Examples Of Materialism In The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald third book, “The Great Gatsby”, stands as the supreme achievement in his career. According to The New York Times, “The Great Gatsby” is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s. In the novel, the author described Daisy Buchanan as childish, materialistic, and charming. These characteristics describing Daisy is also description for the way women were seen during the 1920s.

Daisy is describe as childish, because like a child playing pretend, she pretends to be someone she is not, she cannot make up her mind, and does not think about how her action will affect everyone else. For example, Nick said, “The instance her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what

In a conversation she was having with Nick, she was telling him what she said to the doctors when she gave birth to her daughter. She told the doctor, “And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool”(17). She is telling the doctor, just like herself, she will like if her daughter is a fool and marry a man that will do everything for her and just be like a trophy wife. She wants her to mostly use her beauty rather than her brains. Another example of Daisy being materialistic is between a conversation with Nick and Gatsby, and what Gatsby said was, “Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money — that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. . . . high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl. . . . ”(120). Here, Gatsby is saying because Daisy has always been wealthy, that everything that she says is always related to money. Gatsby has experience being poor and rich, and when he said Daisy’s voice is full money, he meant that because she has been wealthy all her life, that there is a difference in the way a rich person talks compared to a unfortunate person. Gatsby sees that Daisy’s voice has so much sophistication and upper class in it that it seems to be full of money, money that rich people always have. One more way that F. Scott Fitzgerald describes Daisy as materialistic is when Gatsby said, “She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!”(130). When Gatsby said that Daisy only married Tom because she was tired of waiting for him and that he was poor, makes the reader think that she choose money over true love. In the novel, women’s in the 1920s only cared about having fun and spending money. They did