Passing in The Great Gatsby and Six Degrees of Separation

Introduction: Two Impostors, One American Lie

Perhaps if F. Scott Fitzgerald were to write his famous The Great Gatsby today, Gatsby would be a Black man. Gatsby, much like the protagonist of the film Six Degrees of Separation — the cinematic version of John Guare's play of the same name — is "passing" for a member of the Long Island Hamptons aristocracy, just as the young Black hustler Paul, as depicted by Will Smith, is passing for the son of Sidney Poitier. By definition, Paul is passing as a son of the new Black aristocracy of talent, prep schools, and poise, just as Gatsby is passing as a member of a wealthy, class-bound society where image, parentage, and where one went to school means everything.

In their act of passing, or idealizing a false world, these protagonists unintentionally stir up some "foul dust" — that is, the foul and decaying ideology of race and the importance of money in both the decadent world of the New York Hamptons and the Upper East Side Manhattan of the tail end of the twentieth century (Davis, 2001). Ironically, both Paul and Gatsby wished to blend in, yet they make the contradictions of the world they unsuccessfully attempt to become a part of all the more evident. Gatsby's society pretends it is a world of old money and class, yet all the money is new, the morality is decadent and dead, and those of high class lack any real class at all — even less so than the interloper Gatsby himself. Guare's society is liberal, but liberal only within racial constructs that make its wealthy, educated members comfortable and secure in finely decorated apartments and homes.

The introduction of Gatsby and Paul to these societies thus makes the hidden hypocrisies of class and race respectively evident and uncomfortably present upon the surfaces of these surface-conscious worlds. The concept of racial passing has a long and complex history in American culture, one that both works engage with in distinct but related ways.

Defining Passing Beyond Race

Of course, strictly speaking, neither Paul nor even Gatsby is "passing" in the traditionally understood racial sense of the Harlem Renaissance or the antebellum South. One might contend that the true definition of "passing" is to pass for white — not to pretend one is Sidney Poitier's son, nor to claim one is of a higher class than one was born to in Roaring Twenties New York society. "Passing" is usually understood to mean passing by virtue of a light skin tone in the body of a presumably fair-skinned African American (Larsen, 2001).

Passing does not necessarily carry criminal connotations either. Black men and women once passed in order to take advantage of the greater social and economic opportunities accorded to whites, as does the protagonist of Nella Larsen's 1929 novel Passing, later reprinted in 2001. That novel revolves around detailing the protagonist's conflicted identity and status in a world that demands she shed her racial and cultural identity in order to become a fully-fledged, rights-bearing citizen in America.

Will Smith's character Paul "passes" as a wealthy young Black man in order to burgle the home of a wealthy couple. He constructs himself much as the bootlegger and adherent of organized crime Jay Gatsby does — assembling a persona from fragments of knowledge he gleaned from the Kitteridge children, one of whom Paul has had a romantic relationship with. Ironically, that young man is himself currently passing for heterosexual to his parents.

Economic and Emotional Motives for Passing

But Paul's motives, like Gatsby's, are not purely economic in nature. As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that Paul desires the maternal influence of Ouisa Kitteridge as well as her wealth. He wishes to be a part of the Kitteridge world and to be loved by it, just as Gatsby desires to be loved by Daisy Buchanan. Moreover, the act of passing or concealing one's race was once considered an illegal act in American history, just as intermarriage between the races was illegal. By "passing" as white, one committed a kind of burgling — making oneself a social and economic interloper based on one's appearance in white, mainstream, Caucasian society and taking advantage of opportunities accorded only to whites.

Such an act also destabilized racial categories, questioning the notion that race — any more than class — was self-evident in one's character as it was upon the skin. The boorishness of Tom Buchanan, evidenced among many other traits by his openly expressed racism and his sense of superiority for no evident reason, brings this lie into sharp relief in Fitzgerald's novel.

Conclusion: Six Degrees and the Social Web

A last similarity and irony to both worlds is that American aristocracy in general could be construed as a kind of "passing," for there really is no American aristocracy as such. All American money, however old, is new when compared to the money of Europe. But as the opening of the film Six Degrees of Separation famously makes clear, all are ultimately connected — in such a relatively new world, and especially in an area as small as New York City — by only six degrees of separation from one another.

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1926.

Larsen, Nella. Passing. Thadious Davis, Editor. "Introduction." 2001 Edition.

Plunka, Jean. The Black Comedy of John Guare. 1992.

Six Degrees of Separation. Film. Starring Will Smith. 1993.

Guare, John. Six Degrees of Separation. Play, 1991.