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East Egg and West Egg as a setting for The Great Gatsby
While both East and West Egg are wealthy communities, families with inherited wealth, or “old money,” live in the more fashionable East Egg. In West Egg, by contrast, residents whose wealth is new, like Gatsby, conspicuously mimic European aristocracy to appear established. Gatsby’s house is modeled on the Hotel de Ville (French for city hall) in Normandy, France, and was built by a brewer who offered to pay the neighbors to live in thatched cottages, like peasants. While many of the descriptions of the houses in the novel seem over the top, they are in fact based on real mansions that existed on Long Island in the 1920s. For example, an estate named Harbor Hill was also modeled on Hotels de Ville, and included farms, a blacksmith, a casino, and Turkish baths on its 650 acres. Despite such opulent displays of wealth, the novel suggests that the city, the suburbs, and the valley of ashes all share a sense of spiritual desolation and psychological desperation. In the end, then, it seems to matter little where the characters find themselves along the corridor between New York and the twin Eggs. Nobody in
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New York City as a setting for The Great Gatsby
Most of The Great Gatsby occurs in suburban East Egg and West Egg, but there are also significant developments in the novel that transpire in New York City—specifically, across the Queensborough Bridge in Manhattan. These include the impromptu drunken party at Myrtle’s sister’s Catherine’s apartment in Chapter 2 and Nick and Gatsby’s lunch in Chapter 4 at which Gatsby tells Nick apocryphal stories about his past and where Nick meets Gatsby’s mobster associate, Meyer Wolfsheim.
In Chapter 4, Nick describes the profound optimism he feels when arriving in the city by train: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” He goes on to assert, “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge.” Yet for all that New York appears full of possibility, Nick often finds his actual experience there sad, as when, in Chapter 3, he observes “young clerks . . . wasting the most poignant moments of the night and life.” Allthough frequently romanticized as a place where anything is possible, with its buildings compared to slices of cake and heaps of sugar, the reality of city as a hub of loneliness, thwarted ambition, and dark secrets eventually become apparent to both Nick and the reader.
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The valley of ashes as a setting for The Great Gatsby
The “valley of ashes” is a vast trash heap between the city and the suburbs that has become the dumping ground for debris discarded by the residents of more fortunate areas around it. It is—much like its resident, George Wilson—desolate, desperate, and hopeless. The valley of ashes serves as a symbol of the moral decay of American society hidden by the glittering surface of upper-class extravagance.
Read about the how the novel’s settings serve as symbols in the fourth Mini Essay.
