Fitzgerald's Portrayal of the Idle Rich in "The Great Gatsby"

Throughout his novel, The Great Gatsby, author F. Scott Fitzgerald offers both subtle and flagrant images of wealth, inheritance, exclusivity, and the treachery of this insular world on the self and the soul.  Almost all of Fitzgerald's portrayals of the Buchanans are ripe with social commentary and an acknowledgement of the corrupting power of money.  Both Tom and Daisy are characters with potential: in both Tom and Daisy's emotional (and physical) infidelity they suggest that they do, even if on the most minute levels, have the capacity for authentic feeling independent of their class restrictions.  However, in their ultimate decisions to hide behind the insular and impermeable boundaries of their wealth, they further adulterate their capacity for humanity with denials of authenticity in favor of money.

In particular, Fitzgerald's descriptions of Daisy work to create a vision of the self capable of love and happiness beyond the scope of shallow social constructions of the wealthy class but at the same time marred by an inability to sacrifice these shallow comforts.  Towards the end of the novel Fitzgerald offers a recollection of Daisy and Gatsby's nascent relationship when she was still caught more evenly between the worlds of wealth and love:
                "Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked
                 fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth...Gatsby was
                 overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the
                 freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot
                 struggles of the poor" (Fitzgerald, 117).
Daisy is at once untouchably beautiful in her ivory tower of wealth and yet simultaneously imprisoned by the myopic and regressive ideologies of her class.  She is "safe" "above the hot struggles of the poor"-- a position that makes her both ignorant of the struggles of people not like her and vulnerable against a perceived threat of poverty.  This description of Daisy is only one of many offered by Fitzgerald about the Buchanans and their shallow yet exclusive contract of a marriage.  Ultimately, Fitzgerald recognizes the dreams of love, marriage, and the glamorous fantasy of the world of wealth, yet he knows these dreams are corrupt, adulterated by naive perspectives and archaic ideals that remain tragically and fatally fixed in solitude.