Desire and The Great Gatsby
Love in The Great Gatsby
Love is often thought of in society as something attainable and common. Most people would say they love their parents or another family member, and many fall in love at least once during their lifetime. When we think of love, we generally think of intrinsic love: loving the person for who he or she is and not for what he or she can do for you. This concept has become an ideology in today’s culture. True, intrinsic love is supposed to be how we feel about the people we enter into relationships with, from friendship to marriage. F. Scott Fitzgerald challenges this. In The Great Gatsby love is most often extrinsic, based upon usefulness. -EB
Intrinsic Love as Ideology
The ideology that love should focus on the intrinsic value of the beloved relates to the writings of Terry Eagleton. In his book titled Ideology, he writes about three kinds of ideology: cognitive, affective, and genetic. In affective ideology, he describes ideology through the words of Althusser, who claims that ideology “expresses a will, a hope or a nostalgia rather than describing a reality” (Eagleton 19). That is exactly what is going on with intrinsic and extrinsic love. Our religious (and often our secular) ideas tend to lean toward us loving others not for what use they can perform but for simply being as they are. Consider the golden rule: treat others as you wish to be treated. This rule asks people to love others for their intrinsic value. With this as the basis for how we believe relationships ought to be, as the “will” or “hope,” an ideology has been developed. It was present in the jazz age when The Great Gatsby takes place and is still present today. Unfortunately, this ideology does not describe the reality we find ourselves in, and that is part of what Fitzgerald uses the characters in The Great Gatsby to point out. -EB
Application to Today
A Counter to the Argument that Time Has Changed Our Relationships
A challenge to Fitzgerald’s stance that love most often, at least among the upper class, is characterized as viewing the value of the beloved in instrumental terms, is that time has changed that. Fitzgerald wrote about the 1920’s, after all. This is the 21st century now. According to some, though people used to view relationships more in terms of instrumentality, we have greater freedom to make relationships with more intrinsic value. Yet consider friendship and the reasons it is made. If done out of loneliness, then a new friend serves a purpose, a use, making a friendship that is instrumental in nature. If a friend is made because he or she has a useful skill that would further a person’s life, like making friends with the smartest person in class so that one can get help on one’s schoolwork, then the friendship is based on the extrinsic value of the other person. If a friend is made because a person is bored and needs someone to interact with, that friendship is based on the extrinsic value of the other person. All of these friendships can develop into intrinsic relationships. It just so happens that in some cases, they do not. I like to call these relationships bonds of convenience. They were made extrinsically, and they can be dissolved when no longer convenient. -EB
The Relationships
Using the relationships of Tom and Daisy, Gatsby and Daisy, Tom and Myrtle, and Nick and Gatsby, I will show that only one relationship of the four could be described as being grounded in the intrinsic value of the beloved, and the rest involve people reducing the other to being merely of instrumental value. Discover more about these individual relationships by clicking on one of the links below. -EB
