Consumption In Gatsby

The relationship between spending habit and social position are inextricable. Just as Gatsby has been striving to become a member of the traditional upper-social class like Tom and Daisy. His conspicuous consumption is to proof that he deserves Daisy. But is consumption able to reshape class fractions? Yet he is rejected again by Daisy in the summer of 1923. There lies an insurmountable gap between Gatsby and the Old Money—a gap that cannot be filled up by money—that is the taste.
Gatsby just buy all the high-priced stuffs, but his lacking of aesthetic judgment reveals his real identity as a crude, vulgar person. Bourdieu posits a theory of social space based on aesthetic judgment of taste in A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste that how aesthetic dispositions, namely aesthetic preference, influences one’s choice of material, and the material itself works as a symbolic figure to show the buyer’s social space to the world. This can explain Gatsby’s conspicuous consumption cannot help to elevate social status for him, because the products he owns are not the insignia of the upper social class—he does not have a right taste to choose the aesthetic products.
The clues that Gatsby is a vulgar, crude person can also be found in Gatsby’s parties that were “brightness, confusion, magnificence, daring, vulgarity, excess, and excitement.” He never holds a formal social gathering but a house party for anybody to enjoy the glistering night life with extravagant services. The guests wear fashionable clothes and bob their hair to his parties, but usually drink themselves into stupor before going back home. “Old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles,” and a drunken girl plays the piano, singing and weeping at t...

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... “the kind of man you’d like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister(78)”. Wolfshiem is uncivilized enough to mistake Oxford University as “college,” and is not quite clear about Gatsby’s “learned” social manner. As for leisure class like Tom he has the sense to figure out the differences between Old Money and New Money. Tom is uncomfortable with Gatsby’s inappropriate behavior and poor taste, and he feels even more disgusted about Gatsby’s money source. He despises Gatsby and calls him “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” and his West Egg mansion a “menagerie” and “pigsty” (115, 136). Not to mention that Daisy is hypnotized by Gatsby’s dazzling surroundings, she does not want to marry him still. Gatsby’s conspicuous consumption rises him to a prominencecin New York, but he is still a gate-crasher who has no class and no taste to the traditional Old Money elite.