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Examples Of Naturalism In The Great Gatsby

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In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, we gain access to the characters lives and how they try to fight naturalism by making an attempt to rise up in the social class system. Evidently, the novel makes a Naturalism argument about not being able to rise from one social class to another; The Great Gatsby says that we as people do not have a choice of social class and are put into a single class. You can only start off from where you are put and stay in that class. In The Great Gatsby, it is easy to recognize the story agree with Naturalism, when it says you are born into one social class, moreover people cannot move up or down in the classes of society. We identify this thought with a few characters, including when Myrtle uses Tom. …show more content…

In chapter 2, before the party, she decides to change, “Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change” (Fitzgerald 34). By wearing cream, Myrtle is trying to show that she is wealthy, or similar to Daisy, who is wearing white the majority of the time. White is the symbol of wealth, nevertheless cream, being close to white, makes sense that it would represent a character that is trying to seem rich or upper class. What’s more, during this entire party at her apartment, Myrtle acts as if she has all the money in the world and tries to seem upper class to fit in with the crowd but also stand out. In addition, she is trying to move up the social class and in doing so, she receives a slap across the face for acting as if she can do whatever she wants. She is acting as if she is higher up than she actually is to seem as if she is a part of their society. Myrtle is also trying to transition to the upper class using Tom as a driver. Witkoski tells us about selfishness and shows the impact …show more content…

One example of this is the fact that Daisy has a child. This child is only seen once throughout the whole story and everyone seems surprised to see her. After Nick, Jordan, Tom, and Daisy are all talking, the phone rings and Tom hurriedly stands up and gets the phone. After he has a conversation with who is thought to be Mr. Wilson, Daisy says that he is holding down the receiver, meaning that he is talking to his mistress. After a moment, a nurse comes in with the child, and everyone reacts differently, “Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand. Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before” (Fitzgerald 124). By Gatsby being genuinely surprised by the child, it is easy to tell that she is not well known. It is interesting that Daisy calls her child “blessed precious” and feels the need to say “your own mother that loves you”. Taken from this section of text, it can be inferred that this means Daisy does not actually raise her daughter, but she is raised by the nurse that brought her in. Her doughter is more of a thing than a human being. She is something for her mother to show off and say ‘look I have this’. This goes to show that yet the rich cannot be satisfied and so they try to fill their lives with material things. Furthermore,

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