What Does Myrtle Wilson Mean In The Great Gatsby

Albert Einstein, a german physicist who changed the way the world thought about many things, once said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Happiness can be brought about by many different means, but many people might agree that money brings happiness. In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald there are many examples in which depending on money for your happiness, led to the destruction of said happiness. Myrtle Wilson and Jay Gatsby are two characters in the novel with a vastly different amount of money and share very similar ends to their lives. Money enticed these characters to seek out the glamorous life that can come with it. Money did bring joy to their lives, but it was

She grew to resent her own husband for being poor and unable to provide her with the lavish things Tom gave her. When talking about why she had married her husband when she seems to dislike him so much Myrtle explained, “‘I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,’ she said finally, ‘I thought he knew something about breeding but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.’”(pg. 34). Myrtle assumed that her husband, George Wilson, was a man who would be able to provide for both of them and wanted to live a comfy life. As time went on she realized that Wilson was actually just a poor man with a defeated attitude. This resentment grew more when she met Tom, a man who carried himself with authority and threw around money with no care in regards to whether or not he’d run out. Quickly she fell in love with him because he had money and acted the way she thought a man should act. Tom smothered her with gifts and she felt like a queen, but unlike Gatsby, she wasn’t trying to impress anyone. Gatsby wanted to have a lot of money so that he would be accepted by the society his love belonged to and lead Daisy to accept him too. At the time in which this novel

Before meeting the man who would show her what living with a lot of money was like, Myrtle was just a simple woman. Her life might’ve been very monotonous, but at least she was living a good enough life. Some might argue that money did bring her a lot of happiness and didn’t destroy her happiness, but that is wrong because her infatuation with living in riches is what causes her to die, destroying any happiness she could have ever experienced in the future. The narrator states in chapter seven that Myrtle while speaking to George Wilson exclaims, “‘Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!’" A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting before he could move from his door the business was over.”(pg. 137). She ran out trying to get the attention of Tom Buchanan who she assumed was driving the vehicle and ended up getting killed. If she hadn’t fallen for this man and his money because of how wealthy and handsome he was, she’d likely still be alive and happy. Money seems to only have brought stress and sadness to Gatsby. Throughout the novel, Gatsby is seen to always be taking phone calls from people who presumably work with him, even when he is at parties or trying to relax. In chapter eight of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway is planning Gatsby’s funeral when he receives a call from someone