Great Gatsby

Conflicting Perspective

The 1920s prove to be an era that brought around some of the greatest influences and some of the greatest controversies. In the 1920s, there began to be a schism in the beliefs of prohibition, personal freedoms, and class separation. Traditionalist believed that people were running ramped drink and being promiscuous. Modernists were out to seek personal freedoms, such drinking, sexual experimental, women coming out of their stereotypical roles of being reserved and prude. Classes divided because some people had inherited wealth and other had work hard to earn their money. In The Great Gatsby, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, these controversies that divided the generations of the 1920s included prohibition, and the right to personal freedoms and compares and contrast new money versus old money and modernism versus traditionalism.

In The Great Gatsby, there is social dividing line that separates the aristocracy and those who are "would be" aristocracy. That diving is visible as well as invisible. It is visible in the form of "West-Egg" and "East-Egg", which are areas of Manhattan that are divided between the people with New Money, West-Egg, and the people have had money for generations, East-Egg. People of the east look down on the people of the west as gaudy in every aspect, their homes are over elaborate, as describe by the narrator Nick Carraway. "My own house was an eye Ð'- sore, but it was a small eye-sore and it had been overlooked" (9-10 Fitzgerald). But the homes of east were not described in such as way they were "the white palaces of fashionable East Ð'- Egg" (10 Fitzgerald). Thus dividing in such a way that was as visible as the sound that ran between them.

A more invisible dividing line was the snobbish way that Tom Buchanan treated everyone. He dismissed his own wife at times, to go and be with his mistress, whom he treated like property. Tom, one day on the way into New York, forces Nick off the train into the Valley of the Ashes, to go and retrieve his mistress. Demandingly Tom says to Myrtle "I want to see youÐ'... Get on the next train" (30 Fitzgerald). And that was that no contestation, Nick stood there almost dumbfounded, and the arrogance of Tom was very apparent. This was a display that drew an invisible in between the people of East

In 1920 the 18th amendment came into effect, outlawing and banding the sale, manufacturing and transport of alcohol. Alcohol is very present in the Great Gatsby, and works as a catalyst towards the end of the novel. At all the parties that Nick attends at Gatsby's house and the one at Tom's apartment there is alcohol present, even though it is illegal. "In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another" (Fitzgerald 44). People came to these parties and got completely drunk, to the point of make themselves into spectacles and fools. Even though the people of East Ð'-Egg were snobby toward the people of West-Egg they still attended Gatsby's parties, and anyone else came who thought they should be there. "I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited Ð'- they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door" (45 Fitzgerald). It was like the parties that occur today, everyone meet at someone's home and then caravan to where there would be alcohol.

In history, prohibition was a failed attempt at what was thought to be a progressive reform. The modernist of the period did not feel that prohibition was a progressive reform as it was made out to be, they felt that it was an infringement on their personal freedoms. "I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library"(Fitzgerald 50). The character Owl Eyes states here that he's been drunk for a week in the middle of 1922. Prohibition was well into effect and yet here is someone who feels that they can drink regardless of alcohol being outlawed. But the traditionalist argued, "Many