Similarities Between The Great Gatsby And Their Eyes Were Watching God

Crime and Punishment in The Great Gatsby and Their Eyes Were Watching God
Both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God illustrate ambition as a crime against the predetermined positions or categorizations in American society. Although the narrative style, the geographical location, and the cultural setting are vastly disparate, in both novels, the crime of ambition is punished, while the actually illegal crimes that characters commit are largely ignored or excused. Gatsby’s aspiration to escape his impoverished past and reinvent his ethnic identity to achieve mobility in the hierarchy of New York high society is the true crime in the novel; in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s ambition

In this essay, I will argue that for those not already a part of the established power structure – in this case a black woman and a Jewish man – their ambition is seen as a crime against society according to their inherited ethnic or racial categorizations.
In many ways, The Great Gatsby can be considered a crime novel, focalizing its narrative on a bootlegger (Gatsby) who commits acts that are against the law in order to advance his position in society and shed his past identity as an impoverished Jew. Ironically, it is not the illegal activities overtly discussed but his societal ambition that is the true crime of the novel according to ingrained anti-Semitic attitudes as it is manifested in the narrator, and further, this driving desire is what makes Gatsby a ‘crime novel,’ while the supposed ‘actual’ crimes of the novel are ignored as

“They were all against her … with their tongues cocked and loaded … the only killing tool they are allowed to use in the presence of white folks.” (176) However, the “white folks” of the jury who are responsible for the conviction of Janie exonerate her even though she did in fact commit murder, an actual, illegal crime in society. The reason for this disparity is that the African Americans wish to punish Janie for her crime of marrying Tea Cake and ignoring her own and Tea Cake’s class disparity and social placement (“It was a hope that she might fall to their level some day.”), while the all-white jury does not condemn Janie for the murder of Tea Cake because it occurred between two African Americans, and therefore not a transgression of the social hierarchy according to race. “Well, long as she don’t shoot no white man she kind kill jus’ as many niggers as she please.” (179)
After her exoneration, Janie returns home to the judgment of her community – “dey got tuh go way back in yo’ life and see whut you ever done” – but unlike Gatsby,