Franklinian American Dream

Franklinian American Dream
"Materialistic Dream"
Emersonian American Dream
"Idealistic Dream"
Hybrid
Characteristics/Priorities:
- Achieving wealth to simply be wealthy
- Materialistic items = happiness
- "so exclusively concerned with getting free that it has no energy left for exploring the meaning of its freedom"
- Relationships with others is not as important
- Self-reliance
- Using wealth to become free from the power of another
- Gaining control over others
- Will achieve wealth by any necessary means

Characteristics/Priorities:
- Also relies on wealth for happiness, but as a means not as an end
- Money enhances the ability to experience happiness
- Power over self vs. power over others
- Deeply rooted in the idea of achieving happiness by MORAL means
Nick Carraway

Daisy Buchanan
Jay Gatsby
- Intends to use wealth as a means of obtaining happiness (i.e. to win Daisy's love)
- Achieves wealth by immoral means
- Satisfied with nothing less than absolute power over everyone and everything


Gatsby's Defeated Characters:
The Decidedly Disadvantageous Aspects of Immorality in Regards to American Dreams
- Dissatisfied with social station
- Moves East to become a bond salesman
- Once surrounded by upper-class members of society, begins to be influenced by their immorality
-lies
-breaks the law
-Gatsby's offer
- In the end, no wealth, no happiness, and no idea of how to be happy
- Escapes total damnation, remains scathed
- Born and raised within the FAD
-maintain wealth
- Lifestyle corrupted moral code
-
Liar, adulturess, possible murderess, manipulative and controlling, little interest in maintaining deep, meaningful relationships with others (narcissistic), materialistic
- Left at the end of the novel much in the same position as we found her in the beginning