Marxist Reading - Eliot

When reading The Great Gatsby with a Marxist lens the first thing I do is forget everything that I thought I knew when reading with a psychoanalytical lens. This is because with a psychoanalytical lens you are looking for people’s motives and thought processes and with a Marxist lens you are given the motives and are looking for things, which back up this explanation. Reading with a Marxist lens there is the idea of Commidification. Commidification talks about people being used for their value this is comparable to the Marxist idea of exploitation. One character who demonstrates this is Tom. He uses people’s value to make up for his own lowered social status. Another character who will commoditise people is Daisy. She uses Tom and Gatsby to whatever end she pleases she sides with the better commodity and is very willing to leave them should they become less beneficial. One example is she is perfectly content to allow Gatsby to take the blame for Myrtle’s death. Gatsby is another example. He commoditised Daisy. Marxist theory says that he felt that should he win her his new money and the stigmas that came with it would change. His money would become ‘new’ money Interestingly enough though a book which, it can be argued, is making strong Marxist statements does not portray the lower class well. Fitzgerald does not treat myrtle and Wilson benevolently. This could show that it was never intended to be a commentary using Marxist ideas, or that Fitzgerald didn’t feel that the focus on the lower class would help him makes his point.