Wearing a mask and Passing for a different

• Wearing a mask / Passing for a different / an important person seems to be an essential concept in The Great Gatsby, Passing, One Is Not Born a Woman, Letter from Birmingham Jail, MLK and his Guns, Buyer’s Remorse, Alt. Everything: The Youth Market and the Marketing of Cool;

• Nick Carraway spends the first five pages of the novel describing himself as a sincere, genuine, important judge of character. Is he really who he appears to be? Is he hiding behind a social mask? How do you feel about Nick so far?

• How does the advice of the narrator’s father shape his attitude toward other people? (p. 5)
• When Nick says, “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments,” do you expect him to behave accordingly? (p. 5)
• Is Nick’s description of Tom Buchanan judgmental and, therefore, contradicting his statement? (pp. 10-11)
• Select a quotation in which a character expresses an opinion about himself/herself while behaving differently. Explain/discuss the inconsistency.

• Tom Buchanan, the upper class elitist, tends to regulate what is important in their social sphere. Is he the rough individual portrayed by Nick? Or is he hiding a soft heart inside a tough exterior?

• Speaking of Tom, Nick says that “the fact that he ‘had some woman in New York.’” What kind of morality/behavior is expected from such a man? (p. 26)
• Is it hypocritical of Tom to call the “valley of ashes” a “terrible place”? Why? Why not? (p. 30)
• Why does Tom break his mistress’s nose? And what does this gesture reveal about him? (p. 41)

• Daisy Buchanan, Tom’s wife, shares the privileges of being important with her husband, but she is depicted as a victim of her apparent passivity. Is she the submissive wife who lets her husband have his way? Or is she really a manipulative adulteress craving for attention?

• Compare and contrast paragraph 4 (She laughed…) on page 13 and paragraph 9 (It’ll show …) on page 21. What is revealed about Daisy Buchanan?
• When Daisy agrees with Tom by saying, “We’ve got to beat them down,” to what or to whom is she referring? And how does this show Daisy to the reader? (p. 17)
• George Wilson wants to be a success, an important businessman in order to impress his wife. Thus, he allows Tom Buchanan’s mistreatment to improve business at his garage. Is he really lacking backbone? Is he hiding his embarrassment behind a mask? Or is he really hiding a certain toughness?

• Why does the author involve Nick Carraway in the adultery scene and set it “under Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare”? (p. 28)
• Is George as “dumb” as Tom says? Is he not aware of his wife’s affair? Or is he pretending not to know? Why? Why not? (p. 29)

• Myrtle Wilson, George’s wife, understands that importance means gaining entry into the world of the elite. Thus, she becomes Tom Buchanan’s mistress. Is she really a gold digger hiding behind a romantic mask?

• When Tom describes the female dog he bought for Myrtle as “a bitch,” is there a pun intended? (p. 32)
• Does Myrtle really believe that Tom would leave Daisy and marry her? (pp. 36-41)

• Shirlee T. Haizlip, the author of “Passing,” explains how her family abandoned her mother and “deliberately set out to try their luck living as white people in a white world.”

• Is it important that she writes, “All of her family looked like white people,” instead of “[are] white people”? Why? Why not? (p. 113)
• Why is “the deep, wide canyon we call race in America” present between the two sides of the author family? (p. 114)
• Why would it be difficult for someone to pass as another type he/she admitted that he/she “got this kinky hair from someplace.” (p. 114)
• Based on the complexity of race mixing and the fact that “no records were kept of the exact numbers,” (p.115) do you think there are many pure race Americans left in this country?
• Do you think that people such as Gatsby, Myrtle Wilson, George Wilson, would ever drop their mask and give up their “need to belong”? (p. 122)

• In the short bio of Monique Wittig, which precedes the reading selections, the editor writes, “The problem is that the “deformed body” (plucked, shaved, thinned, surgically altered) is conventionally regarded as a product of natural forces, of forces that are an essential part of what it means to be a woman” (99). Explain in your own words the meaning of this quotation and its relevance to the theme of passing.

• When Wittig’s “approach to women’s oppression destroys the idea that women are a ‘natural group,’” she refers to Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis that “one is not born, but becomes a woman” (105). Are they right? Is a woman just a social concept? Is a woman really a female passing, or forced to pass, for a woman in order to function properly in society?

• Citing an example of Colette Guillaumin who writes that “a physical and direct perception [of women] is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an imaginary formation,” the author adds that “they are seen as women, therefore, they are women” (106). Elaborate on this opinion.

• Based on Wittig’s analysis, do you think that woman might disappear from society and, thus, bring to an end this form of passing if females refuse to play the “the role ‘woman’”? (107).

• Jay Gatsby (1) goes through a total transformation to become the most important of them all. Thus, he remains a mystery to all. Has he really inherited his fortune? Is he a gangster?

• Parties are given at Gatsby’s mansion during Prohibition, the forbidding of the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic liquors as beverages. How do you feel about the great Gatsby breaking the law? (p. 44)

• When Owl-Eyes says that “if one brick [is] removed the whole library [is] liable to collapse,” how is this remark portraying Gatsby? (p. 50)

• What does Nick mean when he says that Gatsby is a man “whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd”? (52).

• Why does a “strained, unfamiliar look of embarrassment came over Gatsby’s face” as he met Tom Buchanan? (78).

• As he stood in front of Daisy, Gatsby “literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room” (94). Is he still in love with Daisy? Is he perhaps hiding a vengeance behind a mask of romance?

• And later, commenting on the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, Fitzgerald adds, “Possibly it had occurred to [Gatsby] that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever” (98). Analyze this quotation.

• Elaborate on the following passage, “James Gatz — that was really … his name…. he had the name ready for a long time. … The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (104).

• Is Tom Buchanan warning the reader about Gatsby’s façade as he said, “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife” (137).

• Instead of telling Nick that Daisy was driving the car, is Gatsby caught in his own game, unable to remove his mask, when he says, “[B]ut of course I’ll say I was [driving]” (151).

• Should Gatsby reveal James Gatz to the reader or keep on the mask to maintain the illusion?

• Jay Gatsby (2) goes through a total transformation to become the most important of them all. Thus, he remains a mystery to all. Has he really inherited his fortune? Is he a gangster?

• How important/pivotal is the following revelation from Nick Carraway, “It was that night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody?told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out”? (155}.

• Why does Gatsby lie to Daisy? (pp. 155-156)

• If Fitzgerald underlines that Daisy lives in “her artificial world” then is it acceptable for Gatsby to pass, to create his own artificial world? (p. 158)

• Some critics say that nobody comes to Gatsby’s funeral because Fitzgerald is emphasizing that it is really James Gatz’s funeral. Do you concur? Elaborate.

• Was Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the nonviolent civil rights movement, forced to wear a mask of nonviolence because he was “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny” (473).

• Even though MLK conducted a “coordinated and massive nonviolent resistance,” he nevertheless reminded his fellow clergymen that they must not only “look merely at effects” of the “demonstrations” but also at the “underlying causes” (473). Elaborate.

• What did MLK have on his agenda when he wrote that “privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily”? (475).

• How do you contrast King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” with Adam Winkler’s “MLK and his Guns,” especially when the latter stated that “… King kept firearms for self-protection. … he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.”

• Considering that, in Winkler’s text, “Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King’s home as “an arsenal,” and the fact that MLK won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, was he really a nonviolent person or a person wearing a mask of nonviolence to achieve his goal?

• If Daniel Akst places so much emphasis on the fact that “our society is much too materialistic,” and that “materialism is a serious social problem,” is it perhaps because he feels that the things we purchase facilitate the assemblage of the masks that help us pass for different important people? (241).

• The author also writes that “the real reason for our unease about possessions [things] is that many of us … still seem to answer to a higher power (241). Working on that assumption, is it safe to suggest that those who still buy things think that this “higher power” [God] cannot see behind the mask?

• According to Akst, since “material goods, which are essentially transient, seem emblems of human vanity [the mask],” will people ever stop acquiring these symbols that encourage the practice of the mask, the vanity? (242).

• When designer Christian Lacroix said that “very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people,” was he insinuating that lower-income people waste more money to create their masks? (250).

• Naomi Klein writes, “The truth is that the ‘got to be cool’ rhetoric of the global brand [white manufacturers] is, more often than not, an indirect way of saying ‘got to be black'” (251). Based on this viewpoint, those young black people are wearing things made by white companies, thus apparently wearing a white mask. Elaborate.

• At the same time, while “the hip-hop philosophy of “living large” saw poor and working-class kids acquiring status in the ghetto by adopting the gear and accoutrements of prohibitively costly leisure activities,” Hilfiger was “selling white youth on their fetishization of black style” (252). Is it possible to bypass the mask and still function in society?
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