The ephemeral luxury of Jay Gatsby

The ephemeral luxury of Jay Gatsby
4 min read
29 September 2022

The ephemeral luxury of Jay Gatsby

The greatest dandy of the literary New York of the 1920s, reconstructed by Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby (1925), uses a mansion and fills it with luxuries to win back the woman who rejected him when he was a young man without fortune.

Jay Gatsby, surprisingly millionaire, appears in history when he bought property along the Hudson River where every weekend a cut of New York's high society gathers: artists, film producers, dancers, politicians, stockbrokers, and the rich. of different ilk like courtiers who are in charge of expanding in all directions the fame of the lavish wealth of the Great Gatsby.

Luxury is the origin of prestige, and a chain of infidelities on the part of the Buchanan couple causes the unfortunate events that end the life of Gatsby and a third marriage, the Wilsons. The characters are polar opposites in class origin. Class is the family, situation, condition, and social position. Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband, is Gatsby's antagonist. A Yale graduate and polo player, he is a millionaire whose wealth never needs to be explained, because he was born into the bourgeoisie and inherited the wealth and because of it he stayed with Daisy and leads the life of a sports jockey with a stable of horses who get everything he wants. that looks for as it gives place. With money, he also coaxed from the humble house in which he lives and made his mistress Myrtle Wilson, the poor wife of fireman Georges Wilson,

Another secondary character is Jordan Baker, a golf player with a secure position but without personal brilliance who plays the role of a matchmaker by ensuring the meeting between Daisy and Gatsby. With those women of opposite social extraction, stiffened by marital lives, and the arrogant confrontation between two millionaire patriarchs to obtain favors or take over the females, the blind revenge of the cuckolded fireman Wilson, and the jazz era as a parable of an era and social epicenter of city life, Fitzgerald builds a sentimental picture with class oppositions and social contradictions that create an atmosphere of splendor and decadent excess in the fury of the 20s of the last century. Perhaps The Great Gatsby is the great American novel of frivolity.

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Fitzgerald brings together in nine chapters what happens in West Egg and in New York in the summer of 1922: intimate scenes, social gatherings, hotels, mansions, riverside beaches, a set of settings that become ceremonial elements to mythologize American luxury and that it ends up being a synthesis of what could have been experienced in the big cities. The novel sublimates or mythologizes at least part of whatever the 1920s were: the jump from the foxtrot to the Charleston, mocked prohibitionism, the squandering of those who got rich putting gasoline into the war in Europe believing that the wars had lagged behind. Some of those elements that since decadence encourage the "American dream" of emigrants who aspire to reach the land of freedom: obtaining wealth.

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The bay of the Hudson River, on both sides, was being colonized with mansions by those who made their fortune in New York. It is there where the jazz parties and banquets offered in the garden and pool of the Gatsby mansion are held. It is an old mansion abandoned by the Pharaonic dream of another millionaire, restored and furnished by the nouveau riche of the neighborhood who aspires to attract a particular woman there.

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