New Money Versus Old Money; The Importance of Wealth in Building Relationships in The Great Gatsby

Abstract

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.