Fitzgerald's Stances on Materialism


Fitzgerald takes a really interesting stance on materialism that's shown constantly throughout his novel The Great Gatsby, but dominantly through Jay Gatsby himself.  As we find out in chapter 5, he bought his mansion in hopes that he'd get to meet a girl whom he had romanticized in his mind.  Daisy, the girl, was something unattainable to Gatsby, she was "something" he could chase after and focus his mind and collective being on.  When Gatsby finally gets to meet Daisy and get to know her he crashes and realizes that she is not what he expected.  He describes his confusion to this saying, "his count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."  Daisy is compared to an object whose magnitude of disjointedness is quantitatively "one".  Fitzgerald is communicating that materialism is like a void in Gatsby's life, and it needs to be filled, constantly.  Suspense is built describing Gatsby's anxieties to meeting Daisy, his years of preparation meet  an anticlimax.  Gatsby's materialism drives him to fear stagnancy foreshadowed through Daisy.  Gatsby is foiled in this sense by Nick Carraway.  Nick epitomizes this stagnancy within his small home and busy job.  Nick carries a lethargy with him through his hesitancy to Gatsby's antics.  The two collectively show the relationship between wealth classes in a capitalistic society.  Gatsby uses Nick to achieve a "status symbol" and then once he's achieved this "didn't know [Nick] at all".  The way Fitzgerald intertwines the two characters puts these themes at the center of the story just as they were central themes in the early twentieth century america.

Bourgeois Capitalist 

Donkey
An inspiring comic showing a memory through visual rhetoric.

Author's note: The donkey's are not meant to represent anyone, and there is no significant reason for all the characters being donkeys.

In the chapter featuring Soaphead Church in Toni Morrison's novel, The Bluest Eye, Soaphead is compared to non-human things throughout the novel which dehumanizes his character.  Soaphead is a misanthrope, meaning he hated mankind, this suggests his personal superiority complex that will be strengthened  later in the chapter.  Soaphead is described as loving things, this makes sense that he would try to seek comfort in nonhuman things  in the face of his misanthropy.  Soaphead describes his wife leaving him as "She left me the way people leave a hotel room."  The comparison is to a place, not a thing- it lacks the emotional comfort to be a thing to him.  This blocks Soaphead's emotional viewpoint and works to loosen the empathy Morrison has built for him.  It also shows us how Soaphead believes he is above others on an emotional level, it implies an emotional stillness humanly impossible that Soaphead normally sees himself as having.  Later in the chapter, Soaphead  begins to compare himself to God, the inflated monstrous ego; this implies further works to dehumanize Soaphead to the reader.  The irony of this comparison is that Soaphead preaches about his good intentions with regards to helping people, while trying to downplay the pedophilia, molestation, fraud, and dog murder.  It can be said that Soaphead became the God he has criticized in his letter by refusing to adjust the course of his actions.   Chauvinistic gluttony consume Soaphead even in his most private thoughts.  

Soaphead Church from a play

Maureen Pie

“A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back.”  that describes Maureen Peal.  The description of her subtly put me on edge and i didn’t realize why until the third time reading it.  Morrison describes her hair as lynch ropes, the severity of this comparison brings to mind shocking images that contrast with the sunny child that they are describing. During the chapter "Winter", Pecola is being picked on and the other Breedloves rescue her, Maureen steps in afterwards and tries to comfort her conceitedly, as if her mere presence would fix the psychological mayhem just thrown onto young Pecola.  As they continue walking Maureen brings up a question that is obviously disturbing to Pecola and will not let it go rather than consider her adversity to the topic.  When the Frieda and Claudia intervene, things turn ugly and Maureen says “You ugly!  Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!”  This climactic conclusion to their altercation makes us question her motives for comforting Pecola.  The outburst was likely representative of her conscious’ contemptuous thoughts on the Breedloves.  It Is likely that Maureen is condescendingly helping people who are in her eyes less than her to enable her own self. Morrison foreshadows this calling her hair “lynch ropes” which mirrors her actions which to utilize the misfortunes of others to further her personal agendas in the same way that she utilizes symbolic nooses as a beauty accessory.

Legos are a unique outlet for creativity that brought our generation to where we live today, unfortunately Legos also found a way to push gender stereotypes onto their anthropomorphic blocks while they were at it.  How the boundaries are put onto these block people is easy to understand, they create Lego sets which feature girls cooking, running a tour kiosk, and even shopping at a food market; whereas they feature boys as pirates, spacemen, superheros, supervillians, robots, cyborgs, dinosaurs, fantasy characters, construction workers, ninjas, and pet shop owners.  Something not so transparent is how these boundaries progress through our lives.  The toys put us into neat compartments letting toy companies label us as simply "boy" or "girl" essentially taking away our individualism.  The problem with these broad and generic labels is that it leaves kids out making them feel awkward and lonely only wanting a toy that they can relate to the way that everyone else seems to be relating to.  The toys we play with passive aggressively leave imprints on our behaviors, they teach us what is "normal" and what "isn't"; they teach us who to hate others, and in extreme cases: to hate ourselves.  

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: iconic man

To relate this on a personal level, one of the problems of the extreme masculinity placed in "boy's" toys is the way it dictates our identity to us as “MAN”.  The sinewed biceps and popping pecs of our superheros told us that someday that's who we would have to be, and anyone who didn't meet those standards was "weak" or a "girl" or other things too informal for this blog post.  The facade that is societal masculinity unfortunately has been environmentally conditioned in us since we were maybe two, it runs deep in our psyche and it breeds emotionally detached mannerisms within us from there.  The toys teach us a type of self-centeredness that perpetuates throughout our lives and unfortunately breeds fascism, hatred, misogyny, and contempt for anyone who would dare question the false masculinity we use unfortunately to cover up our tired, tired faces.  The problems that girls toys perpetuate are different, but equally potent and harmful.  It’s hard to say how we can as a society move on from these things, I think to desegregate ourselves from the mentally concrete dividers we’ve put up would be something extremely difficult, however, to do people need to educate themselves and realize that since before we could talk we’ve been programmed to act in ways that were out of our control from the beginning, and then from there decide to distance ourselves from the chains and shackles of gender boundaries.