What Romantic Relationships Can Facilitate (Sandra Ackert - Smith)

        Lois Tyson’s interpretation of The Great Gatsby puts an eye-opening new light on an old text, and changes the overall experience of the reader. Although I was vaguely aware of the hidden dynamics in the novel, reading Tyson’s made me rethink some of my postulates. The psychoanalytical lens Tyson used to look at the book changed the intention and mood of the plot altogether. By focusing on the fact that “fear of intimacy with others is usually a product of fear of intimacy with oneself” (p. 41), the author took a different path to the same destination. I had never considered that Gatsby himself had a fear of intimacy, but Tyson convinced me otherwise. “Gatsby’s outrageous idealization of Daisy as the perfect woman – she can do no wrong, she can love no one but him; time cannot change her – is a sure sign that he seeks to avoid intimacy, for it is impossible to be intimate with an ideal” (p. 48).  Overall, Tyson spun a new atmosphere around the novel simply by focusing on one aspect, leaving the author to agree with her closing statement: “… whether it intends to do so or not, The Great Gatsby shows us how effectively romantic relationships can facilitate our repression of psychological wounds and thereby inevitably carry us, as the novel’s closing line so aptly puts it, ‘ceaselessly into the past’” (p. 49).