The Great Gatsby Tom Buchanan Analysis

Corruption Through Tom Buchanan’s Love Interests in The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald laced The Great Gatsby (1925) with his own social commentary on the decay of Jazz Age society due to white Americans. Fitzgerald knew of the growing divisions among America’s white community in the nineteen-twenties, and he utilized The Great Gatsby’s characters to show how the division will cause the end of the Jazz Age. Tom Buchanan, a arrogant man from old money, optimizes the views of eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard, who believed in levels of whiteness within the white race; ultimately, Tom’s love interests provide the backbone for Fitzgerald’s distaste for the social stratification of the white community. Daisy Fay Buchanan, Tom’s picturesque wife, represents the peak of the whiteness spectrum, and Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s

Fitzgerald means for Tom’s love interests to personify the extremes of the spectrum of whiteness on the surface level and in their naming; the highest level of whites will use their power to tear apart those lower than them with no remorse, which will destroy white society from the inside, just as Daisy ended Myrtle. Unsurprisingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald drew inspiration for writing from the world he lived in. Fitzgerald lived from 1896 to 1940, but the nineteen-twenties were his time to flourish (Donaldson 16). Fitzgerald spent a great deal of his time in and around New York city, with his

wife Zelda Fitzgerald; though, he wrote The Great Gatsby in France, which hit better with reviewers than his previous works (20-4). Fitzgerald framed The Great Gatsby in the era he knew best, the Jazz Age; referring to the nineteen-twenties in the United States, the Jazz Age claims its name due to the popular musical genre derived