The Professor's House and The Great Gatsby: Wealth in Post-War America

Novelists such as Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald used themes of desire of wealth as a fundamental element to motivate their characters. In their novels, the theme is reflected by the rich Americans who primal desire is to obtain more and more wealth. These characters are so infatuated with and blinded by money that they no longer regard the more noble qualities of life. In each of their works, these authors present intricate, self-conscious characters that desire wealth in order to attain their dreams. In reality, wealth cannot buy people, ideas or even time.

The Professor's House was written in 1925, in post-war America. Cather narrates a story of detached and collapsed family consumed by the powers of materialism and wealth. Louie Marsellus wears the source of his wealth proudly – the fact that his livelihood is derived from his wife’s deceased fiancé does not create tension between husband and wife nor between the couple and society. He even names his new home after the man, “We have named our place for Tom Outland, a brilliant young American scientist and inventor, who was killed in Flanders, fighting with the Foreign Legion, the second year of the war, when he was barely thirty years of age,” (Cather 30) displays his pride in and respect for his benefactor. Kathleen also describes her desire to earn wealth and material goods similar to her sister to her father: "‘I can't help it, Father. I am envious, I don't think I would be if she let me alone, but she comes here with her magnificence and takes the life out of all our poor little things. Everybody knows she's rich, why does she have to keep rubbing it in?'" ( Cather 68) While Rosamond

attained a higher status in society through Tom, Kathleen became jealous of such...

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...id not necessarily want Daisy back, but the time he had with Daisy all those years ago. He wanted to relive his past. He wanted to have his past self love the past Daisy in the past years, and it cannot be because time has moved them forward. After his first secret meeting with Daisy, Gatsby talks

it over with Nick:

'I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't repeat the past.'

'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'”

[. . .]

'I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,' he said, nodding determinedly. 'She'll see'”.(Fitzgerald 116, 117)

Gatsby seems to think that his wealth will allow him to buy back time, or to buy back the time he had with Daisy. He feels if he could just go back to the past, or have the present seem like the past, then everything in the future will turn out the way he wants.