New Money Versus Old Money; The Importance of Wealth in Building Relationships in The Great Gatsby
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23918/ijsses.v10i2p131Abstract
The Great Gatsby is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It sketches life in the United States in the 1920s. It chronicles the lifestyle of the rich, the dreams of the nouveau riche and the ambitions of the working class through the eyes of a character named Nick Carraway. Nick, who is a Midwesterner, narrates his life and social relationships with other characters such as Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Tom Buchanan in Long Island and New York City. The life of the Americans is shown from Nick’s perspective after the First World War during the economic expansion in the United States. Hence, The Great Gatsby is considered to be a chronicled account of what is known as the Roaring Twenties.
Fitzgerald examines money in the light of the economic boom in America. In his novel, money is divided into two types: new money and old money. New money is the fortune that self-made characters like Gatsby have. Old money encompasses the inherited money owned by Daisy and Tom. Furthermore, talking about money inevitably can be developed into talking about social classes. For example, Tom is a member of the upper class and his fortune and possessions are inherited. On the contrary, Gatsby is a nouveau riche who comes from a modest background and has built his fortune in the land of opportunities. Therefore, Marius Bewley (1959) suggests that Fitzgerald’s novels are based on ‘‘a concept of class’’ (Bewley, 1959, p. 260).
The purpose of this paper is to show the role of money in building relationships in The Great Gatsby and to discover how far love is contingent on money through analysing characters of Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Tom Buchanan. This paper seeks to find out the relationship between love and money or the link between having money and building relationships. Firstly, the historical context of the novel is revisited. For as Jonathan Bate (2010) puts it, literature ‘‘at its best is a song of experience’’ (Bate, 2010, p. 10), a brief account of the Jazz Age is presented to offer a few glimpses of that age and how it is reflected in the novel.
References
Bate, J. (2010). English Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Bewley, M. (1959). The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel. Chatto and Windus.
Chase, R. V. (1958). The American Novel and Its Tradition. G. Bell.
Donaldson, S., & Massa, A. (1978). American Literature: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. David & Charles.
Faulkner, P., & Jump, J. D. (1977). Modernism. Methuen.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1993). The Great Gatsby. Wordsworth Editions.
Gray, R. (1983). American Fiction: New Readings. Vision Press.
Guerty, P. M. (2007). From the Editor: Revisiting the 1920S. OAH Magazine of History, 21(3), 3–3.
Mizener, A. (1972). Scott Fitzgerald and His World. Thames and Hudson.
Morgan, E. (1984). Gatsby in the Garden: Courtly Love and Irony. College Literature, 11(2), 163–177.
Morris, L. R. (1951). Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life from 1850 to 1950. Random House.
Samkanashvili, M. (2013). What Makes “The Great Gatsby” By F.S. Fitzgerald Great?. Journal of Education, 1(2), 73–78.
Snyder, L. (2012, January). Buying into Money Equals Happiness Fails for the Characters in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby [Poster session] English Senior Seminar Papers, English Department, St. John Fisher College, New York.
Tran, L. (2009). The Great Gatsby. In Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors (Eds.), A New Literary History of America (pp. 574–580). Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Tunc, T. E. (2009). The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald). In Harold Bloom & Blake Hobby (Eds.), The American Dream (pp. 67–79). Bloom’s Literary Criticism.
Uenishi, T. (2011). Are the Rich Different?: Creating a Culture of Wealth in The Great Gatsby. The Japanese Journal of American Studies, 22, 89–107.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 International Journal of Social Sciences & Educational StudiesInternational Journal of Social Sciences & Educational Studies applies the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic Licence (CC BY-NC 2.0)