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Opulence In The Great Gatsby

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The 1920’s expressed great wealth and luxuriousness through excessive and lavish parties with dazzling effects and no apparent purpose other than to simply entertain. In Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby’s displays of affluence demonstrate that in the 1920’s, opulence was represented in forms of materialistic objects. Hieronymus Bosch's painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” suggests that sensuous temptations and the need for grandeur can lead to the corruption of purity. In Philippa Hawker’s article “The subtle art of staging Gatsby's lavish parties,” she describes the effective use of overindulgence and chaos in Gatsby’s parties to represent the shift in societal norms of conservative and refined parties to a more vulgarized form. In John F. Carter, Jr.’s article “‘These Wild Young People,’ by One of Them,” he exposes the changing perspective of his generation from the stringent realistic outlook of the older generation to his looser and more …show more content…

In his novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald represents grandeur and “refinement” as world objects like Gatsby’s “two motorboats…drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam” (Fitzgerald). This exposes a change from traditional views on wealth and class that occurred in the 1920’s, to illustrate the corruption of refinement and old values. Similarly Bosch's painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” clearly represents the digression from purity and high-class to greed and immorality through detail and color. Near the bottom of paintings center panel, Bosch’s use of bright green and white depict the innocence and purity of society tainted by occasional dark figures lurking amongst the good, tempting them with lust and curiosity (Bosch). Both sources serve to express the shallow views of refinery and grandiosity, infecting the original idea of divinity and

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