The power of Gatsby and Wuthering Heights
Nearly a hundred years old and as relevant as ever, Gatsby remains a perennial favourite with Leaving Cert students, writes Elaine Dobbyn
The classic tale of love, greed, status and injustice speaks to the millennial generation as much as it spoke to generations throughout the twentieth century. The world it depicts is so like our own – materialistic, celebrity-obsessed, shallow, corrupt and cruel – you can easily imagine Jordan using a mobile phone to text Nick or Myrtle lurking on Instagram to spy on Tom and Daisy!
Money and possessions are central to the lives of most of the characters. In order to win Daisy back, with her voice ‘full of money’, Gatsby gains enormous wealth and sets about displaying this wealth in lavish style. Their first date, as they reunite, revolves around Gatsby showing Daisy his decadent mansion. She values money and status deeply and marvels at his affluence - she even cries when she sees his designer shirts! Myrtle desperately wants to leave her life of poverty in the Valley of Ashes and sees Tom Buchanan as her way out. She loves spending his money and deludes herself into believing he will leave Daisy for her. Their obsession with wealth and material things brings them no happiness and both Myrtle and Gatsby die tragically young.
The social world of Gatsby is extremely shallow. Nick Carraway arrives into this world as an outsider and despite being Daisy’s cousin and spending lots of time with the Buchanans and Jordan Baker, his relationships with everyone except Gatsby remain superficial. He is “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” People come to Gatsby’s parties in their droves without actually being able to recognise him and when his name becomes tarnished they just as quickly disappear. We can see similar behaviour on social media sites today – we’re ‘friends’ with people we barely know but only ever see the surface of their personality not into its depths.
Modern celebrity culture too is visible in Gatsby’s fame in New York social circles. His wealth and the air of mystery around him make him fascinating to the public. Fame then, as today, however, is fickle and people turn on Gatsby after the hit-and-run. Despite hundreds attending his parties Nick struggles to get even a handful of people to come to his funeral. Twitter is probably the site most guilty of this sort of behaviour – one misstep by a celebrity and a lynch mob forms within seconds!
The glitz and glamour of this superficial world hides the corruption and rot at its core. Gatsby’s money was made from criminal boot-legging, Tom Buchanan, a signed up member of the ‘old-money’ crowd is racist and unfaithful to his wife. The beautiful and worshipped Daisy is unfaithful to Tom and Myrtle cheats on her husband George. Almost all the characters put their own desires above the needs of other people. The American Dream ideology that ‘anyone can make it if they work hard enough’ is shown to be a fraud in Gatsby – all the money in the world won’t make Gatsby part of Tom and Daisy’s ‘old money’ club:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
It’s a world where truth and illusion get mixed up all too easily. The truth that Daisy was the driver in the hit-and-run gets covered up and Gatsby is scapegoated – talk about fake news! Ultimately Nick decides to leave this world and return to his home in the Mid-West which he feels is a purer, simpler place. He has learned that reinvention is not really possible: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…’