Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby, a 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is often described as a novel about wealth, love, illusion, and the American dream. It is indeed all of these things, but the book is also a sociological masterpiece about class, taste, aspiration, and exclusion. I cannot believe that I have not read this book before. The novel shows how social belonging is governed by rules and how social aspiration does not always work, regardless of how much one tries.
Jay Gatsby is rich, but he is ‘new money’, a term used by American society to describe newly rich people who might have the same amount of money, or often more, than society, but who do not belong. The rule of belonging is linked to one’s social conduct, behavior, and communication style, so obviously, this book interested me. Gatsby believes that his money can purchase an entry into the world he does not belong to by birth. Gatsby became rich and purchased a big house, expensive clothing, a car, and he throws big, lavish parties. However, by doing so, he fails to communicate the way society does and overstates his wealth, instead of understanding it, thus being perceived as imitating society rather than being part of it. He does all of these things, partly to belong – we learn he has tried to learn ‘appropriate’ behavior since an early age, but also because he loves Daisy, a woman from society he was seeing before he went to war, and who meanwhile married Tom, also a member of society.
The novel shows that class is not just economic, but also cultural, communicative, and embodied. Gatsby performs class while Tom and Daisy embody their class in how they communicate, behave, and how easily they walk away from the destruction they cause to other classes. Gatsby’s performance includes elegance, excessive hospitality, learned speech, wrong clothing, and gestures that are learned mechanically rather than embodied through some sort of immersion. The novel is, therefore, not just about the American Dream but also about social recognition, transformation, and class aspiration. Gatsby believes that he can remake himself through discipline, style, wealth, and learning and memorizing cultural codes. But the old-money world of East Egg does not accept the West Egg and does not reward transformation in the way he expects them because the East Egg recognizes origins, detects insecurity, and notices over-effort.
Nick Carraway, as a narrator, is partially morally observant, but he is part of the class he critiques. In some ways, he admires Gatsby and the wealth he accumulated, but then his descriptions of Gatsby also show judgment. He sees Gatsby as vulgar, but also as someone with substance because Gatsby is not empty. He just tries to be more like the man he thinks Daisy wants, and he wants to belong to a class that is not his own. On the other hand, Tom and Daisy are members of society, but they are portrayed as morally hollow; thus, they belong to society, but society is not portrayed as something worth belonging to, which is a really interesting tension and a critique of society in 1920s America.
Thus, inequality in this novel is understood not just through money, but also through taste, manners, networks, and recognition. The novel shows that elite worlds do not explicitly exclude people; they let them fail by misrecognizing the rules. The novel is about love, but also not just about love: it is also about a society in which desire is organized by class, and reinvention is blocked by hierarchy.
Thank you for reading!