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Symbolisms of Color in The Great Gatsby

 

            In "The Shining," Stanley Kubrick uses shades of red and blue to symbolize innocence and perniciousness. In the beginning of the film, the owner of the Overlook Hotel wears a dark blue jacket with a deep crimson tie as he informs Jack Torrance, a destructive father, of the macabre past of the hotel. In the following scene, Wendy Torrance, Jack's loving and innocent wife, wears a bright, colorful blue dress with a vibrant red shirt and socks while discussing the positive side of Jack's outbreak against his son. Similar to Kubrick's use of color in "The Shining" to emphasize certain themes, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the colors yellow and gold to symbolize new and old money. Both in his novel and The Shining, colors are used as a symbol to display the relationships between both themes. Gold represents old money because gold displays wealth. In contrast, yellow epitomizes new money as yellow imitates gold, but fails, lacking true authenticity. Fitzgerald attempts to emphasize the difference between old money and new money through the symbolic use of color. In the novel, the contrasting colors yellow and gold represent the differences between the two main wealth classes.
             Throughout "The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald uses the color gold, a symbol of substance and wealth, to symbolize old money. When Nick first arrives at his wealthy cousin, Daisy Buchanan's house in West Egg, he admiringly points out the "line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold"(6). Fitzgerald uses the imagery of windows "glowing with reflected gold" to create an image of wealth and power. The "reflected gold" contrasts the authentic, traditional old money, to the new money that does not contain any real substance. Moon glistening(AbP), Nick walks around at Gatsby's first party "with Jordan's golden arm resting in [his]"(33). The diction of "golden arm" to describe Jordan demonstrates her true old money ways as even she gives off a golden hue.


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