Desire In The Great Gatsby

For them shopping brings pleasure, it is a form of entertainment. Stavrakakis (2006: 97) notes that there is an enjoyment in the act of consuming goods as there is an “enjoyment entailed in desiring itself”. Yet, there is a danger that the purchases will define and limit them reducing the women to the objects that surround them.

The women in Fitzgerald’s fiction are inseparable from their wealth, or lack of it, and possessions. When Nicole fell for Dick she was tempted to try to win him over by telling him about her wealth, “that really she was a valuable property” (TN: 132). She did not do it, but it shows her insight into how women become commodities and how it relates to erotic desire. Although Nicole can express herself, her spontaneity,

Daisy’s description does not provide any characteristic features apart from her voice. She is more of an indefinite idea than a real person, just as Gatsby’s longing for her love blurs and diffuses into his desire to recreate the reality and past according to his wishes. Donaldson (2001: 206) points out the importance of the green light at the end of the Buchanans’ dock as taking on “an aura of enchantment for Gatsby representing a lost love just beyond his grasp. But once he sees and touches the actual rather than the idealized Daisy, the beacon begins to lose its ‘colossal significance’ for him.” When he has the object of his desire within his reach rather than far away on the horizon, it loses its magic. “In Fitzgerald’s universe as in those of so many American writers, familiarity breeds disillusionment” (Hussman 2013: 95). The distance upholds the illusion while proximity reveals everything that is mundane, ordinary or unsavoury about the object of desire. The marriage of Gloria and Anthony starts to decline after just a few weeks when they know each other better along with their peculiarities and habits. They expected that marriage would bring them bliss, feeling of being complete and that desire would be self-perpetuating. Unfortunately, the only way to keep the desire alive is to be far away from its object. In “The Rich Boy” Anson Hunter forfeits several opportunities to marry Paula. The years following their breakup he spends having short affairs not able to commit himself to one woman and casts Paula as his ideal partner. The men in Fitzgerald’s works know their loved ones only superficially. They reduce women to images, reflections, memories, and those partial, incomplete images have a stronger influence than the real person. When Anson is about to consummate his affair with Dolly Karger, a much younger