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 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 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...
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