The Chosen and the Beautiful

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published in 1926. As Ron Charles identifies in his review of The Chosen and the Beautiful, The Great Gatsby has “been passed off for decades as the ultimate interrogation of the American Dream” in its portrayal of poor boy Jay Gatsby’s quest to prove himself and eventually win over rich girl Daisy Fay” (Charles). Through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald’s novel shows Gatsby’s attempt to lure Daisy away from her rich, well-born husband Tom through lavish displays of wealth and intimate moments of affection. He acquires his wealth quickly and illegally through bootlegging or illicit alcohol sales during the era of Prohibition (1920-1933), but nevertheless nearly succeeds in his plan of convincing Daisy to run away with him, until a fatal accident involving Tom’s mistress Myrtle Wilson sees Daisy fleeing back to the protection of her husband and Gatsby getting shot. For Nick, the narrator, who titles his story The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is a flawed, but sympathetic protagonist who shows that without the institutional backing of a good family and solid connections, the American Dream can only take you so far. Similarly, capitalism, the vehicle of the American dream, creates elaborate yet fragile spectacles that can easily turn to wastelands.

While The Great Gatsby’s reputation since its publication hails it as an oracle of universal truths about the American Dream and the human condition, its protagonists are exclusively white, and Carraway’s perspective is one of male privilege. As a white, well-educated man himself, Fitzgerald created a fictitious world in which non-whites appear merely as background or as an anonymous preoccupation of white supremacists like Tom Buchanan who recommends a book on the superiority of the white race.

What Fitzgerald leaves implicit, Nghi Vo makes an explicit part of her retelling of the story in The Chosen and the Beautiful. She transforms Jordan Baker from Nick’s love interest and a convenient mouthpiece for Daisy’s experiences with Gatsby prior to the narrative’s main action, into an Asian character with a mind of her own. In Fitzgerald’s original, Jordan, “a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet” and a “wan, charming, discontented face” is probably white and the archetype of the fashionable flapper (Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Bloomsbury Publishing, London. 11). An unmarried, partygoing golfer, Jordan is a symbol of privileged women’s more liberated status following the World War I and has been Daisy’s companion since childhood. Fitzgerald often describes the two women as a double act, for example, when they both appear “wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth and carrying light capes over their arms” (Fitzgerald 122). Here, their dressing alike has an element of solidarity and conspiracy. Vo subverts this in her novel, where Daisy puts a rose color on her own lips before proffering it to Jordan’s and declaring that “we match.” To Jordan, however, it is obvious that, “of course we didn’t” (2). While Daisy is an established white, Southern belle, Jordan’s own adopted name “hung oddly on me” (3), given her Vietnamese origins and appearance of ambiguous ethnicity. The difference in the women’s ethnicity in a racist world gives Daisy the upper hand in their relationship, as she treats Jordan as an interesting exotic who she summons whenever she is in trouble, evoking the toxic colonial dynamic of a white lady and servile Oriental.

Nevertheless, Daisy is enchanted by and even a little afraid of Jordan’s ability to perform magic and transform reality through paper-cutting. Jordan, who loves Daisy despite being cynical about her, mostly complies with her friend’s requests and supports her until she comes into her own as an Asian woman and embraces her power as an individual who is capable of magic. This is evident of the expansion of the narrative world’s perspective from Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Daisy-centered original, to the multiethnic New York underworlds that Jordan explores for herself. Jordan’s acceptance of her difference touches the perspective of the rest of the novel, as characters who were originally presumed white like Nick and Gatsby, respectively have Thai and Native American and Black ancestors. This is symbolic because both Nick and Gatsby are less established in society than the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) characters Daisy and Tom, and thereby share an element of Jordan’s outsider status, as the racist laws and attitudes that affect her also threaten to touch upon their lives, too.

In addition to adding multiracial and magical elements, Vo’s retelling of Fitzgerald’s narrative from Jordan’s perspective draws out the erotic elements in original narrator Nick’s obsession with Gatsby. This is evident at the end of Fitzgerald’s novel, where Nick practically forgets ostensible love interest Jordan in his immense mourning of Gatsby. Similarly, Jordan’s continual presence as Daisy’s sidekick is invested with a sexual element as the two share a bed and exchange kisses. At the end of Vo’s novel, she stages a scene where Nick and Jordan come out to each other, claiming that while they share mutual attraction, they both preferred the companion of their own sex “best.” The disruption of the original narrative’s heteronormativity introduces a multiplicity that makes all dynamics as important as the central love story between Gatsby and Daisy and complicates the trajectory of desire in the novel. This also gives Nick and Jordan more agency as characters, as they become participants rather than the observers they were in Fitzgerald’s narrative.