Janvi Mehta
Ms. Mantilla
ENG3UO
June 15th, 2015
How does wealth or societal class impact our personal relationships? Humans Beings are complex creatures. There are many complexities within human beings that make them unique. These complexities may include beauty, wealth, societal class etc. The way human beings cope with situations and problems in a society sets them apart from other beings. In many of these cases, the system fails and no longer provides equality and justice. A central theme in the Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald is the importance of wealth and its portrayal of social class divisions. In the novel, Fitzgerald introduces distinct societal classes, which portrays a message of elitism in the society of the 1920s, as well as the immorality of the people of the elite class. Throughout the book, the characters are continually affected by the snobbish attitudes of the rich, the failure of the American dream and how Gatsby’s pursuit of his own dreams (Daisy Buchanan) eventually lead to his death. The article “When Richer Weds Poorer, Money Isn 't the Only Difference” outlines the challenges two divorced individuals from separate societal classes face when in a relationship together. Wealth and social class negatively impacts our personal relationships through the discrimination amongst lower classes, the biased opinions it creates and the access to purchasing it provides us with.
In their respective texts, both Fitzgerald and Lewin point out that wealth
The emerging inequitable class systems and antagonisms of the nineteen twenties saw the traditional order and moral values challenged, as well as the creation of great wealth for few and poverty for many. The Great Gatsby, written by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, explores the causes and effects of the unbalanced class structures. Fitzgerald outlines the idea that the desire to accumulate wealth and status is a common ambition amongst the lower classes; when that desire is reached, the traditional upper class is challenged by the emerging newly wealthy, which finally leads to destructive consequences. By creating rigid class structures, traditional upper class, new wealth, and the poor in The Great Gatsby, it is
Many novels are written as a means of scrutinising the details and flaws of a specific society. The author’s purpose is to use the novel as a lens through which they can offer their own critical perception. The highly praised novel The Great Gatsby provides such a view into 1920s America, an era which was often described as the “Jazz Age” or the “Roaring 20s,” mainly due to the +and carefree nature of the wealthy. This higher class, who were essentially safeguarded by their money, lived life as if it was an endless party. It is this particular group that F. Scott Fitzgerald mainly targets when providing his criticism
The pressures of social class tend to give us an urgency to act a certain way. In The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald, He carefully sets up his novel into wonderful agencies but, in the long run, every group has its personal issues to take care of, leaving a powerful reminder of what a precarious region the world truly is. By creating awesome social instructions which include new money, old money and the poor. Fitzgerald sends sturdy messages about the elitism running throughout society. He emphasizes the department between the social instructions and the motives in the back of why they are separated. The first and most
While wealth can be quite alluring, the power associated with it can also shape one's opinions, morals, and overall humanity. Wealth is a significant factor in determining one's position in society, thus the eagerness to obtain more is correlated with the wish to hold a higher status. The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, relates to this pursuit of riches and the social hierarchy attached to it. The story takes place during the height of the roaring 1920’s in New York City. Each character represents an economic sphere and has their own ambition for wealth; however, these characters, whether they fail or succeed, lose their humanity in the process. Fitzgerald utilizes the characters Gatsby, Myrtle, and Daisy to demonstrate that the desire for wealth leads to a process of dehumanization, in which morals and identity are displaced.
The 1920’s was an interesting time where social and political ideas were changing; women gained the right to vote, the jazz age created a large popularity in music and dancing, but most importantly, wealth became a new way to express one’s class in a society as people moved from rural areas to cities. The Great Gatsby is a significant example that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in order to show how one’s wealth can affect the people they meet and the way people treat each other. Along with wealth, this book is about love, both from the past and from the present, that soon twists into a tragedy when Gatsby was killed while protecting the other, all in the name of love. Everything Gatsby did was to impress or protect Daisy because he was deeply
Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ is set in America of the 1920’s, a predominantly materialistic society revolving around wealth and status above all else. Fitzgerald depicts this obsession with money and luxury through complicated relationships full of trouble, infidelity and sorrow. The relationships Fitzgerald portrays all symbolize the materialism and hedonism of the age; each relationship is doomed to a certain extent based on the social class of each character.
In the period of the 1920’s, there was a certain status of wealth that was difficult to achieve. There were two societal classes consisting of those with wealth from prior generations, and those who worked to earn it themselves. Tom, Daisy, and Nick, who represented the old money society did not have to work hard, unlike Gatsby which he represented the new money and they had to work to earn money. People like Gatsby, who gained their wealth on their own often fought for the approval from the upper class who inherited their wealth. Rather than having new money and old money, people who tried achieving the American Dream and ended up in failure usually they end up like George and Myrtle Wilson In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the notion that social norms in the upper class depict the idea that being apart of it was impossible unless they were born in it was expressed through Daisy’s rejection of Gatsby because of the corrupt way in which he gained his wealth, making his American Dream unattainable.
Society tends to harbor an inherent and often unavoidable nature that unfairly favors those who are wealthy yet corrupt, and forces those who are moral and noble to suffer. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald comments on this concept with the characters Tom and Gatsby. By comparing and contrasting Tom and Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald develops his critique of the class structure of 1920s America that allows corrupt characters to thrive while punishing sympathetic characters for striving for their dreams.
Conflict is a recurring struggle throughout The Great Gatsby and Ken Allen’s “Roaring Twenties”. In Fitzgerald’s nonfiction novel, class was one of the main conflicts and reasoning’s behind many of the actions from the characters. A major social issue was class socialization. Class socialization refers to the rich socializing with the rich and the poor socializing with the poor. Classes of people were divided by wealth. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy would not be with Gatsby due to his lack of money. Since Gatsby descended from a poor family, Daisy would not accept him as a lover although she was indeed in love with him. Gatsby’s lack of wealth led to many other conflicts sustaining from his drive to earn money to prove his worth of her affection. Another conflict in The Great Gatsby was the stock market crash. The stock market crash was a major event during the Roaring Twenties. When the market crashed, prices on goods soared due to the low quantity of products resulting with millions of people becoming poor. In Allen’s poem “Roaring Twenties”, socialism
After a time of prosperity, the roaring 1920’s became a decade of social decay and declining moral values. The forces this erosion of ethics can be explained by a variety of theories. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald paints a convincing portrait of waning social virtue in his novel, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald portrays the nefarious effects of materialism created by the wealth-driven culture of the time. This was an era where societal values made wealth and material possessions a defining element of one’s character. The implications of the wealthy mindset and its effects on humanity are at the source of the conflict in The Great Gatsby, offering a glimpse into the despair of the 20’s. During a time
The social hierarchy is influenced by the amount of money one owns which determines whether one can attain their dream. By creating apparent social classes within ‘The Great Gatsby’ – old money, new money and no money, Fitzgerald strongly suggests that American society is intensely stigmatised. Daisy, Tom and Jordan represent the elite social class of society where despite their problems and failures they are always protected and immune by their wealth. Tom refers to Gatsby as ‘Mr Nobody from nowhere” and a “common swindler who would have to steal the ring he put on her finger” as he boasts about his hereditary wealth compared to the other distinct elite group of society who acquire their wealth through business deals, which are sometimes corrupt. Although Fitzgerald mainly attacks the rich, by making them look judgemental, superior and selfish, evidently the lower class of society are vulnerable within American society. This is shown where so many, like Myrtle,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the finest American authors of the twentieth century wrote The Great Gatsby during the Jazz Age to critique the distortion of the American dream, and his work has lasted long past his lifetime. Fitzgerald discusses the nature of love and wealth and stresses the importance of defining a person beyond their external position. In his novel, letter to his daughter, and the screenplay adapted from the novel, it is clear that F. Scott Fitzgerald utilizes exposition, narration, and imagery to illustrate how people in the 1920s did not understand the meaning of true love and worried about superficial characteristics, thus resulting in the corruption of the American dream from the pursuit of true love and equality to the pursuit of wealth and discrimination; however, he moralizes that human beings are capable of emotional growth and of escaping the illusion of wealth.
Fitzgerald, in his sarcastic novel The Great Gatsby, frequently shows how racism and classism seriously influence the possibilities of achieving American dreams in obscure methods. The novel details Gatsby’s achievements and dream including Daisy, and makes comparison with other people in different races and classes indirectly but visibly. The fact that, though Gatsby is much wealthier than those in East Egg, he has never achieved the American dream, never owned Daisy truly and never acquired respect, but rumours, due he isn’t born in high class and makes money through bootleg. To some extent, the miserable end of Gatsby is the reflection of the disparity of classism. Gatsby’s mansion reminds people of the feasibility of making the American dream come true. However, his unexpected death that is not caught by police, but killed by Wilson, a white man in mid class, proves that it is related to races and classes closely. Fitzgerald takes us into the suffering of Gatsby to show us that the American dream is like a shell company, which makes everyone look forward to their future with great expectations, but only certain people can truly reach it because people are not standing on the same starting line.
We all have a family, but we all have grown up in a different way. Social class plays a huge role in family life. Three of the connections between social class and family include kin, child rearing, and education levels.
The Great Gatsby presents different social groups to embody and transmit the idea that each class has it’s own problems to prevail over and unhappiness transcends over all the social classes. The problems in each group, despite the social stratification, reveal the instability of the world they live in. The three classes are old money, new money, and no money in which all three believe their own rules of survival in society and enforce boundaries between social classes. Fitzgerald uses the similarities between the poor and the rich to reinforce his opinion and his characterization of the upper class.