The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Corruptive Nature of Wealth
Rough Copy
By
Sarah Zaidi
Miss Cheung
ENG 4U
January 6, 2009
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is set during the Roaring Twenties. For many Americans, this was a time full of prosperity and free-spiritedness because the economy was on a steady climb after the war. Fitzgerald’s narrator in the novel, Nick Carraway, moves from his home in Minnesota to pursue the bond business in New York. Nick rents a bungalow in West Egg, a community where new wealthy individuals reside across from the East Egg. The East Egg is another division on the Long Island Sound and it is home to established individuals with reputable money. Upon arriving to West Egg, Nick is thrown into a world full of lavish parties and materialistic desires where people despise poverty and long for money and sophistication. Greed and dishonesty are dominant issues in the novel and corruptive wealth is the cause of the majority of the conflict regarding the morals of the secondary characters; Tom Buchanan, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker.
Tom Buchanan is a rich, influential man who lives with his beautiful wife and daughter in East Egg. It is understood that he is from a well-to-do, respected family however it is also apparent early on in the novel that the wealth he so easily inherited has affected his principles. Tom did not have to work to establish the aristocratic position he has in Fitzgerald’s society and essentially he was given all the luxuries he could ask for. As a rich man in the 1920’s Tom believes that he can have whatever he desires and this includes both Myrtle Wilson and Daisy Buchanan. Tom seems to have it all however he is not satisfied with his life and is greedy for more, hence the reason why he takes George Wilson’s wife, Myrtle, as his mistress. Tom thrives over their inferiority and his complete ease when with Myrtle’s husband is a prominent example of his low morals. There is a distinct difference between Tom and Wilson’s personality which is heavily influenced by their financial background. When the two characters meet later on in the novel, after Wilson has discovered that Myrtle is having an affair, Nick notices how “Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty,” (Fitzgerald 118). Wilson felt solely responsible for Myrtle’s affair and it made him physically sick whereas Tom did not feel a shred of guilt for ruining Wilson’s marriage. His aim was to satisfy his desires and what he desired was Myrtle. When Gatsby attempts to win Daisy’s love, Tom begins to realize that “His wife and his mistress… [once] secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control,” (Fitzgerald 119). Myrtle is merely Tom’s guilty pleasure however it is with Daisy that he upholds a respectable image; a picturesque life with a beautiful home and family. When Tom thinks Gatsby and Daisy are having an affair he becomes infuriated because his life is spiraling out of control and it seems like he cannot have either women. Tom’s wealth enabled him to believe that the pleasures in life were for him to consume however it can be seen that the corruptive nature of money drove him to develop amoral values.