Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Compare Tom Buchanan and George Wilson, especially in terms of their attitudes toward women, and their ways of showing violence.

On the face of it, Tom and George are pretty different.
Tom is wealthy, and George is poor. Tom is a bully; George is bullied. Tom never works;
George works all the time.


The men are connected by Myrtle,
George's wife and Tom's lover. Myrtle moves both Tom and George to violence. Tom, caught
by his need to assert dominance over both his wife, Daisy, and Myrtle, brutally
suppresses Myrtle in Chapter two:


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“Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs.
Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any
right to mention Daisy’s name.


“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!”
shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy!
Dai—”


Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her
nose with his open hand.


Then there were bloody towels upon
the bath-room floor, and women’s voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long
broken wail of pain.”



There
is a kind of sordid, cheap cruelty in this scene that belies Tom's wealth and power. Tom
hits Myrtle to make her "behave."


Wilson, on the other
hand, is moved to violence by Myrtle indirectly, after she is run over by Gatsby's car.
After Tom leads him to believe that Gatsby is responsible for her death, he goes to
Gatsby's house, shoots Gatsby, then turns the gun on himself. He is trying to avenge
Myrtle's death, I suppose, but ultimately he has been tricked by Tom into doing what Tom
himself would never do. Tom's entitlement, his "right" to own everyone and everything
around him, is perhaps matched only by George's lack of will and gullibility.
Nevertheless, they are both motivated by a desire to control a
woman.

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