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I mourn the fact that the only piece we have written more or less from Warthrop's perspective (aside from a couple bits in the book that is still Will Henry retelling Warthrop's story) is some interview Rick Yancey did prior to the release of book 3 AS Warthrop. Tho it is oddly enough still kinda insightful on Warthrop's POV, highly recommend checking it out:

An Interview With the Monstrumologist

+ One of my favorite bits from it

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby attempts to critique the American Dream and the myth of meritocracy, yet fundamentally fails to do so by romanticizing the very delusions it seeks to expose.

By framing Gatsby's dream as noble, his hope as admirable, and his self-invention as audacious, Fitzgerald sanitizes the brutal truth of capitalist aspiration. The novel's lyrical prose and elegiac tone undermine its critical potential, transforming what should be a damning indictment of bourgeois hegemony into a reactionary mourning for beautiful impossibility. This failure becomes clear when compared to Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, which demonstrates that structural honesty, even from an aristocratic perspective, produces more incisive critique than progressive sentimentality.

The central issue lies not in what Gatsby does, but in how the novel frames it. Gatsby need not have been a revolutionary who dismantled class structures, nor must he have recognized the futility of the American Dream. The problem is that Fitzgerald writes a novel ostensibly critiquing the system while simultaneously structuring Gatsby's dream and romanticism as something to admire.

The reality of Gatsby's wealth, amassed through bootlegging and smuggling, is treated by both Nick and the narrative as a "taint" on an otherwise pure dream. Yet Gatsby's criminality is not a flaw; it is the only honest thing about him. It exposes the truth of all capital: that accumulation requires exploitation, that "legitimate" wealth and criminal wealth differ only in legal designation, not moral substance.

Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony illuminates Gatsby's tragedy with precision. The ruling class (embodied by Tom and Daisy) maintains power not through force alone but through cultural domination. They convince the working class that ruling-class values - wealth, status, exclusion - are universal values. Gatsby is the ultimate victim of this propaganda. He believes so deeply in the Green Light, in the promise of elite status, that he sacrifices his entire life, his ethics, and his identity to chase it.

When readers are encouraged to glorify his ambition, his hope, his dream, they are applauding the effectiveness of bourgeois propaganda itself.

Fitzgerald could not write the book that condemned the dream.

Fitzgerald was Gatsby. 

He remained enamored with the rich even as he saw through them, unable to fully condemn what he desperately wanted to join. His inability to keep his old-money wife happy, his perpetual outsider status, these biographical facts reveal why the novel's critique collapses into nostalgia.

Consider, then, The Age of Innocence. It may seem paradoxical to prefer a novel that ignores working-class struggle entirely, focusing solely on upper-class hypocrisy. Yet, Wharton succeeds where Fitzgerald fails: she portrays upper-class oppression for what it truly is, even when depicting the suffocation of someone within that class. This recalls Marx and Engels's admiration for Honoré de Balzac, a staunch royalist and conservative, whom they preferred over progressive liberal writers of their time. They valued Balzac for his analytical honesty, his accurate depiction of class dynamics mattered more than his political allegiances. A writer who describes the reality of the class system accurately, even from within the elite (Wharton was an aristocrat), proves more valuable than one who paints a progressive but false picture.

The distinction becomes clearest in how each novel treats structural determinism. In The Great Gatsby, the environment remains passive. The Green Light is merely something onto which Gatsby projects naive hopes. In The Age of Innocence, the environment is the antagonist. The heavy curtains, the suffocating seven-course dinners, the opera boxes, the unspoken rules. These are not setting but active forces. Wharton demonstrates how material conditions dictate emotional reality. Social determinism functions as the central mechanism of tragedy.

As a leftist reader, structural tragedy will always prove more compelling than individualist melodrama. While Gatsby's failure stems from systemic barriers, the novel personalizes that failure. His blindness is praised, he had hope and dreams, and isn't that beautiful? 

But this personalization perverts any substantive critique of the system. 

With Wharton, the structure itself is unambiguously the issue.

The objection might be raised that Nick is an unreliable narrator, infatuated with Gatsby, delusional, romanticizing what he cannot have. Yet in crucial moments, Fitzgerald's authorial voice breaks through, undermining the entire novel. Consider the famous final lines:

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Dismissing this as irony is impossible. The prose is too lyrical, too earnest, too elegiac to function as critique. This is Fitzgerald writing in his own voice, with full authorial weight. He mourns the dream even as he acknowledges its futility, which is fundamentally different from rejecting it. This is reactionary nostalgia, and it cheapens the novel's critical potential.

Similarly, Gatsby's transformation from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby is described with wonder, with almost mythic language about self-creation. There is reverence for the sheer audacity of the performance, the bootstrapping act of will. This is entirely different from exposing such reinvention as pathetic, desperate, or symptomatic of a diseased system.

Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra exposes Gatsby’s fundamental condition: he is a copy without an original, a performance of wealth constructed from images of images. Jay Gatsby has no authentic referent - he exists purely as simulation, his entire identity built from cultural signifiers of success he observed and replicated. The Green Light itself functions as hyperreality; Daisy is not a person to Gatsby, but a pure sign onto which he projects constructed desire. His parties exemplify this: they’re more extravagant than real wealth would ever need to be, because they’re not wealthy - they’re the performance of wealth, excess as a signifier. 

This should be Fitzgerald’s most damning critique.

That American capitalism has progressed to a stage where even identity becomes a pure commodity, where authentic human connection is impossible because we can only relate to simulations. 

Under these material conditions, Gatsby’s tragedy isn’t romantic, it’s inevitable. His dreams were always-already hollow because the system produces only simulacra, not substance. Yet Fitzgerald treats this simulation as a beautiful tragedy rather than structural condemnation. 

The prose aestheticises Gatsby’s performance, “he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent", framing his self-creation as audacious rather than symptomatic.

By making Gatsby's simulation romantic, Fitzgerald mystifies rather than exposes the violence of a system that alienates people from authentic selfhood. 

Wharton, by contrast, understands that her characters' performances aren't individual choices but structural requirements. Newland Archer's conformity isn't romanticized - it's shown as the direct result of material and social forces that make deviation impossible. The simulation isn't tragic; the structure that demands simulation is tragic.

Fitzgerald aestheticizes what should be condemned. And in doing so, The Great Gatsby fails as a critique, not because it's poorly written, but because its beauty becomes complicit in the very ideology it claims to expose.

An Essay on Art in 'A Room with a View'

Paolo Uccello was an Italian painter whose work showcases a turning point between the flat, heightened elements of the International Gothic of the late Middle Ages and the progressive perspective of the early Renaissance. One of his works, 'Battaglia di San Romano, Niccolò da Tolentino alla testa dei fiorentini' is shown in the background of a scene in director James Ivory's film 'A Room with a View', adapted from the novel by E. M. Forster. 

In the scene, the characters Mr. Emerson and his son George Emerson visit the National Gallery in London, after having met the young Lucy Honeychurch in Italy, the protagonist of the story. In London they happen upon Cecil Vyse, a 'gentleman' who, unbeknownst to them, has been engaged to Lucy. Mr. Vyse informs them of a house that is for sale in the area where Lucy lives, as they are looking for a 'cottage' in the countryside. 

This scene takes place about halfway through the film, and in it the director illustrates the main obstacle of the story: Lucy Honeychurch's struggle. Lucy is a naive upper-middle-class young woman who makes a visit to Florence with a chaperone. There she meets the English George Emerson, a working-class young man. On a walk through the Italian countryside circumstances bring them together and they embrace in a kiss. The 'indecent' act having been seen by her chaperone, Lucy is hurried back to England to avoid a scandal.  Back in her home country, she decides to accept an engagement of the intellectual, upper-middle-class Cecil Vyse. She abruptly falls back into the norms of her country and the expectations of her family, seeming to find herself in safety from scandal until the Emersons move into her area because of Cecil's recommendation. 

This setup of events is used as a background for Lucy's decision between her true love for lower-class George, who she met in Italy, but would not fit into the expectations of Lucy's upper-middle-class family, and the socially acceptable engagement to Mr. Vyse. Because her thoughts are so clouded by the norms and expectations of civilisation, Lucy herself is not aware of her choice, and Ivory illustrates the differences between true love, represented by Forster's motifs of the working class, Italy, the Renaissance and nature, and the performative, socially acceptable engagement, represented by Forster's motifs of the upper middle class, London and England, the medieval and the city. 

This contrast of options is reflected in the subtle presence of Uccello's work in the background of the scene in the National Gallery. It showcases elements of both the medieval (flat figures, exaggerated colours), and the upcoming Renaissance (a grid-like perspective, foreshortening in the foreground). The painting is part of a series of three, the others being exhibited in Florence and Paris. The presence of this Italian painting in London reflects Lucy's emotional connection to George, who she met in Florence and will now meet again in England. This connection forms a conflict in relation to her connection to Mr. Vyse. This is reflected in the event that is depicted in the painting: a battle. 

Class difference plays a big role in Lucy's dilemma, and this aspect is represented in the scene with Uccello's painting. Besides an actual battle being depicted in the artwork, societal differences are also shown in various other ways. Cecil wears a sleek black top hat, while father and son have taken off their hats and wear dark gray rather than jet black suits. Because Cecil is taller, he quite literally looks down his nose at the others in the horizontal positioning of the characters against the background. 

In their conversation, when he mentions that they are looking for a new place, Mr. Emerson expresses that he prefers the countryside and nature to the bustling city of London. Later, Vyse asks them for a card so that he may reach them about the house, but being working class, the Emersons don't have one. Instead they write down the address of the house. All in all, these details characterise the Emersons as being more grounded and connected to the natural world. Mr. Vyse, on the other hand, finds society and relations more important, illustrated by the fact that he keeps glancing at passers-by during the conversation. The characters of both 'love interests' are aptly expressed in this one scene, illustrating Lucy's options. 

The scene preceding the National Gallery scene reveals a lot about Lucy's emotional position, and the personality of the two men, and the two scenes are closely linked.  Before Cecil recounts how he met a father and son in London (and the gallery scene is shown as a flashback), he sees Lucy approaching, and compares her to a 'Leonardo', praising her because of her beauty, like he would a painting.  In the Gallery scene, George also interacts with art, but in a completely different way. While his father is talking to Mr. Vyse, George looks into the Uccello painting behind them on the wall. This difference between Cecil and George shows how the one looks at the beauty of art on a surface level, while the other looks into it, wanting to understand and explore. This contrast forms a direct parallel to the way both characters want to love Lucy: in a surface-level way, and in an in-depth way respectively. This link to their emotional relation to Lucy is confirmed when George later on says to Lucy that Cecil 'wants to own [her] like a painting.'

The act of Cecil recommending the house to the Emersons (mostly as a joke on the lower class) is also a main turning point for Lucy to reconsider Cecil as a partner. Lucy had previously put in great effort to recommend the house to others, this effort being undone by Cecil's crude sense of humour. The Emersons moving into Lucy's neighbourhood also brings George close to her again.  Thus the Gallery scene illustrates the emotional turning point for Lucy: it distances her from Cecil while it draws her closer to George. 

recently saw this screenshot in the wild and lost my mind because i knew it wasnt supposed to say girl. its ladykins. its get off the cross ladykins. i know this because ladykins is not something my brain could make up and i remember ladykins. and i was sincerely wondering if someone put in the work to censor ladykins for some inscrutable purposes but then i looked it up and