming or Dreamtime is often used to describe the time when the earth, Aboriginal people, the animals and the landscapes were created. During the Dreaming, ancestral spirits came to earth and created the landforms, the animals and plants. The stories tell how the Ancestral Beings (deities or gods) moved throughout the land creating the rivers, lakes and mountains.
Even today, Aboriginal people still know of these special places where the Ancestral Beings have been and where they came to rest.
Dreamtime Stories explain how Aboriginal people came into being and the creation of Totems, along with their links with each Aboriginal Nation, how people learnt languages and dance and how they came to know about fire.
The Dreaming did not end with the arrival of Europeans but simply entered a new phase. It is a powerful living force that is maintained and cared for.
Bayami (Great Spirit); In Worimi Dreaming this Ancestral Being, created their world.
In the beginning Bayami stepped down from the sky and created the land, formed the mountains and valleys, filled rivers with water, and created all living things. Everything Bayami created had a purpose, plants of all shapes and sizes were placed on the land, he also placed men and women on the special places he had created and made the first laws that governed the way Aboriginal people lived, that remained unchanged through thousands of years of Aboriginal life.
Bayami stayed and made sure all living things he created lived together in harmony. When he was satisfied he stepped back into the sky from which he came, where he remains now watching over his people and the wonderful place he created.
Aboriginal spirituality takes many forms practices and has been profoundly influenced by the impacts of colonialism, both past and present. For Aboriginal people, spirituality refers to ways of being, ways of knowing. It encompasses a sense of belonging – belonging to the land, to the sea, to the people and their culture. Spirituality links the past, the present and the future and can be expressed through dance, ceremonies, art and artefacts. It is an integral part of an Aboriginal persons being and is essential to their way of seeing and thinking about their world, and their connection to their Dreaming and Country.
The journeys of the Spirit Ancestors across the land are recorded in Dreaming tracks. A Dreaming track joins several sites which trace the path of an Ancestral Being as it moved through the landscape, forming its features, creating the plants and animals and laying down the Lore. Many Aboriginal communities travel along Dreaming tracks with their children, to teach them the stories of the sites. They explain and perform ceremonies to teach them about their Country and their Dreaming.
Dreaming tracks are sometimes called ‘songlines’ and record the travels of the Spirit Ancestors who ‘sung up’ the country into life. It is believed that performing the right songs and ceremonies at sites along the Dreaming Tracks gives people direct access to the Dreaming.
One of these Spirit Ancestors is the Rainbow Serpent, whose Dreaming track is shared by many Aboriginal communities across Australia. The Rainbow Serpent (Yuulangga) is represented as a large, snake-like creature, whose Dreaming track is always associated with watercourses, such as billabongs, rivers, creeks and lagoons. It is the protector of the land, its people, and the source of all life. However, the Rainbow Serpent can also be a destructive force if it is not properly respected.
The Rainbow Serpent is a consistent theme in Aboriginal paintings and has been found in rock art up to 6000 years old. The Rainbow Serpent is a powerful symbol of the creative and destructive power of nature. In most paintings of Rainbow Serpents, they tell the story of the creation of the landscape. Even today, after the rains have filled the waterholes and rivers and replenished the vegetation, the Rainbow Serpents spirit can be seen as a rainbow stretching from one waterhole to another.
The land (barray) held the key to life’s secrets. Man (guri) was given the knowledge to read the land, and for every rock (bakan), tree (wati) and creek (dungang), he found an explanation for existence. He did not own the land, the land owned him. To know the land was to know life.
Land is the lifeline of existence as we know it. Without it no community will survive. In the Goori way, it is a mother; We come from the earth, we return to the earth, we live off the earth, we seek solitude in her, we are protected by her, we dare not desecrate her, our law is enshrined in her and we carry out our rituals accordingly. Land is the starting point to where it all began, it’s like picking up a piece of dirt and saying this is where I started and this is where I will go.
The land and its environment was managed, nurtured, protected and respected by Aboriginal people in a cyclical process of birth, death and renewal that is central to Aboriginal philosophy.
This relationship ensured that the land would not be exploited. Family groups were restricted to designated areas for day to day activities, and these restrictions included areas to which access was limited by both gender and the level of instruction one had received in traditional lore.
 Lore: Acquired knowledge or wisdom on a subject such as local traditions, handed down by word of mouth and usually in the form of stories.
To Aboriginal people land is not just something that they can own or trade, it is the core of their spirituality, identity and purpose; Aboriginal people are connected to this land and always will be. The land has never just been about soil, rocks or minerals, but a whole environment that sustained Aboriginal people, their culture and practices in a traditional past and now in an ever evolving modern present.
The spiritual relationship Aboriginal people have to the land has been and continues to be deeply misunderstood by many Europeans. When European colonisers first arrived in Australia they encountered an unfamiliar land occupied by people they had no understanding of, particularly their social structures and their land ‘ownership’ system. As a result, Australia was mistakenly deemed to be ‘terra nullius’ and the land was claimed by the British.
It is sometimes said that Aboriginal people did not own the land and just wandered around. This myth has come about because the British saw no evidence of cultivation or land ownership systems. They saw no fences or barriers to show land ownership as in the European way, therefore the British concluded that Aboriginal people had no interest in the land.
Aboriginal people divided the land up into traditional lands using geographic boundaries such as rivers, lakes and mountains. The knowledge about their boundaries was communicated through carved trees, rock carvings and paintings, as well as being passed down by the Elders. The Elders would pass on their knowledge by teaching the younger people through songs, dance, art and storytelling.
Traditional Custodians of Port Stephens
The Worimi (Warrimay) have always been and remain today the traditional custodians of a large area of land, “The Worimi Nation” oral history passed down by the Elders record that the Worimi Nation was originally bounded by four rivers, Hunter River to the south, Manning River to the north, the Allyn and Patterson Rivers to the west.
The Worimi Nation was home to 18 clan groups or ‘ngurras’, with the Worimi Conservation Lands falling within the area of the Maiangal ngurra. All spoke the Gathang language.
Traditionally, the Worimi people used Stockton Bight to travel between the northern and southern parts of the Worimi Conservation Lands (WCL). We know these areas today as Birubi Point to the north and Stockton to the south.
Much of Worimi Country has changed dramatically since 1788, and dispossession has had significant impacts on Worimi people and their culture. As a result, the granting of the freehold title over the WCL means it is of particular significance to the Worimi. It is an area where the protection of Worimi cultural values has priority in Australian law, where decisions affecting Worimi Country and culture are made by Worimi people through their majority representation on the Board of Management, and where Worimi traditional owners are employed to implement these decisions.
When Europeans arrived in their country they conducted a great deal of research into the lifestyles and practices of the Worimi. They noted that the Worimi who inhabited Port Stephens were slightly fairer in skin colour, taller and of a more muscular physique than the Eora people of the Port Jackson region of Sydney.
In 1873 William Scott (source of The Port Stephens Blacks) wrote;
“The Port Stephens Aborigines were more prone to laughter than tears, seemingly regarding life as great fun to be enjoyed to the utmost”.
The Worimi are proud of their culture and heritage, their descendants still live on their traditional lands and continue to maintain their cultural practices by passing their knowledge, arts, rituals and performances from one generation to another, speaking and teaching their traditional language, protecting cultural property and their sacred and significant sites and objects.
Ngurra is a traditional word used by the Worimi of Port Stephens to identify groups of Worimi people living within their own distinctive territory. Early Europeans recorded eleven Ngurras of the Worimi Nation, however, Worimi Elders record that there were eighteen. With the arrival of European settlers, the Worimi Ngurras were dispossessed of their lands and eventually forced onto Reserves and Missions. The government policies in which families and communities were separated were more than just heartbreaking for the individuals involved – they also effectively halted the passing of cultural knowledge and lore from one generation to next.
There were 4 Ngurras of Port Stephens and surrounding areas each occupying a definite area. Two of these were salt-water groups, and two were inland groups.
Maiangal and Gamaipingal
Garuagal and Buraigal
Before 1788, there were approximately 700 languages spoken throughout Australia, with an estimated population of 750 000 to 1 million people. The Gathang is the traditional language spoken by the Worimi throughout their Nation. The Gathang language that was once spoken by the Worimi of Port Stephens would soon became unspoken with the arrival of European colonisation of their lands. When the Australian Agricultural Company established its headquarters at Carrington on the north shore of Port Stephens in 1826, the Worimi migrated toward the settlement, and began to learn the European lifestyles and language. This migration reduced the number of Worimi following a traditional lifestyle which inevitably led to the loss of their language and culture. There are many place names in Gathang language that are used to describe a particular area such as; Birubi (‘Southern Cross’ or ‘view of the Southern Cross’), Tanilba (place of white flowers), Mallabula (swampland between two mountains), Karuah (place of native plum tree) and Pindimar (place of black possums).
In the 1960s the linguist Nils Holmer made audio recordings with Worimi Elders, Eddie Lobban and Fred Bugg. From this he compiled a set of rules that describe the structure of the Gathang language that control the way that sentences are formed. Today; efforts are now being undertaken to revive the Gathang language, through books songs, dance, storytelling and language workshops.
The Worimi people lived a hunter and gatherer life. The men hunted the large animals such as kangaroos and emus, whilst the women and children hunted smaller animals and collected fruits, berries and medicinal plants. The local environment provided a variety of food (buwatja) sources during particular seasons. Although there are no major freshwater (ngapuwi) creeks (duumala) or rivers (bami) in the area, this would not have constituted a barrier to occupation as ground water is readily available in low lying areas. The estuarine, marine and terrestrial plant and animal resources are extensive and easily accessible. Their traditional knowledge of plants and animals has not been surpassed.
On the coast and in the harbour the Worimi caught fish and collected many types of shellfish including pipis, mussels and oysters. To maintain the fragile environment and because of seasonal variations, the Worimi would only stay in an area for a certain time. This helped make sure they didn’t hunt, fish or harvest an area too much so there would be food for the next season. Every part of the animal and plant was eaten or used to make things such as clothing, baskets, tools and weapons.
Carefully chosen tree branches were made into hunting weapons and utensils such as boomerangs (barrgan), woomeras (wamarr) and digging sticks (ganay). Boomerangs were made from Wild Myrtle (garrigay). Gums and resins from some plants acted as adhesives for certain weapons.
The lifestyle of the Worimi was a mobile one; they never stayed in one place for too long and because of this they constructed the most basic shelters. Seasonal changes determined which particular structure they would erect; the shelter used at the camp when the weather was cool or wet were bark huts (ganya) made from paperbark, and when the weather was hot and dry, shelters were made of bush (wirray).
In 1826 Robert Dawson (superintendent of the Australian Agricultural Company) describes the bark shelters of the Worimi as being:
“A small hut supported by three forked sticks, about three feet long, brought together at the tops in a triangular form; the two sides towards the wind are covered by long sheets of bark, the third always open. In the winter, each family has its own fire in the front of the hut”.
The Worimi, as with all Aboriginal Nations have a complex system of family relations, where each person knows their kin and their country. These extended family relationships are the core of Aboriginal kinship systems that are central to the way culture is passed on and society is organised. Kinship systems define where a person fits into the community, binding people together in relationships of sharing, obligation and responsibility in raising and educating children with structured systems of moral and financial support within the community.
The traditional meaning of a Worimi Elder is someone who has gained recognition within their community as a custodian of knowledge and lore, and has permission to disclose cultural knowledge and beliefs. The Elders bridge the past and the present and provide guidance for the future. They teach important traditions and pass on their stories, skills, knowledge and personal experiences. Elders are highly respected people within all Aboriginal communities.
Elders can be referred to by using the term “Aunty or Uncle” in the formal introduction of their name.
An artefact is anything which has been made or modified by humans. The term ‘stone artefact’ includes both a finished product – usually a stone tool – and the debris which was left behind when it was made. The Worimi used stone tools for many things including: to make other tools, for hunting and preparing food, to chop wood, and to prepare animal skins. Stone artefacts are one of the most common forms of artefacts found on Worimi country. They are generally in areas where the landscape has not been drastically altered by European settlement; these artefacts can be found lying on the surface, often in quite large numbers. They can also be uncovered by erosion, or the shifting of wind-blown sand.
Under the National Parks and Wildlife Act removal of any artefact is prohibited and carries heavy fines.
A ‘midden’ is an occupation site where Aboriginal people feasted on fish, shellfish, birds and animals. At some sites, substantial deposits grew over generations from continued use of the same area, showing some middens few metres deep. Non-Aboriginal people refer to middens as waste dumps and while this is partly true, it ignores the sophisticated cooking techniques of Australian Aboriginal people. In Aboriginal community’s middens were associated with large communal ovens. The Worimi people constructed a pit lined with stones to retain and radiate the heat of the cooking fire. When the fire burnt down to glowing coals, some foods were wrapped tightly in green vegetation and covered with more hot stones and coals and left to bake slowly. The food cooked this way retained a lot of moisture and sweetness.
After the meal, the oven was swept out in preparation for the next day’s feast and as a consequence animal bones and shell remains built up beside the ovens. Some of these heaps grew to be some metres in height and examples can be found on most riverbanks and seashores. Shell middens tell us a lot about activities of the Worimi in the past. The types of shells and bones in a midden can show the type of aquatic and terrestrial food sources that was used, and the time of year when Worimi people used it. Shell middens are generally located around sandy beaches and dunes; some are also located around estuaries, swamps, tidal creeks, rivers and lakes. Charcoal from campfires and pipi shells are mostly found in middens on the Worimi Conservation Lands. Some middens also contain artefacts and tools made from stone, while others contain fishhooks made from bone or shell. Middens are usually located in the best possible spot – a pleasant place, that’s easy to get to, where there are plenty of shellfish. They are often found close to fresh water on a level, sheltered area.
Flaked Stone Tools
The flaked stone tools were made by hitting a piece of stone, called a core, with a ‘hammer-stone’. This would remove a sharp fragment of stone called a flake. Both cores and flakes could be used as stone tools. New flakes were very sharp, but quickly became blunt during use and had to be sharpened again by further flaking, a process called ‘retouch’ providing a distinct difference between a simple rock and an artefact. The best types of stone are rich in silica, hard and brittle. These include quartzite, chert, flint, silcrete and other stones with fine grained qualities.
The Worimi quarried such stone from outcrops of bedrock, or collected them from rivers and streams. Many flaked stone artefacts found on the Worimi Conservation Lands do not occur naturally in the area therefore the cores would have been carried long distances.
Canoes (guuyang) were made from the bark of the Stringy-bark tree (bana). Using a stone axe to cut the particular shape of the canoe the bark would be carefully prised from the tree by their spears and immersed in water then passed over a hot fire to cure and shape the bark. Most canoes were generally 15 feet in length and each end bound with vine and plugged with clay (barray), a small fire (watha), burned on a bed of clay at the back of the canoe. Their paddles (walung) were made of seasoned hardwood and were shaped like a large spoon. They were used in a kneeling position from the middle of the canoe.
The Worimi accessed fresh ground water from the low-lying areas around the Port. Freshwater (ngapuwi) was also accessed from permanent seepages from the rocky hillsides and headlands. A favoured location used by the Worimi for accessing fresh water is a waterhole at Karuah known as the ‘dam’ and a natural spring at Salamander Bay. The Worimi also used water (bathu) for the leaching out of poisons from certain plants prior to consumption. For example, the nuts from the Burrawang Fern, a form of Cycad, were used as a source of flour to make damper type bread. Although high in nutritional value, about 43% carbohydrates and 5% protein, but in the raw state they are very toxic. To render the plant edible, the nuts were left to leach out the poison in running water for several days.
Water was also used in the manufacturing process of tools and weapons. The sharpening of points or wearing of edges was necessary. To ensure there was a continuous availability of water to meet these and other needs, small wells were often made in rock (giba) surfaces.
The Worimi used fire (watha) for warmth, providing light, cooking, hunting, protection from evil spirits (guwiyn), communications, ceremonial applications, medical applications, manufacturer of weapons and tools, and as a tool itself in altering the landscape. Through a process, called fire-stick farming, the vegetated landscape was undoubtedly changed.
Continuous burning turned forests into grasslands and increased the carrying capacity for edible grass-eating animals such as kangaroo (wambuyn) and wallaby (barrin). Nearly all the larger native animals were grass eaters. Apart from the advantages for hunting and food gathering yielded by the fire-stick farming processes, an additional gain was that large masses of undergrowth were not able to build up. Thus, the risk of fire to the community was minimised.
Many Australian plant species are relatively fire-resistant and some rely on fire and extreme temperatures for germination.
Stone (giba) was used to make implements. It was also used for food preparation and cooking. Common implements made of stone were axe heads, scrapers, knives, chisels and spear heads. The Worimi manufactured their tools in different locations, such as Stockton Beach, Birubi, Soldiers Point and Karuah. The nature of their lifestyle ensured that stone work was done on site with only the finished product being carried away. Geographical variations in availability of differing stone types led to ongoing trade, enabling all groups to benefit from the comparative advantage one might hold.
The Worimi preferred the marine resources; such as fish (makurr), oysters (ninang) and pipis (bitjagang), however, their pattern of exploitation was associated with the seasonal availability and the relative abundance of other food sources, such as kangaroos (wambuyn), wallaby (barrin) as well as vegetable foods, such as the gigantic lily (bulungiyan) and wild yams (wambay). A favourite food that the Worimi considered a delicacy was the Cobra (nyumarr) a worm mostly found in the mangrove trees.
The environmental richness of the estuaries and coastline confirmed that the Worimi had a variable and readily available food resource. The abundance of marine sources of food in summer (garrwaayn) tended to make the Worimi more relaxed during the summer months.
There was an abundance of seafood both inside and outside the Port, which the Worimi accessed during different seasons. Aquatic resources inside the harbour were a staple component of their diet, primarily in the form of fish (makurr) and oysters (ninang). On the seaward side of the Port, the Worimi collected seafood along the coastline from Fingal Bay, to Birubi Point through to Stockton. This included several species of fish, crustaceans and shellfish.
Aquatic foods included;
Fish – makurr
Mullet – biiwa
Flathead – darawang
Bream – gupirr
Jewfish – djarrawarra
Pipi – bitjagang
Oyster – ninang
Crab – dijiraa
Lobster – wira
Prawn – banung
Although there was a preference for the aquatic foods, the terrestrial foods were not neglected but formed a supplement and variety to their diet which were accessed during winter (dhakarr). They would venture inland in the colder conditions of winter to hunt for kangaroo (wambuyn) and wallaby (barrin). Of all the land animals, the kangaroo and the wallaby were the preferred meat when hunting, however, they considered the possum (wathu) a delicacy and were only eaten on special occasion.
Terrestrial animal foods included;
Kangaroo – wambuyn
Wallaby – barrin
Possum – bilu
Carpet Snake – dhungiyn
Emu – mitukit
Echidna – miriki
Goanna – wurran
Flying Fox – gandjiwang
The Worimi also accessed a variety of bush food for their dietary needs. The wild Native Plum (garuwa) and the Lilly Pilli (buranggirrbang) were highly sought after. The wild yams (wambay) a common vegetable tuber of a slender vine that flourished in the scrubby gullies were dug up by the women with their yam sticks (ganay). The tubers vary in thickness to 5cm and are up to 20cm in length and were baked in the ashes.
The apple berry (garamalay) is an oblong berry, 2 cm long and 1 cm wide grows on a small vine and forms in summer. The fleshy green fruit turns yellow when ripe. Fruit is eaten raw when it has fallen to the ground, or roasted if still green. The skin is hairy and similar to peach and the fruit has a sweet flavour similar to kiwifruit.
The roots of the Swamp Fern (bangwaal) were soaked, roasted and pounded to make flour then baked into a form of bread. The young flowering spikes of the Gigantic Gymea Lily (bulungiyan), after a long soaking in water were roasted prior to consumption.
The Bush honey (girrga) was extracted from the hives via the use of a small axe (magu) however; they favoured the honeycomb as a great delicacy as opposed to the pure honey.
The flowers of the Grass Tree (bumiray) and the Golden Wattle (batjigay) were also used as a valued source of sugary carbohydrates.
The leaves of the Native Hop Bush when crushed were used for toothache and the relief of fever.
The crushed leaves of the Sally Wattle Bush (gupang) were used to poison the water and stun fish for easy capture.
The soft bark of the Paper-Bark Tree (bilbuuribith) was used as bandages, bedding, shelters and food wrap.
Coolamons (gulaman) were made of wood or paperbark and were used for carrying food, water and even babies.
The juice from the leaves of the Pigface plant (gaarkula) when mixed with water was used to treat diarrhoea, dysentery and stomach cramps. The leaf juice was also used externally, much like Aloe Vera for burns, abrasions, open cuts, grazes, mosquito bites and sunburn.


Often, readers of this novel confuse Nick’s stance towards those characters and the world he describes with those of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s because the fictional world he has created closely resembles the world he himself experienced. But not every narrator is the voice of the author. Before considering the “gap” between author and narrator, we should remember how, as readers, we respond to the narrator’s perspective, especially when that voice belongs to a character who, like Nick, is an active participant in the story. When we read any work of fiction, no matter how realistic or fabulous, as readers, we undergo a “suspension of disbelief”.
The fictional world creates a new set of boundaries, making possible or credible events and reactions that might not commonly occur in the “real world”, but which have a logic or a plausibility to them in that fictional world. In order for this to be convincing, we trust the narrator. We take on his perspective, if not totally, then substantially. He becomes our eyes and ears in this world and we have to see him as reliable if we are to proceed with the story’s development. In The Great Gatsby, Nick goes to some length to establish his credibility, indeed his moral integrity, in telling this story about this “great” man called Gatsby.
He begins with a reflection on his own upbringing, quoting his father’s words about Nick’s “advantages”, which we could assume were material but, he soon makes clear, were spiritual or moral advantages. Nick wants his reader to know that his upbringing gave him the moral fibre with which to withstand and pass judgment on an amoral world, such as the one he had observed the previous summer. He says, rather pompously, that as a consequence of such an upbringing, he is “inclined to reserve all judgments” about other people, but then goes on to say that such “tolerance . has a limit”.
This is the first sign that we can trust this narrator to give us an even-handed insight to the story that is about to unfold. But, as we later learn, he neither reserves all judgments nor does his tolerance reach its limit. Nick is very partial in his way of telling the story about several characters. He admits early into the story that he makes an exception of judging Gatsby, for whom he is prepared to suspend both the moral code of his upbringing and the limit of intolerance, because Gatsby had an “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness”.
This inspired him to a level of friendship and loyalty that Nick seems unprepared to extend towards others in the novel. Nick overlooks the moral implications of Gatsby’s bootlegging, his association with speakeasies, and with Meyer Wolfsheim, the man rumored to have fixed the World Series in 1919. Yet, he is contemptuous of Jordan Baker for cheating in a mere golf game. And while he says that he is prepared to forgive this sort of behavior in a woman: “It made no difference to me.
Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame too deeply – I was casually sorry, and then I forgot,” it seems that he cannot accept her for being “incurably dishonest” and then reflects that his one “cardinal virtue” is that he is “one of the few honest people” he has ever known. When it comes to judging women – or perhaps only potential lovers – not only are they judged, they are judged by how well they stand up to his own virtues. Nick leaves the mid-West after he returns from the war, understandably restless and at odds with the traditional, conservative values that, from his account, haven’t changed in spite of the tumult of the war.
It is this insularity from a changed world no longer structured by the values that had sent young men to war, that decides him to go East, to New York, and learn about bonds. But after one summer out East, a remarkable summer for this morally advantaged young man, he “decided to come back home” to the security of what is familiar and traditional. He sought a return to the safety of a place where houses were referred to by the names of families that had inhabited them for generations; a security that Nick decides makes Westeners “subtly unadaptable to Eastern life”.
By this stage, the East had become for him the “grotesque” stuff of his nightmares. What does this return home tell us about Nick? It is entirely reasonable that he would be adversely affected by the events of that summer: the death of a woman he met briefly and indirectly, who was having an affair with his cousin’s husband and whose death leads to the death of his next-door neighbor. His decision to return home to that place that he had so recently condemned for its insularity, makes one wonder what Nick was doing during the war?
If the extent and the pointlessness of death and destruction during the war had left him feeling he’d outgrown the comfort and security of the West, why has the armory he acquired from the war abandoned him after this one summer’s events? Don’t we perhaps feel a little let down that Nick runs away from his experience in the East in much the same way that he has run away from that “tangle back home” to whom he writes letters and signs “with love”, but clearly doesn’t genuinely offer? Is it unfair to want more from our narrator, to show some kind of development in his emotional make-up?
It is unfair to suggest that this return home is like a retreat from life and a kind of emotional regression? The only genuine affection in the novel is shown by Nick towards Gatsby. He admires Gatsby’s optimism, an attitude that is out of step with the sordidness of the times. Fitzgerald illustrates this sordidness not just in the Valley of Ashes, but right there beneath the thin veneer of the opulence represented by Daisy and Tom. Nick is “in love” with Gatsby’s capacity to dream and ability to live as if the dream were to come true, and it is this that clouds his judgment of Gatsby and therefore obscures our grasp on Gatsby.
When Gatsby takes Nick to one side and tells him of his origins, he starts to say that he was “the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West – all dead now . . . ” The truth (of his origins) doesn’t matter to Gatsby; what matters to him is being part of Daisy’s world or Daisy being a part of his. Gatsby’s sense of what is true and real is of an entirely other order to Nick’s. If he were motivated by truth, Gatsby would still be poor Jay Gatz with a hopelessly futile dream. Recall the passage where Nick says to Gatsby that you can’t repeat the past, and Gatsby’s incredulity at this.
Nick begins to understand for the first time the level of Gatsby’s desire for a Daisy who no longer exists. It astounds Nick: “I gathered that he wanted to recover something . . . that had gone into loving Daisy . . . out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees . . . Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something – an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago . . . ” These are Nick’s words.
Whose “appalling sentimentality” is operating here? Has Nick reported any of Gatsby’s words – which comprise so little of the novel – to suggest that he would even begin to put his love for Daisy in these “sentimental” terms? Is not this excess of sentiment in fact Nick’s sentiment for Gatsby or perhaps Nick’s attempt at displaying those “rather literary” days he had in college? Or both? We should consider the distance that Fitzgerald has created between his presence in the story and Nick’s and their implications. Fitzgerald has created a most interesting character in Nick because he is very much a fallible storyteller.
When an author unsettles an accepted convention in the art of storytelling by creating a narrator like Nick, it draws attention to the story as fiction, as artifice. Ironically, in doing this, he has created in Nick a figure who more closely resembles an average human being and thus has heightened the realism of the novel. When F. Scott Fitzgerald turns on the heat in Gatsby, he amplifies a single detail into an element of function and emphasis that transforms neutral landscapes into oppressive prisms.
Through these prisms which distort and color the lives of Fitzgerald’s characters, we see why human’s elations are, as Nick Carraway describes them, “shortwinded”. Heat is the antithesis of Jay Gatsby. It is symptomatic of his undoing, his nemesis. As he suited up in his cool demeanor time and time again, perhaps we should have guessed that his coldly methodical five-year plan to restore the past would end up, in the sizzling heat of a five-hour showdown, as useless as one of the spent matchheads Daisy flings so carelessly after lighting a cigarette.
From midafternoon at the Buchanan palace to twilight at the Plaza Hotel, Fitzgerald’s emphasis on the oppressive heat sticks out as clearly as Gatsby’s pink suit against Daisy’s crimson carpet. It is an emphasis that has a cumulative effect of placing characters into a setting they cannot escape and into a situation that reflects their internal discomfort. The plot heats up as the setting heats up, furthering suspense while placing untested characters in such boiling heat that their lives can find expression only in explosive release or resignation.
Their tempers flare as the temperature rises and it is not until they lose their composure that anything begins to cool. In Fitzgerald’s stylish hands, heat functions to shape plot and test character. His acute recognition of the role of atmosphere in both furthering conflict and testing character is illustrated by his unwavering use of detail from first to final draft. From the beginning of these scenes to the end, we are made to feel the relentless heat as clearly as we see the green leather seats in Gatsby yellow car. Fitzgerald’s revision adds more than degrees to the hot day.
Heat serves to parallel the acceleration of conflict between Gatsby and Tom. Heat gives their conflict a further sense of inevitability. Fitzgerald does not miss his many opportunities to remind us that the heat of the moment is testing his characters, wearing away the outer veneer they wear so well, and revealing them as they struggle in a hot situation. In the manuscript, Nick rides on a train during the “simmering hush of noon” toward his luncheon engagement. By the time final copy was written, a new line was added: “The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest day of the summer”.
In the original manuscript, the conductor on the train says the word “hot” six times. In the published version, he repeats the word seven times. The constant reference to the heat creates an atmosphere of strain so that small text changes can have a cumulative atmospheric effect: Man versus nature while man versus man. The weather takes its toll on character’s moods. “Make us a cool drink, said Daisy,” in the manuscript. ‘”Make us a cool drink, ” cried Daisy” in the published version. It is a small detail.
Its significance is that so many small details like this one were included that our perception of the scene and the characters is altered. We begin to anticipate that tension will get the best of these characters. “They certainly look cool,” said Gatsby pleasantly” (of the drinks) in the manuscript. In the final version, Gatsby repeats his line “with visible tension”. When Gatsby, Tom and Nick walk out on the Buchanan veranda, which Nick describes as “stagnant in the heat,” Fitzgerald establishes the rivalry between Tom and Gatsby that will result in one becoming victor and the other vanquished by day’s end.
In the typescript, Gatsby says, “I live there,” and Tom replies, “I see. ” Revised, Gatsby says, “I’m right across from you,” and Tom says, “So you are. ” Fitzgerald establishes the face-off, positioning competitors across from one another. It is the heat that will force articulation of the conflict–it will become so unbearable that no one will be able to stay cool and composed nor to pretend that the situation is cool and comfortable. We are reminded of the “dog days” in both the original and the published version, and reminded that the Buchanan salon is “darkened against the heat.
It is because it is so hot that Daisy suggests going to town. We are told in the manuscript that Daisy’s voice “struggled on through the heat, beating against it, molding its deadly senselessness into forms. In the transcript revision, “deadly” is removed, allowing the reference to stand more simply and to blend into the text more effectively. In the manuscript, Daisy asks of Gatsby, “How do you look so cool? Tell us your secret, brother Gatsby. ” In publication, she cries, “Ah, you look so cool. ”
She repeats, “You always look so cool. Brother Gatsby,” hardly indicative of their relationship, is appropriately omitted, and we are left to realize the contrast between cool Gatsby and everyone else whose composure is wilting in the heat. In both the manuscript and typescript, Tom’s response to Daisy’s awe of Gatsby is to interrupt quickly and to order, “Get your fur coats. ” In the published version, the fur coats have been omitted, doubtlessly in view of the heat. Again heat comes into the picture before they can leave. Daisy suggests that they should smoke a cigarette before leaving.
Tom says they did that all through lunch. In the final version, Fitzgerald adds to Daisy’s dialogue, “Oh, let’s have fun. It’s too hot to fuss. ” As they board their cars, Daisy suggests that she and Gatsby follow the others in Tom’s car. In the transcript, she is described as speaking “coldly” to Tom. In the final version, “coldly” has been cut. In the transcript, they left “toward the city through the oppressive afternoon,” but in final form, they “shot off into the oppressive heat. ” Heat plays another important function.
It is important to stop at Wilson’s garage, for Myrtle (whose nerves were continually “smoldering” in an earlier chapter) to mistake Jordan for Daisy, and for Myrtle to recognize the car. Tom says he’s probably got enough gas to get to town but Jordan objects. “I don’t want to get stalled in this baking heat,” she says. Thus, Fitzgerald has provided a believeable reason for stopping at the garage, a reason in keeping with his characterizations. Missing from previous drafts is Nick’s added comment upon leaving the garage that “the relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me.
By now, we have become so aware of the oppressive nature of the heat that we are not surprised to find Nick wearing out, nor do we expect anyone else to be fresh; the weather has worked on everyone’s nerves. The unmitigating heat adds tension to the upcoming confrontation but it also delays the action so that the confrontation scene can be more fully exploited and believed. As Tom pulls out of the garage, suddenly aware of the parallel between his life and George Wilson’s, he is described at first as feeling “the cold touch” of panic. After revision, what he feels is “the hot whips of panic.
In the original manuscript, as Tom catches up to Gatsby on the road, Daisy simply says, “You go first. We’d rather follow you. ” In final form, she says, “It’s so hot. You go. We’ll ride around and meet you after. ” Once in the Plaza, Nick tells us that the room is “large and stifling,” with too few windows, and through these come only a “gust of hot shrubbery from the park. ” In the transcript this same “hot shrubbery” was the setting for a little cafe in Central Park. Just as heat represents the building up of emotions and losing of control, cool represents control.
Added in Fitsgerald’s final draft, Tom says, “The thing to do is to forget about the heat,” our first hint that Tom may be the one most able to control himself, even though he’s been portrayed as an intellectual buffoon. Nick remembers vaguely the argument that occurred at the Plaza. What he remembered vividly is that his underwear kept climbing around his legs and beads of sweat raced across his back. In his earlier manuscript, Fitzgerald said of the ballpark that “it was so hot that my underwear climbed like a damp snake around my legs, so hot that when I took off my coat, beads of sweat raced cold across my back.
Obviously, Fitzgerald knew to retain the descriptive element of heat as he moved his meeting from the ballpark to the Plaza and his hot shrubery from the little cafe to the gardens outside the Plaza windows. When the subject of marriage came up originally, no reference to heat was made. In the final version, Jordon cries dismally, “Imagine marrying anybody in this heat! ” (84). Also added: “From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up on hot waves of air. ” When Tom argues that Daisy loved him when they were married, Daisy’s voice is described as being “cold,” (88) a description missing in earlier drafts.
She also throws a burning match on the carpet. The reader recognizes that when Daisy is defeated, when her courage leaves her, her voice goes cold and the fire is thrown away from her. From this point on, there are no more references to heat. The fire in Daisy has been extinguished and Gatsby begins to panic. When Gatsby and Daisy leave the Plaza suddenly like children being dismissed from supper, even the heat of Tom’s temper has cooled, and when the scene ends at 7:00 that evening, Nick and Jordon and Tom drive through “the cooling twilight. ”
Heat is a detail emblazoned on our senses by repeated emphasis until it alters our percepton of a normal day in the city and becomes the overpowering atmosphere in which people struggle to direct or redirect their lives. The heat led Daisy to show to her husband her love for Gatsby. The heat directed this luncheon party from the Buchanan house where Gatsby felt that he could do nothing to the Plaza where he could claim his true love. It led Tom Buchanan to George Wilson’s garage where a jealous Myrtle Wilson mistook Jordon for the source of her imprisonment in her desert on the highway.
It is the heat that finally wilts Daisy’s daring , that makes her as tired as she was when she first met Tom Buchanan and saw a way out of Louisville. And it is in the heat of debate that Gatsby is handed defeat. To the rekindled romance that might have been, it doesn’t matter what happened once Daisy and Gatsby left the Plaza. To the fair-weather princess, their passions had become too heated. Theirs was, after all, an early summer love, and the fair-weather was no more.