Love and The American Dream

The Great Gatsby draws a parallel between romantic desires and the American Dream. Fitzgerald suggests that if love is only the desire to possess, then that love will fail, just as if the American Dream is only the desire to possess, that dream is destructive and the entire purpose of the dream--self-dependency and -discovery--is wasted. The downfall of the American Dream is rooted in the fact that true love in the 1920s was subordinated to the overwhelming consensus that an abundance of money, not familial and individual achievement, was the highest form of happiness. The subordination causes societal and romantic relationships to fail. For example, we know that Gatsby's love for Daisy is only an inflated and romanticized infatuation with money. We know that she could not bring herself to marry him while he was poor, and that she is finally attracted to him when he is rich; she only displays emotion--a sign of love--when he shows her his beautiful, expensive clothing. Both Daisy and Gatsby subordinate love to the idea of this really stereotyped, materialistic coexistence with another person. Both have empty, broken American Dreams, because both are more susceptible to money than they are to love. Daisy marries Tom out of convenience, because he was able to provide her with social and financial comfort when Gatsby was not: "[Tom] came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars" (75-76). Likewise, Myrtle is attracted to Tom because "he had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and [she] couldn't keep my eyes off him" (36). She is too blinded by his money to know that he really only wants her because in his boredom he has nowhere economically higher to look, and because he can easily control her with expensive temptations like the dog and its leash (the latter being a direct metaphor for control). Fitzgerald pities the deteriorating American Dream for its succumbing to the pleasures of wealth and overlooking the value of the kind of love that Wilson has for Myrtle, the kind that lives without material appeal.