Alongside love and tragedy, class is one of the key themes in both Atonement and The Great Gatsby. Whilst there are some clear holes in Briony and Nick’s narrative reliability, readers can still gain an insight into the portrayal of class. Ideas such as class segregation, the rich’s hollowness, and class consciousness are presented through numerous techniques. These include narrative bias, metaphorical settings, and character foreboding.
Fitzgerald and McEwan alike reflect their narrators as having class based prejudices, which consequently influences the reader’s interpretation of the text. Briony suggests class to be the primary factor for Robbie and Cecilia’s tragic ending, “love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed”. …show more content…
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald illustrates the social class of Gatsby through the house he resides in. Gatsby’s house is mocked by Nick as a “factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville” and is noticeably “spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy”. It could be argued that the noun “imitation” is symbolic of the owner Gatsby, who attempts to imitate the behaviour of the upper-class. In both the 1920s and 30s, property still held the monopoly on symbolically representing a person’s status, reinforced by Malcolm Cowley’s assertion that “houses, land, and machinery had always been in focus when it came to measuring wealth”. The description that the house is “spanking new” however signifies the lack of heritage and history, something Tom Buchanan taunts Gatsby over, “Mr Nobody from Nowhere”. Furthermore, the personification in the mansion’s “thin beard of raw ivy” accentuates the comparison to Gatsby; the “thin beard” conceals the building’s unestablished status in the same way Gatsby crafts a façade to mask his “raw”, new wealth and unrefined mannerisms. This intertwines with the characteristics of the “Nouveau riche” in the context of the 1920s. Gatsby unquestionably falls under this category, in which an individual achieved wealth in one generation and hence did not inherit the upper-class mannerisms and principles, due to their working class backgrounds. As a result, the “ivy”, which has connotations of age and hence Gatsby’s traditional wealth, is an attempt by the character to imitate what he believes as signifiers of prestige and cultural refinement, evident within “old money” residents such as Tom Buchanan. Like Gatsby, Robbie was not born into wealth, being the “only son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father”. Having said that, “humble” could suggest how Robbie, also described as a “humble woodcutter”, is unpretentious to be anyone else in spite of the
Fitzgerald and McEwan alike reflect their narrators as having class based prejudices, which consequently influences the reader’s interpretation of the text. Briony suggests class to be the primary factor for Robbie and Cecilia’s tragic ending, “love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed”. …show more content…
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald illustrates the social class of Gatsby through the house he resides in. Gatsby’s house is mocked by Nick as a “factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville” and is noticeably “spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy”. It could be argued that the noun “imitation” is symbolic of the owner Gatsby, who attempts to imitate the behaviour of the upper-class. In both the 1920s and 30s, property still held the monopoly on symbolically representing a person’s status, reinforced by Malcolm Cowley’s assertion that “houses, land, and machinery had always been in focus when it came to measuring wealth”. The description that the house is “spanking new” however signifies the lack of heritage and history, something Tom Buchanan taunts Gatsby over, “Mr Nobody from Nowhere”. Furthermore, the personification in the mansion’s “thin beard of raw ivy” accentuates the comparison to Gatsby; the “thin beard” conceals the building’s unestablished status in the same way Gatsby crafts a façade to mask his “raw”, new wealth and unrefined mannerisms. This intertwines with the characteristics of the “Nouveau riche” in the context of the 1920s. Gatsby unquestionably falls under this category, in which an individual achieved wealth in one generation and hence did not inherit the upper-class mannerisms and principles, due to their working class backgrounds. As a result, the “ivy”, which has connotations of age and hence Gatsby’s traditional wealth, is an attempt by the character to imitate what he believes as signifiers of prestige and cultural refinement, evident within “old money” residents such as Tom Buchanan. Like Gatsby, Robbie was not born into wealth, being the “only son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father”. Having said that, “humble” could suggest how Robbie, also described as a “humble woodcutter”, is unpretentious to be anyone else in spite of the