Fitzgerald As A Critique of the American Dream And Capitalism

One of the most effective ways The Great Gatsby criticizes capitalist culture is by showing the debilitating effects of capitalist ideology even on those who are its most successful products, and it does so through its representation of commodification.

Nowhere in The Great Gatsby is commodification so clearly embodied as in the character of Tom Buchanan. The wealthiest man in the novel, Tom relates to the world only through his money. For him, all things and all people are commodities. His marriage to Daisy was certainly an exchange of Daisy’s youth, beauty, and social standing for Tom’s money and power and the image of strength and stability they imparted to him. Tom uses his money and social rank to, metaphorically, purchase Myrtle and the numerous other working-class women with whom he has affairs.

Tom’s consistent choice of lower-class women can also be understood in terms of his commodified view of human interaction. He, in a way, markets his socioeconomic status where it will put him at the greatest advantage: Among women who are most desperate for and most easily awed by what he has to sell. Having attended Yale, Tom must be, as Fitzgerald was, painfully aware of the Eastern social requirement he can never by birth fulfill. Even if he and Daisy return to Europe or the Midwest, Tom carries the knowledge of his social inferiority inside himself. His vulgarity can be seen as an attempt to reassure himself that his money and power are all that count. An attempt to show that his wealth insulates him from considerations of class or refinement

Daisy’s acceptance of the pearls, and of the marriage to Tom they represent, is, of course, an act of commodification. She wanted Tom’s sign exchange value as much as he wanted hers.  

Even Daisy’s extramarital affair with Gatsby, like her earlier romance with him, is based on a commodified view of life. She would never have become interested in him had she known that Gatsby was not from much the same strata as herself. When she learns the truth during the confrontation scene in the hotel suite, her interest in him quickly fades. The apparent ease with which she lets Gatsby take the blame for Myrtle’s death, while she beats a hasty retreat with Tom, indicates that her commodification of people, like that of her husband, facilitates the cold-blooded sacrifice of others to her convenience.

If Gatsby is the novel’s representative of the American dream, however, the dream must be a corrupt one, for Gatsby achieves it only through criminal activities, a fact that severely deflates the image of the honest, hardworking man that the dream is supposed to foster. And although Gatsby is certainly more charming than Tom and Daisy, and more sympathetically portrayed by Nick, he commodifies his world just as they do. In fact, one might argue that he commodifies it more. However much of the Buchanans’ possessions are important to them in terms of sign exchange value, they also have use value. We see the couple reclining on their sofas and eating at their tables. In contrast, we are told that the only room Gatsby occupies in his magnificently furnished mansion is his simple bedroom, and during the only time we see him there his purpose is to show it to Daisy. He almost never uses his library, pool, or hydroplane himself and he doesn’t drink the alcohol or know most of the guests at his lavish parties. It seems that for Gatsby the sole function of material possessions is sign exchange value. He wants the image their ownership confers on him and nothing more. 

Operating against The Great Gatsby’s powerful critique of capitalism is the novel’s subtle reinforcement of capitalism’s repressive ideology. This counter-movement operates in three ways. First, the unflattering portraits of George and Myrtle deflect our attention from their victimization by the capitalist system in which they both struggle to survive. Second, because Nick is seduced by the American dream Gatsby represents, his narrative romanticizes the protagonist, obscuring the ways in which Jimmy Gatz’s investment in the dream produced the amoral Jay Gatsby. Third, the lush language used to describe the world of the wealthy makes it attractive despite the people like the Buchanans who populate it. Perhaps The Great Gatsby’s most obvious flaw, from a Marxist perspective, is its unsympathetic rendering of George and Myrtle Wilson, the novel’s representatives of the lower class. George and Myrtle try to improve their lot the only way they know how. George clings to his foundering business, and Myrtle, in a sense, tries to start one of her own by marketing the only commodity she has in stock. She rents her body to Tom Buchanan, hoping he’ll want someday to purchase it by marrying her. They are victims of capitalism because the only way to succeed in a capitalist economy is to succeed in a market, and, as neither George nor Myrtle succeed in the only markets open to them, they are condemned to the valley of ashes.