This paper examines the theme of materialism in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, analyzing how the pursuit of wealth and social status drives every major character and relationship in the novel. Drawing on the social and economic conditions of the 1920s — including the post-war stock market boom and Prohibition-era bootlegging — the paper explores the contrast between old and new money, Jay Gatsby's constructed identity and self-image, Daisy Buchanan's amorality, and key symbols such as the green light, the valley of ashes, and the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The paper argues that Fitzgerald portrays materialism as both the engine and the destroyer of the American Dream.
One of the most immediate themes of The Great Gatsby is the power struggle between the old rich and the new rich. The old rich, or traditional aristocracy, is represented by Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, who behave with ingrained grace, understated taste, subtlety, and elegance. They are suspicious of, and discriminating against, the new rich, who are represented by Jay Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925). In contrast to the aristocratic rich, Gatsby is ornate, exaggerated, outlandishly clothed, ill-mannered, and an absolute wastrel. Both the old and the new rich measure themselves and others by materialistic standards and use those standards in achieving non-materialistic objectives, such as relationships and loyalty.
Fitzgerald uses the material and social conditions of the 1920s as the setting of this novel. Those conditions began with the peaking of the stock market after World War I, the massive increase of national wealth, and the evolution of an overpowering sense of materialism and luxury. This unprecedented trend led people to spend widely and wildly and to become greedy. Wealth was so abundant that anyone of any social background could suddenly become rich. The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the sale of alcohol, made bootleg liquor a source of enormous wealth in the criminal underworld, where demand was steep among both rich and poor.
Materialism is the value assigned to physical wealth and pleasure, and the novel — much like the 1920s itself — teems with both. Fitzgerald shows the marked search for pleasure in his characters and the resulting social, physical, and moral decay of the era. The extravagance of Jay Gatsby's Saturday evening parties — with their wild jazz and ostentatious displays in his mansion — is all fading noise and color, vanity and fantasy that miss the true American Dream. The unrestrained desire for money and pleasure was out of sync with the genuine American Dream of discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of real wealth. All the spectacle is mere stimulation, directed inward from the outside.
Nick Carraway describes the cultural struggle between the East and the Midwest in his own words:
"That's my Middle West... The street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark... I see now that this has been a story of the West... Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I... possessed some deficiency... subtly unadaptable to Eastern life." (Fitzgerald, Chapter XI)
Fitzgerald places East and West in stark opposition: the East has a fast-paced lifestyle, extravagant parties, decaying morals, and an obsession with wealth, while the West and the Midwest observe more traditional values. Nick describes life on the East Coast and both his and Gatsby's inability to adapt to that milieu, which creates tensions and misbehavior in them and toward the companions who are perfectly at home there. These tensions reflect each character's response to the overwhelming materialism that prevails.
Only Nick manages to resist the pressure and return to Minnesota. He recognizes that materialism has swallowed Jay Gatsby whole, destroying him rather than fulfilling his illusions. As the saying goes, East is East and West is West and never the two shall meet — yet the power of money, ambition, and desire can narrow or erase that gap.
Nick reveals slowly in his narrative how intrinsically intertwined Jay Gatsby's garishness, deceitfulness, and materialistic values truly are. He introduces Jay only in the third chapter, but before that, Nick relates how Gatsby first becomes the subject of wild gossip in New York for his newfound and fantastic fortune and his extravagant Saturday evening parties for the rich, famous, and powerful (Fitzgerald). Something has made him an overnight legendary success and celebrity who awes everyone — and that something is his accidental fortune. As long as he has wealth, he retains the aura of success and excellence and remains the toast of opportunists and advantage-takers.
This wealth appears to give him the power to create his own identity, since money seems able to buy everything, including a new name. With money in his possession, he is able to assume a different name — James Gatz — and modify his hopes and dreams according to circumstances, as other individuals yield to the power of his money. He develops — or the power of money allows him to develop — reinvention skills, which in turn ascribe a kind of "greatness" to him, hence the name the Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald). He becomes the epitome of excess, and "excellence" comes to mean, to all who look up to material and physical superiority, precisely what Gatsby embodies. Adulation flows his way from the multitude, which believes that what Jay Gatsby has is what Jay Gatsby is. That adulation feeds his ego and blinds him with passion, disabling him from recognizing his own limitations.
Jay's mystique exceeds even his opulence. His smile becomes an object of fascination and intrigue:
"He had one of those rare smiles... of eternal reassurance... that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you..." (Fitzgerald, Chapter III)
His smile functions as a kind of magic wand, establishing his role and identity in any situation. This has a deeply materialistic dimension: Jay Gatsby is evaluated physically, without regard to what is inherently within him. Those who are limited to appearances admire how he smiles and are controlled by it. Nick only describes and infers — noting how Jay's smile performs the role that Gatsby himself defined at age seventeen in Louisville. That smile, Nick understands, is an essential part of the persona Jay Gatsby has carved out for himself, one he "awards" to the lucky recipient. The mighty self-assurance the smile carries arrogates upon Gatsby a sense of eternal superiority that is itself a rare experience for those who witness it.
The other dimension of that smile is that it falls only upon a privileged few — it serves as a prize, endowing its recipient with an irresistible sense of favor. Both dimensions are, at their core, materialistic.
Gatsby becomes so vastly successful, powerful, and bountiful that he compares himself to Jesus Christ in Chapter VI (Fitzgerald):
"Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island... A son of God — and must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty... And to this conception he was faithful to the end."
When a person has virtually everything the world offers, he or she can begin to feel like a deity. If that everything is materialistic or physical in nature, the person relies solely on body and matter for that sense of perfection. And if that state of "perfection" persists long enough, the person may come to believe it is permanent and deserved — even that he or she must be a god, or the Son of God. There is a parallel here with Ernest Renan's argument in The Life of Jesus, as noted in SparkNotes (2004), that Jesus simply made Himself the Son of God, so that when the "factual truth" caught up with Him, He was crushed between reality and claim. Similarly, Jay Gatsby uses his extraordinary luck to create his identity, his options, and even a personal aesthetic — his ornate mansion, his Rolls-Royce, his lavish parties, and his carefully cultivated taste all establish him as a demigod of material abundance. The adulation of bootlickers and opportunists reinforces his self-image as a supreme being who can obtain anything he desires.
Gatsby's self-image began forming at the age of seventeen, when, as a young military man, he was so infatuated with the wealthy and refined Daisy that he misrepresented himself as her social equal, just so she would accept him. His initial success in attracting her into a relationship so consumed him that he worked his way — through very wrong means — to the peak of fortune, solely in order to re-acquire her (Fitzgerald). His immeasurable lust for Daisy — and for everything material she represents — became his enduring rationale for crime, the acquisition of money, extravagance, and obstinacy in all things that money could seemingly buy. By living in excess and behaving lavishly, he hopes to draw her back to himself, especially in light of her vow to wait for him when he went to war. He pins that expectation not only on the power of money and material possessions but on the very real power those things have over Daisy. Though Daisy occasionally feels she loves Jay Gatsby, she is far more in love with her material self-interests and luxuries, which are secure with her husband Tom, whom her family fully approves of (Fitzgerald).
As a child, Jay Gatsby was a poor nobody — a college dropout who hates the life he conceals until late in the novel. He saw Daisy as an illusion because she appeared unattainably affluent and remarkable while he was destitute and unremarkable. He turned to illegal and often quicker means of achieving his objectives, and it appeared to work. It is also possible that it was Daisy's characteristics — her jewels, costly clothes, daintiness, and charm — that he pursued obsessively more than Daisy herself, without fully realizing it. Since it was those possessions that first dazzled him, he may have perceived them as the very substance of her and so sought to acquire the same material qualities in order to attract her back to him.
"Daisy's shallow, amoral materialism and cold privilege"
"Key symbols representing wealth, waste, and moral decay"
"How materialism shapes and destroys every relationship"
You’re 40% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 3 sections.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.