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The great gatsby and classism
Great gatsby as a novel of social criticism
Myrtle great gatsby role
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Myrtle is Tom Buchanan’s lover, her husband George owns a rundown garage in the valley of ashes and she possesses fierce vitality and desperately looks for ways to improve her situation. Sadly she chooses Tom who treats her as an object of his desire. She is mid-thirties, short and plump but carries her extra flesh voluptuously. She wears clothes that are stretched tight over her fairly broad hips. (Fitzgerald p.28) Myrtles personality and behavior show that she wants to climb the social status with her acute manner and vigor.
Myrtle has a type of control over her husband and uses him. He is in love with Myrtle and will do anything for her and she uses that to her advantage, as it allows her to order him around. She admits that she has never loved him and would marry
Thirdly, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s modernist novel titled The Great Gatsby follows the deuteragonist called Myrtle Wilson as she commits deadly sins of wrath and greed and lust. According to Oxford Online Dictionary, “deuteragonist” is defined as “The person second in importance to the protagonist in a drama”(https://en.oxforddictionaries.com). In other words, a deuteragonist is the secondary main character who is the second most important character in a novel. Myrtle is the wife of George Wilson but also has an affair with Tom. She is a foil to Daisy Buchanan who is a social climber.
In some works of literature, a character who appears briefly, or does not appear at all, is a significant presence. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, Myrtle Wilson drastically affects other characters by her worldly desires, actions, and static characteristics. In most circumstances it is believed that the story is solely about the main character, but one needs to objectively look at all the cast members, specifically Mrs. Wilson. The author chooses each person with great intentions. Myrtle loved her husband George Wilson when they got married, but has since been disappointed by his lack of cash and social status, and now feels stifled by her twelve-year marriage.
In the great gatsby some love connection are very weak and some at quite real. Gatsby's love for daisy is real, the way their whole situation went down shows how much his love for daisy wasn't pretend, but for daisy she doesn't love him at all, it's all about living this fake lifestyle. Myrtle and Tom so called love isn't real at all. He’s only with her because he’s getting bored of daisy but everything he is saying is a lie. Though under those circumstances Myrtle's husband George wilson's love for his wife myrtle is very real.
In this quote, Myrtle speaks snobbishly while imagining that she sounds fancy. In this quote, Myrtles’ yearning to become a part of the upper class can be seen very easily. In order to create a false impression of being wealthy, she becomes a complete braggart. In fact, Myrtle talks about how she shouldn’t have married into a lower class, and that she only married Wilson because she thought he was a gentleman. In reality, Myrtle is not part of the upper class at all and lives in a tiny garage in a dusty, forgotten place known as the valley of ashes.
Different Women in the Unjustified Situations The Gilded Age was described, by those that bestowed the name upon it, as a time in history that showed incredible feats and fame on the outside, with grim appearances lying beneath. Similar to The Gilded Age in the late 1800s, The Roaring Twenties was filled with a booming economy and a radical change in thoughts and ideas in Americans. Unfortunately, as The Great Gatsby shows, maybe it all was not as good as it seemed. With the rising economy came the possibility of injustices, including males and females.
People who originate from privileged backgrounds and people who have worked up to the privileged lifestyle often feel entitled to everything and anything that comes their way. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald the characters display how this feeling of entitled leads to a careless attitude. In the passage on page 137 of the book this theme is shown. The passage begins with the description of right before the incident of Myrtle’s death, it displays Myrtle and George’s argument, ending with Myrtle telling George to beat her. Myrtle is careless because she does not think about the potential consequences of her words, as George could take offense to her insults and actually choose to beat Myrtle like she asks.
Wilson finds out that somebody is having an affair with his wife but he does not know who. So he decides to move and locks myrtle away in a room and will not let her leave. Myrtle gets hit by a car because she runs out into the road trying to get someone to help her get away from Wilson. Myrtles death leaves Wilson in an awful state he freaks out at first but then goes into a deep silence for a long time. Then he goes trying
According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are those who are the “pursuing” and those who are the “pursued”. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy and Tom are the ones being pursued by people like Gatsby and Myrtle. They are representations of Gatsby and Myrtle's desires, and as these two characters desperately chase after what they want, they lose sight of what they have in the moment. Their pursuit for their desires becomes obsessive as the story progresses and eventually leads to their demise. The difference in how these two characters death’s are portrayed by Nick conveys Fitzgeralds belief that regardless of how one pursues his or her desires, falling for temptations and forgetting what is important will lead to misfortune.
The Moral Decay of the Materialistic Although F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby debuted in 1925– before the Great Depression– it serves as a prophetic exemplification of the the material excess of the 1920s that drowned out signs of the coming Great Depression. The book’s plot follows the bootlegger Jay Gatsby as he pursues his old love Daisy Buchanan through flaunting his new extravagant lifestyle, mainly by throwing ostentatious parties. Yet, in the end, Daisy chooses her unfaithful husband Tom over Gatsby. Through Fitzgerald’s use of wealthy, materialistic characters, he comments on the effect of the material excess of the roaring twenties: moral corruption.
In fact, the lower class member sought to live in the same luxurious lifestyle, but each in his/her own way. As for Gatsby he seemed to be engaged in an obscure business that enabled him to gain so much money in just five years, he disdained his family and their financial status and was full of contempt. But Myrtle has chosen another path to express her anger with her status; she thought cheating was acceptable as long as it enabled her to live the lavish life she dreamed of. However, Tom never wanted to be seen in public with her; for example in the train to New York" So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.
Although the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald emphasizes the parties and prosperity of the American 1920's, it reveals many major characters meeting tragic ends. The characters who meet these ends - Jay Gatsby, Myrtle Wilson, and George Wilson - possess the same tragic characteristic: they endeavor for something more out of their lives than what they have. This ambition for what they could not have ultimately spelled their doom: Gatsby wanted money and Daisy; Myrtle wanted wealth and luxury, and sought it from Tom Buchanan; Wilson earned what he could only to please Myrtle. The Great Gatsby reveals a tragic nature through the trials and tribulations these characters endure to progress and prosper, only to receive death for their ambition. The exciting and wild time period of the "Roaring Twenties" provides a stark contrast to the deaths in order to further highlight the tragic nature of the novel, and leaves a theme that even those with the most hope and strong ambitions can fail and die miserably, no matter how much money they have.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald once stated, “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart and all they can do is stare blankly.” Throughout his famous work, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald portrayed the American Dream. Contrary to the ideology of the “Roaring Twenties” society, he described the American Dream as a delusion. People of the era focused on materialism in order to boost their wealth and status and forgot the importance of their relationships. Several characters within the novel sought to gain a higher status in society.
On the other hand, Wilson becomes completely distraught and is unable to think rationally upon discovery of his wife’s affair. This can be seen by Nick’s description of Wilson that “he had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically sick”(67). It is clear that knowledge of Myrtle’s affair has imposed a tremendous amount of stress on Wilson, so much to the point that he became sick. Additionally, George makes some poor choices as a result of this stress, including locking up Myrtle in the room and threatening to force her to move west. It should