Color Gold In The Great Gatsby

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During Jazz Age people’s spiritual values, traditions and customs were decaying. Lust had took over them and they could easily betray their spouses, just like Myrtle, Daisy and Tom in Great Gatsby. As myrtle’s sister had mentioned to Nick “neither of them can stand the person they’re married to” (p. 23). She proposed that if no one is happy in their marriage they should get divorce and get into a relationship that would satisfy them, because “you can’t live forever, you can’t live forever” (p. 24). Myrtle also suggested that morality has been long dead inside men and they “will cheat you every time. All they think of is money” (p.21).
During this time, Government had prohibited the purchase and use of alcohol, which made people to crave for it …show more content…

It showed wealth, power and grabbed everyone’s attention. One can find this in Great Gatsby when Gatsby wears “a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie” (The Great Gatsby, p.54) or how he drives a “yellow car” (The Great Gatsby, p.89). This color was entered into fashion of this era and we see how women wore “golden and silver slippers”, “yellow dresses”, headbands and beads (The Great Gatsby, pages 96 & 28). According to 1920s Fashions for Women of Scott, this color was also mixed with other colors such as violet or silver, even different shades of gold such as “sunset orange”, yellow green or caramel was in fashion just like Gatsby who wore gold ties and had a “caramel-coloured suit” (The Great Gatsby, p.41).” Not only this color was part of clothes but it also entered into some other goods; for example we have Daisy who gives a “gold pencil” to her husband in Gatsby’s party (p.68), or more importantly Gatsby has “a toilet set of pure dull gold” (p.59).
Even in the works of African American artists such Langston Hughes’s 1926 poem, one of the prominent figures of Jazz Age, we can navigate and find color gold.