Both Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby are portrayed as immensely wealthy in the novel. Tom has inherited his money legally. He is "old" money, meaning he has been born into a wealthy and socially connected family. Gatsby, we are led to believe, has made his money illegally, largely through bootlegging. He is "nouveau riche" and doesn't quite fit into the monied world of travel and horses that Tom floats through easily.
Both men unashamedly use money to woo women. "Love" becomes an interesting concept in the novel. Of the three main female characters, the androgynous Jordan stays largely aloof from love, though she and Nick have some sort of relationship. Tom has bought the "love" of Myrtle—for both of them, it is more a convenient sex-for-money relationship than what we would call a pure and disinterested love match. Daisy marries Tom for money. As the beginning of the novel shows, they have a troubled relationship, primarily because Tom is unfaithful—but they do seem to have deep bond. Gatsby impresses Daisy with his money when they reunite, but the "love" he wins from her is shallow: she is not prepared to make any sacrifices for it or to leave the security Tom's wealth and status offer her.
Some quotes about wealth are as follows:
They [Tom and Daisy] had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
. . .
At high tide in the afternoon I watched his [Gatsby's] guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains.
Gatsby uses his wealth to impress Daisy. He believes his wealth will buy her love. He opens his wardrobe to show her his many shirts, "stacked like bricks." Then, as Nick writes:
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue.
Tom Buchanan has won Myrtle Wilson's love with his immense wealth. Nick describes Tom's affluence when he recalls that Tom's family "were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money as a matter for reproach—" and again when he observes that Tom had brought to Long Island "a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that." Myrtle tells Nick that when she spotted Tom on the train to New York he was wearing "a dress suit and patent leather shoes" and a white shirt. Even though Tom openly ridicules her for her station in life, uses her for sex, lies to her, and breaks her nose, Myrtle is apparently in love with him. He buys her all the trinkets she desires, and she is able to overlook his many glaring faults. Though George Wilson treats Myrtle kindly (until he discovers her affair), she dismisses him as unworthy of her love since he "borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in."
No comments:
Post a Comment