In F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, the ambitious but doomed title character grapples with status and identity, reflecting the author’s own ambivalence regarding his Irish-American ancestry. Fitzgerald was keenly aware of the contested nature of Irish “whiteness” into his lifetime, when the KKK still targeted Catholics, and once described himself as “black Irish”. This self-designation signalled the ambiguous placement of the Irish within America’s interconnected structure of race, ethnicity, sectarianism and class.
In his life and work, Fitzgerald toggled between the common Irish-American aspiration to present as white and questioning the costs of passing for Wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). His self-description in a 1917 letter of being “Teutonic” on the outside but “Celt” within – Fitzgerald was fair-haired – is the language of racial passing.
In America, the terms Teutonic, Saxon or Nordic took hold with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856). (The cognate Aryan, which was put to such sinister use in Nazi ideology, was more common in Europe.) Emerson linked physical characteristics associated with Protestant northern European ancestry to moral, cultural and political superiority. These views fed white supremacy and dominated elite white America’s fantasy of its origins and destiny for generations.
Needless to say, claims to Nordic or Saxon ancestry excluded “off-white” non-Protestant Europeans such as poor Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants, as well as people of colour. Altogether, it is no coincidence that English Traits was published in the wake of the influx of bedraggled Irish refugees fleeing the Great Famine of 1845-52.
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The title character of The Great Gatsby has been speculated to be Jewish or a light-skinned Black man “passing” as white, but Gatsby’s ambiguity is ultimately rooted in Fitzgerald’s own racial and ethnic anxiety. In one of The Great Gatsby’s most discussed moments, the obnoxious alpha male, Tom Buchanan, praises The Rise of the Coloured Empire, a fictional pseudoscientific book on the threat to the “white race”, and names himself and his elite white companions “Nordics”.
By contrast, Buchanan dismisses the socially uncredentialled Gatsby as a “Mr Nobody from Nowhere”. F Scott implausibly denied that he was Irish on his father’s side to the critic Edmund Wilson, though my research into Maryland records suggests that he was the direct descendant of one Edward Fitzgerald, born in Ireland in about 1770.
By contrast, Fitzgerald over-identified with his one English family line: he was tenuously connected to the Maryland elite through his paternal grandfather’s marriage in 1850 into the Anglo-American establishment Scott family. In signing his name “F Scott”, the author emphasised the middle name he received to memorialise the elite but distant antecedents (“Scott”) over his Catholic-sounding first name (“Francis”).
He may have denied that he was Irish on his father’s side but he could hardly do so in the case of his mother. Mary McQuillan was born into an Irish immigrant family of modest origins who became wealthy as wholesale grocers. She and her husband (also named Edward Fitzgerald) were raised as Catholics and sent their son to good private Catholic schools throughout his youth.
Nevertheless, the new money and lack of cultural capital of the McQuillan background made reading James Joyce’s Ulysses uncomfortable for F Scott: “there is something about middle-class Ireland that depresses me inordinately – I mean gives me a sort of hollow, cheerless pain. Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata [sic] or perhaps a lower one. The book makes me feel appallingly naked.”
Fitzgerald referred to the ancestry that embarrassed him as being on his “potato-famine Irish” mother’s side alone. This is a carelessly incorrect phrase, since her family left Ireland in 1842. At any rate, however, Fitzgerald associated his maternal ancestry with the stigmatised famine refugee wave.
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In contrast to Fitzgerald’s lifetime, in contemporary America Irishness is sometimes used to service “white power” messaging. The Irish are now enfolded within the contemporary white Christian constituency for which Trump claims to speak. Indeed, some of the most prominent members of the 2016 Trump administration stressed their Irish-American roots. Therefore, it is imperative to uncover the recognition of past Irish “off-whiteness” in Irish-American writers.
In light of contemporary Ireland’s ethnic and racial diversity, Joyce’s visionary creation of a Jewish Irishman in Ulysses (1922) is partly what makes it the great Irish novel, as it has been repeatedly labelled. The Great Gatsby may be named as the great Irish diaspora novel, because it, too, grappled with Irishness and race in the early 20th century.
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The Great Gatsby emerges from a period in which Irish America was not so uncomplicatedly “white” as it presumed to be in the lead-in to the novel’s centenary next year. Contemporary anti-immigrant voices in Ireland insist that the Irish have always been white, forgetting that they were once despised “not-quite-white” refugees. Considering also that a woman with Irish enslaver antecedents came so close to becoming president, 2025 will be an optimal time to remember that Fitzgerald doubted that the Irish have always been white.
UConn Professor Mary M Burke is the author of Race, Politics, and Irish America
