The Great Gatsby is often read as a book about money, but its sharper subject is the feeling money produces. The novel argues that class is never settled and never safe. Everyone in its world is watching the rung above and the rung below, and the watching never stops. Class anxiety in The Great Gatsby is not a mood that visits a few unlucky strivers; it is the permanent weather of the whole social order, felt by the man clawing upward, the woman terrified of slipping back, and the heir who already has everything and still cannot sleep. Read the book this way and a famous love story reveals its harder engine: dread of where you stand.
Picture the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the image readers remember first. We tend to call it hope, and it is. But hope of that intensity is only the bright face of fear. A man stares across dark water at a single small light because he is afraid the distance cannot be closed, afraid the woman on the far shore belongs to a world that will not let him in, afraid that the self he built will be exposed as a costume. The reaching arm and the racing pulse are the same gesture. Behind every yearning in this novel sits a corresponding fear, and that fear has a social shape. It is the fear of class.
This article makes a single, defended claim and follows it through every chapter: no one in the novel is secure, not even the secure. The strivers fear failure and exposure. The arrived fear losing their place to the next wave of strivers. The result is that rank, in Fitzgerald’s hands, buys no peace at all, not even for the people who seem to own the world. Social standing is supposed to be the prize that ends the striving. The book’s quiet horror is that it ends nothing. The anxiety simply changes its costume and moves up a floor.
That argument matters because the easy reading gets the theme backward. The easy reading treats anxiety as a symptom of not having arrived, a discomfort that Tom Buchanan, with his old fortune and his polo ponies, has presumably escaped. Watch Tom for ten pages and you will see the opposite. His wealth has not calmed him; it has armed him. He is the most defensive character in the book precisely because he has the most to lose and senses, correctly, that the ground is moving. If even Tom is afraid, then the novel is not describing a ladder some people have finished climbing. It is describing a condition with no top floor.
This is a theme analysis, and the goal is to move past assertion into evidence. Many readers can say that the book is “about class.” Far fewer can show how the text builds class into a felt, behavioral force, scene by scene, line by line. That is the work here. We will define the theme as the novel itself treats it, find where it first appears, track how it develops across the nine chapters, name the characters and objects that carry it, read the passages that crystallize it, answer the strongest objection to this reading, and turn the whole thing into a thesis a student can defend. If you want the broader treatment of money and rank as a system, the series handles that in its analysis of wealth and class in The Great Gatsby; this article narrows the lens to the emotion that system generates.
Defining Class Anxiety in The Great Gatsby
Before tracing the theme, it helps to define it as the novel treats it, which is not quite how a sociology textbook would. In Fitzgerald’s hands, class anxiety in The Great Gatsby is the felt, often unspoken pressure of one’s social position: the climber’s dread of failing or being unmasked, the slider’s panic at falling out of comfort, and the established figure’s defensive unease at any threat to the order that flatters him. It is class experienced as nerves rather than as a number on a ledger.
Three distinct strains run through the book, and keeping them separate is the key to reading the theme well. The first is the anxiety of climbing: the strain, exposure, and self-doubt of someone trying to rise above the station he was born to. The second is the anxiety of slipping: the fear, sharpest in those just above the bottom, of losing the small foothold that separates respectability from the valley of ashes. The third is the anxiety of defending: the wariness of the secure, who feel a changing world pressing against their gates and respond by closing ranks. The novel populates all three.
What makes the theme more than a catalogue of worried people is Fitzgerald’s insistence that these anxieties are not personal flaws. They are produced by the system. A society that sorts people by inherited money, that draws a hard line between old fortune and new, and that treats a person’s accent and tailoring as evidence of worth will manufacture dread at every level, because every level can be measured against another. The anxiety is the running cost of a hierarchy that no one is allowed to leave. It is not that these characters happen to be insecure. It is that the world they live in requires insecurity to function.
What is the theme of class anxiety in The Great Gatsby?
The theme holds that social position generates fear at every level of society. Climbers dread exposure and failure, those near the bottom dread slipping, and the established rich dread a changing order. Fitzgerald presents this dread as the system’s universal cost rather than a few characters’ private weakness.
This framing also explains why class anxiety differs from the wider theme of wealth and rank. Money sorts the characters; the novel’s separate pillar essay on social mobility in The Great Gatsby tracks who can rise and who cannot. Class anxiety is the emotional residue of that sorting, the feeling left in the body after the verdict has been delivered. You can map the class structure of the book as a diagram. The anxiety is what the diagram feels like from inside. That is why the theme lives less in what characters own than in how they behave when their standing is touched.
Where the Theme First Appears
The anxiety enters the novel before any party, before Gatsby has spoken a word, in the first chapter’s dinner at the Buchanans’ house. Nick arrives at a place of established wealth, and what he finds there is not contentment but a low, persistent agitation. Tom paces. The conversation lurches. And then Tom delivers the speech that announces the theme to anyone reading closely.
He has been reading, he says, and he has gotten anxious. “Civilization’s going to pieces,” he tells the table, and follows it with a confession that is also a diagnosis: “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.” The book he has absorbed warns that “if we don’t look out the white race will be” overwhelmed by the others. Critics rightly read this as the novel marking Tom’s racism, and it is that. But notice the emotional register underneath the ideology. Tom is frightened. A man with a fortune he did not earn and could not lose if he tried has talked himself into a vision of civilizational collapse. His fear has dressed itself in the language of race and science, but its true object is simpler and closer to home: the order that puts Tom on top is not eternal, and some part of him knows it.
This is a precise opening move. Fitzgerald could have introduced the theme through a striver, through Gatsby straining at the bottom of the hill. Instead he plants it first in the most secure character in the book, at the most established address, over the most comfortable dinner. The placement is the argument. If anxiety began with Gatsby, a reader could file it under the strivers’ problem and move on. By giving the first and loudest expression of dread to Tom Buchanan, the novel forecloses that easy reading on page seventeen. The man who has everything is the man who cannot stop talking about losing it.
Daisy’s contribution to the same evening sharpens the point. When she tells the story of her daughter’s birth, she reports wishing the girl would grow up to be “a fool,” because that is the best thing a girl can be in this world. The line is usually quoted as evidence of Daisy’s despair or cynicism, and it is both. It is also a piece of inherited-class wisdom passed down like a family recipe. Daisy is teaching her daughter, and the reader, that for a woman in her station, awareness is a liability and ignorance is armor. The most protected woman in the novel has concluded that the only safe response to her world is to refuse to see it clearly. That is anxiety so total it has curdled into a parenting strategy.
By the end of the first chapter, then, the novel has shown its hand. The valley of ashes and Gatsby’s longing reach still lie ahead, but the theme is already fully present, and it is present at the top. The strain that drives the rest of the book is not a feature of poverty or ambition alone. It saturates the mansion lit up across the bay just as thoroughly as it will soon saturate the man staring at it.
How the Theme Develops Across the Chapters
From that opening the novel widens the theme deliberately, taking it down through every layer of its society and showing how the same dread looks different at each depth. Reading the development chapter by chapter is the surest way to see that Fitzgerald is not repeating a single note but building a structure.
The Valley of Ashes and the Anxiety of Slipping
Chapter two drops from East Egg to the valley of ashes, and with the descent the theme changes its face. Here, near the floor of the social world, the dominant fear is not exposure but falling further. George Wilson runs a failing garage in the dust between the city and the eggs, and his wife Myrtle has decided she will not stay there. Her whole performance is organized around the terror of being fixed permanently at the bottom.
Watch what happens to Myrtle when she changes into the dress Tom has bought her for the city apartment. “With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change,” Nick observes. “The intense vitality that had been so remarkable” in the garage “was converted into impressive hauteur.” The transformation is the point. Myrtle believes that station is a costume, that putting on the clothes of a higher rank will make her a member of it. So she snaps at the apartment’s servant, complains that “these people” must be watched every minute, and lectures her guests on the help she means to hire. She is performing the anxiety of someone who has glimpsed a rung above and is desperate not to be dragged back below.
Her cruelest moment is also her most revealing. Recalling her marriage to Wilson, she says she thought he was a gentleman, that he “knew something about breeding,” and adds, “I almost made a mistake, too.” The mistake she means is marrying down. Myrtle’s tragedy is that she has absorbed the same class logic that holds her at the bottom. She measures her own husband by the standard of the people who will never accept her, and she despises him for failing a test she herself can never pass. The novel’s portrait of the insecure poor is not sentimental. Myrtle’s dread has made her contemptuous of the only world that would have her, and that contempt helps drive the violence to come.
The Parties and the Anxiety of Climbing
Chapter three brings the parties, and with them the anxiety of climbing arrives in full. Gatsby’s house fills weekly with people who come to drink and gawk, and the crowd itself is a study in social fear. They circulate, they trade rumors about their host, they perform an ease none of them feels, because every one of them is auditioning for a world they have not yet entered. The party is less a celebration than a vast nervous rehearsal of belonging.
Gatsby himself, when he finally appears, embodies the climber’s central dread: that the constructed self will be seen through. His manners are studied to the edge of parody. His formality, Nick notes, “just missed being absurd,” which is the exact condition of someone who has learned the rules of a class from the outside and applies them a shade too carefully. The famous “old sport” is a verbal costume, a phrase borrowed to signal a breeding Gatsby does not have. Everything about his self-presentation is a defense against exposure, and the strain of maintaining it is the strain that defines his character. He has built a self and now lives in fear of its collapse.
The Reunion and the Body of Fear
If chapter five is the novel’s emotional center, it is also the place where Gatsby’s anxiety becomes physical, legible on his body, impossible for the reader to miss. The reunion with Daisy has been the entire purpose of his ascent, and as it approaches he comes apart. He arrives at Nick’s house “pale, and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.” He knocks over a clock and stands there, Nick says, “running down like an over-wound clock.” When Daisy enters, Gatsby is found “reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease,” his hands in his pockets, performing a calm he does not feel.
The scene is a masterclass in how the novel renders dread. Gatsby is not nervous because he loves Daisy, or not only. He is nervous because Daisy is the verdict on his entire project of self-making. To win her is to be confirmed as a member of the world he has counterfeited his way into. To lose her is to be exposed as James Gatz in costume. The pile of imported shirts he throws before her, the man in England who “buys me clothes,” the whole museum of expensive objects he parades through the house: these are not gifts so much as evidence, exhibits in a case he is making for his own legitimacy. And Daisy weeps into the shirts because she, too, reads them as the language of class, the only language either of them fully trusts.
Tom’s Investigation and the Anxiety of Defending
By chapters six and seven the secure man’s defensive anxiety, planted in the opening dinner, has hardened into action. Tom has noticed Gatsby, and noticing turns instantly to threat. “Who is this Gatsby anyhow?” he demands, and the question is not idle. It is the established order sensing an intruder. When someone suggests Gatsby is “some big bootlegger,” Tom seizes the lead and begins, in his own words, to make “a small investigation.” A man with nothing to fear does not investigate. Tom’s research into Gatsby’s drugstores and his bonds is the behavior of someone who feels the gate being tested and means to hold it shut.
The Plaza confrontation in chapter seven is where the defending anxiety detonates. Tom’s weapon is not his fists but his knowledge of the rules. He mocks Gatsby’s pretensions to be “an Oxford man,” and when the truth about the bootlegging comes out, that Gatsby “and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drugstores” and “sold grain alcohol over the counter,” Tom wields it like a duelist. The fight is not chiefly about Daisy’s love. It is about caste. Tom is defending a border, and his fury is the fury of a man who has glimpsed how thin the line is between his inherited position and Gatsby’s manufactured one. He wins not because he is better but because he was born inside the wall, and he knows the law of the wall by heart.
The Final Chapters and the Cost Coming Due
In the closing chapters the theme collects its bill. Gatsby’s death and the empty funeral are the climber’s anxiety realized: the man who spent everything to belong is abandoned by the world he spent it on, his house silent, his guests vanished. The crowds that filled the parties do not come, because they were never his. They were attendees at an audition, and the audition is over.
The novel’s last pages then deliver the verdict on the defenders. Nick’s famous judgment names Tom and Daisy as “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.” The retreat is the key word. Their security is real, and it is monstrous. They can afford to break the world and step back behind the wall of their wealth, untouched. But even this is not peace. Nick imagines Tom continuing “forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.” The most secure man in the book is last seen as a figure of permanent, restless want. His class has protected his body and his bank account. It has not given him a moment’s rest. To the last, no one in this novel is secure, not even the secure.
The Funeral and the Climber’s Exposure
The novel saves its harshest demonstration of the climber’s anxiety for the end, when the dread Gatsby spent his life defending against finally arrives in full. The man who built a self to be accepted is, at his death, exposed and abandoned, and the exposure comes from two directions at once.
The first is the empty funeral. The lawns that filled every weekend with hundreds of guests produce, at the end, almost no one. The people who drank his liquor and traded rumors about him do not come, because they were never his to begin with. They attended an audition, and an audition has no loyalty. Nick works the telephone trying to gather mourners and finds the moneyed world simply gone, unwilling to be associated with a death that might stain them. The absence is the verdict the parties always disguised. Gatsby’s whole project assumed that enough spectacle could purchase belonging, and the empty house answers that it cannot. The dread of never being fully accepted, which drove the performance, turns out to have been accurate all along.
The second exposure comes through Henry Gatz, Gatsby’s father, who arrives from the Midwest in cheap clothes and undoes the constructed self with his presence. He is proud, grieving, and entirely of the world Gatsby spent his life escaping. He shows Nick a boyhood schedule his son once wrote, a list of resolutions for self-improvement penciled into the back of a worn book, and the schedule lays bare the whole machinery of ascent. Here is James Gatz inventing Jay Gatsby line by line, budgeting his hours toward a greatness he believed he could manufacture. The father’s pride in that schedule is unbearable precisely because it reveals what the polished surface concealed: the dream was real, the effort was real, and the fear underneath was real too. The man who feared exposure above all is exposed at last, gently, by the one person who loved the boy he had been.
Together these closing scenes complete the theme’s argument about climbing. The anxiety that organized Gatsby’s life was not paranoia. It was a correct reading of his world. He feared that his manufactured self would never secure him a place, and the world confirms the fear by deserting him the moment he can no longer host. The series essay on the hollowness of the upper class examines the empty world that abandoned him; for the theme of dread, the funeral is the proof that the climber’s central fear was justified. He was right to be afraid. The tragedy is that being right did not save him.
There is a cruel symmetry in how the novel disposes of its anxieties. Gatsby’s climbing fear ends in a deserted house. Myrtle’s fear of slipping ends under the wheels of a car. George Wilson’s fear of being trapped ends in murder and suicide. Only the defenders, Tom and Daisy, survive, because their dread is the one the system is built to protect. They retreat into their money and go on, carrying their restlessness with them. The strivers and the trapped pay with their lives; the secure pay with a lifetime of want they can well afford. That uneven settlement is the novel’s final word on who the hierarchy serves and who it consumes.
Louisville and the Origin of the Climbing Fear
The novel locates the source of Gatsby’s class anxiety in a single early scene, the courtship in Louisville that chapter eight finally reveals, and reading that origin clarifies why his dread takes the shape it does. The young officer who met Daisy in 1917 was poor, and the gap between them was the gap that organized the rest of his life.
What drew Gatsby to Daisy was never only the woman. It was what she represented. Nick reports that her house and her world dazzled the young man, that the sheer fact of her desirability to others sharpened his hunger: “It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy,” which “increased her value in his eyes.” The phrasing is the language of the market, value rising with demand, and it exposes the class machinery running beneath the romance. Daisy was the embodiment of a secure, golden world that the penniless officer could see and want but not enter. His love for her and his longing to rise were the same feeling from the start. To possess Daisy would be to possess the world she came from, and to lose her would be to be sent back to nothing.
This origin explains why Gatsby’s anxiety is so total and so durable. He did not fall for a person and then happen to want money; he fell for a person who was money, who was class itself made warm and lovely and just out of reach. Every later effort, the fortune, the mansion, the parties thrown in the hope she might wander in, is an attempt to close the original gap. And the dread that shadows all of it is the dread born in Louisville, the fear of the poor young man that he is not enough, that the distance between his birth and her world is the one distance no amount of striving can erase. The whole novel is the working out of an anxiety that began the moment a poor soldier looked at a rich girl and understood that wanting her meant wanting to become someone else entirely.
That is the seed of the green light. The man reaching across the bay in the present is the boy who stood outside Daisy’s world in the past, and the reach has the same fear inside it now as then. Gatsby’s climbing anxiety is not a reaction to his success; it predates it, and it survives it. He built an empire to quiet a fear that no empire could reach, because the fear was never about money in the bank. It was about belonging, and belonging was the one thing his money could not buy.
Which Characters and Objects Carry the Theme
The theme does not float free of the cast; it is distributed among them, with each major figure assigned a different strain of the same dread. Reading the novel well means seeing how precisely Fitzgerald has divided the labor.
Gatsby carries the anxiety of climbing in its purest form. Every choice he makes, the borrowed phrases, the imported clothes, the invented Oxford past, the parties thrown for a woman who never attends, is a defense against being seen as what he was. His longing is real, but it is longing braided with terror, the terror of the self-made man that his self is a forgery one hard question could expose. Gatsby is the novel’s great study of how aspiration and fear are the same motion. The series essay on the hollowness of the upper class treats the world he was reaching toward; here he stands for the reaching itself, and for its cost.
Tom carries the anxiety of defending. Secure beyond any practical threat, he is nonetheless the book’s most agitated man, forever sensing enemies at the edges of his world and moving to crush them. His racism, his investigation of Gatsby, his bullying certainty, all are the reflexes of a man defending a position he half-suspects he does not deserve and cannot permanently hold. The full portrait of his temperament, the way power and fear fuse in him, is the subject of the series study of Tom Buchanan’s power and brutality. For this theme, he is the proof that arrival cures nothing.
Myrtle carries the anxiety of slipping, the dread sharpest among those who have only a little and could lose even that. Her performance of status in the city apartment, her contempt for her own husband, her conviction that the right dress makes the right person, all express the fear of someone clinging to a rung just above the bottom. She is the climber without Gatsby’s resources, and her failure is faster and uglier.
Daisy carries a quieter version, the anxiety of the protected woman who senses that her security depends on never looking too closely at anything. Her wish for her daughter to be a fool, her retreat into Tom’s money, her tears over a pile of shirts, all belong to a person who has learned that in her world clarity is dangerous and money is safety. Nick, finally, carries the theme as its observer, a man “within and without,” close enough to the moneyed world to be seduced by it and outside enough to feel the dread it conceals.
Among objects, three carry the theme most heavily. The green light is anxiety wearing the mask of hope, a small far signal that exists to be reached for and never quite reached. The valley of ashes is the visible floor of the social world, the place everyone above it is terrified of falling into, the literal landscape of slipping. And clothing, Gatsby’s shirts, Myrtle’s dress, Tom’s riding boots, recurs throughout as the currency of status anxiety, the surface on which these characters read and perform their fragile positions. To track these objects is to track the dread itself.
The Class-Anxiety Map
The clearest way to hold the theme in mind is to lay each major character beside the specific anxiety their position produces and the behavior that anxiety drives. Call it the class-anxiety map: a single table that converts the theme from a vague impression into a structure you can point to. It is the article’s findable artifact, and it doubles as an essay-planning tool, because each row is the seed of a body paragraph.
| Character | Class position | Strain of anxiety | What the dread produces |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gatsby | New money, self-invented | Climbing and exposure | Borrowed manners, invented past, performance of ease, museum of costly objects |
| Tom | Old money, inherited | Defending a threatened order | Racism, investigation of rivals, bullying control, retreat behind wealth |
| Myrtle | Working class, reaching up | Slipping back to the bottom | Costume of status, contempt for her husband, performed hauteur |
| Daisy | Old money, protected | Losing safety if she sees clearly | Willed foolishness, retreat into money, emotional evasion |
| George Wilson | Working class, fixed | Being trapped at the floor | Exhausted passivity, then catastrophic collapse |
| Nick | Comfortable, marginal | Being seduced or excluded | Watchfulness, irony, the stance of within and without |
Read down the third column and the novel’s argument appears in a single glance: there is a strain of class anxiety at every level, from the bottom of the valley to the top of East Egg. Read down the fourth column and the theme’s stakes appear: this dread is not idle feeling, it is the engine of nearly every consequential act in the plot, from Gatsby’s whole career to the violence that ends three lives. That is the namable claim the map defends. No one is secure, even the secure, and the anxiety is the system’s universal cost.
The Symbols That Carry the Dread
The novel does not leave class anxiety to dialogue and behavior alone; it builds the dread into its central images, so that the symbols a reader meets are themselves expressions of social fear. Reading the imagery this way deepens the theme from something characters say to something the whole book is made of.
The green light is the clearest case. Readers learn early to call it hope, the small far signal at the end of Daisy’s dock that Gatsby reaches toward across the bay. But hope of that pitch is fear turned inside out. A man does not strain toward a distant light unless he is afraid the distance cannot be closed. The green light marks the gap between where Gatsby stands and the secure old-money world on the far shore, a gap he can see, can yearn across, but cannot simply walk over. When the light finally appears up close in chapter five, Nick notes that its “enchanted” quality has “diminished,” because proximity exposes it as an ordinary lamp. The dread the symbol carries is the dread of the climber: that the thing reached for, once reached, will reveal that the climb was never the point and the arrival never possible. The green light is anxiety wearing the costume of hope.
The valley of ashes works as the theme’s other pole, the visible floor everyone above it fears. It lies between the eggs and the city, a grey waste where ash grows “like wheat” and men move dimly through the dust. In plain terms it is where the poor live and work; figuratively it is the bottom of the social world made into landscape, the place the whole novel is terrified of falling into. Myrtle’s frantic reaching is a flight from it. George Wilson’s exhaustion is the look of a man it has already swallowed. For the characters above, the valley is the unspoken threat that gives their striving its urgency. To slip is to descend into the ashes, and everyone who has clawed even a little way up the order can feel that descent waiting beneath them. The eyes of the faded billboard presiding over the valley watch this fear without easing it, a god of the wasteland indifferent to the dread enacted below.
Clothing is the third carrier, the everyday currency of status anxiety running through the whole book. Gatsby’s imported shirts, flung in a bright pile before Daisy, are exhibits in his case for legitimacy, and her tears into them register the language of rank that both of them trust above words. Myrtle’s dress rewrites her personality the moment she puts it on, converting her vitality into hauteur, because she believes the costume makes the class. Even Tom’s riding clothes and the casual perfection of Daisy’s white dresses signal a security the strivers can buy the look of but not the substance. To track the clothing in the novel is to track the dread directly, since every character reads and performs their fragile position through what they wear. Fitzgerald turns wardrobe into a barometer of fear, and the barometer never settles.
Read together, these symbols make the theme inescapable. The green light pulls the eye upward toward a security that recedes; the valley of ashes pulls it downward toward a ruin that waits; the clothing covers the anxious body in between. Between the reaching and the falling, dressed in borrowed surfaces, stand all the characters of the novel, and the imagery holds them there. The book’s most famous pictures are not decoration. They are the theme of class anxiety rendered as light, dust, and cloth.
The Passages That Crystallize the Theme
A few moments concentrate the theme so tightly that they reward slow reading. Lingering on them shows how Fitzgerald builds class dread into the grain of the prose, not just the events of the plot.
The first is Gatsby’s remark about Daisy’s voice. “Her voice is full of money,” he says, and Nick, hearing it, suddenly understands the woman’s whole spell: “That was it. I’d never understood before.” The line fuses desire and class so completely that they cannot be pulled apart. What Gatsby hears in Daisy, what he has been reaching toward across the water all this time, is not a person but a sound, and the sound is the sound of secure old wealth, the music of a world he can buy his way near but never into. His longing has a price tag stitched into it. The anxiety in the line is the anxiety of a man who has realized that the thing he wants most is, at bottom, a class he can never join, only counterfeit.
The second is the rendering of Myrtle’s change in the apartment, already noted but worth returning to for its method. Fitzgerald does not tell us Myrtle is anxious about status; he shows her personality reorganizing itself around a dress, “the intense vitality” of the garage “converted into impressive hauteur.” The transformation is grotesque because it is so complete and so fast. A change of clothing produces a change of self. Nothing could illustrate more economically the book’s view that in this society identity is a function of perceived rank, and that the people most desperate to rise are the ones who believe in that function most fully. Myrtle’s hauteur is the dread of slipping turned inside out and worn as a costume.
The third is Tom’s investigation, captured in the flat menace of his question, “Who is this Gatsby anyhow?” Read it as the voice of an entire class. Tom does not ask because he is curious. He asks because an unknown quantity has appeared inside his world and must be classified, contained, and if necessary expelled. The whole apparatus of old-money self-protection is compressed into that sentence, the assumption that he has the standing to demand an accounting, the certainty that any answer involving new money will be disqualifying. When the answer turns out to involve drugstores and bootlegged alcohol, Tom does not merely win an argument. He confirms the border and proves that he polices it. The line crystallizes the defending anxiety into a single act of social surveillance.
The fourth is Nick’s closing judgment, the sentence about “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.” Here the theme reaches its verdict. The carelessness is the privilege of the secure, and the retreat is the proof that their security is real. But the genius of the passage is its refusal to make that security look like happiness. The careless people are not at peace; they are restless, destructive, and finally pitiable in their immunity. The line condemns the defenders without ever suggesting they have won anything worth wanting. Their money is a wall, and behind the wall is exactly the same dread that drove Gatsby across the water, only better furnished.
The Border Between Old and New Money
Much of the novel’s dread concentrates on a single fault line: the border between inherited wealth and earned wealth. The anxiety on both sides of that line is what gives the social conflict its heat, and seeing why illuminates the whole theme.
For the new money, the border is the thing that cannot be crossed no matter how much is accumulated. Gatsby has the fortune, the house, the parties, the clothes, every visible marker of arrival, and still he is held outside. East Egg, where Daisy and Tom live, regards West Egg, where Gatsby’s mansion stands, with a faint contempt no amount of spending can dissolve. The dread this produces in Gatsby is specific. It is not the fear of poverty, which he has escaped, but the fear that the one distinction he cannot manufacture, the distinction of having always belonged, is the only one that finally counts. His whole performance is an attempt to forge that missing credential, and his deepest anxiety is that it cannot be forged.
For the old money, the border is the wall that must be defended against precisely the kind of accumulation Gatsby represents. Tom’s hostility is the dread of the established when the line starts to blur. A world in which a bootlegger can buy a mansion across the bay and court a Buchanan wife is a world whose distinctions are softening, and softening distinctions threaten the only thing that makes Tom superior. His investigation, his sneering at the Oxford claim, his triumphant exposure of the drugstores, all defend the border. He needs Gatsby to be disqualified, because if money alone could buy entry, then Tom’s inherited advantage would be worth no more than anyone else’s checkbook. The defending anxiety is the fear of a leveling the old order cannot survive.
This is why the border generates dread on both sides at once, and why the two anxieties are finally one. Gatsby fears the line will hold; Tom fears it will fail. Each man’s dread is the mirror of the other’s, and the Plaza confrontation is the moment their fears collide directly. The series treats the structure of this divide in its analysis of social mobility and the broader class system; here the point is narrower and sharper. The line between old and new money is the membrane along which the novel’s class anxiety runs hottest, the place where the climber’s fear of exclusion meets the defender’s fear of invasion. Neither side is at rest. The border keeps both of them awake.
What the novel finally suggests is that the border is both real and arbitrary. It is real in its effects, since it ruins Gatsby and protects Tom. It is arbitrary in its basis, since the difference between Tom’s inherited money and Gatsby’s earned money is, morally, no difference at all, and may favor the man who worked for his. The dread the border produces is therefore dread in service of nothing defensible, fear manufactured to preserve a distinction that cannot justify itself. That hollowness at the center of the conflict is part of the novel’s quiet indictment. The characters are tearing themselves apart over a line drawn in sand, and the anxiety it generates is the cost of pretending the line is stone.
How the Dread Shapes the Telling
Class anxiety is not only what the novel is about; it shapes how the novel is told, working its way into the position from which Nick narrates. Attending to the narration shows the theme operating at the level of form, not just content.
Nick describes himself early as a person inclined to reserve judgment, raised on his father’s reminder that not everyone has enjoyed his advantages. The reflection is a class reflection. Nick knows he sits in a comfortable but unglamorous middle, neither rich enough to be secure nor poor enough to be desperate, and that knowledge gives him his characteristic stance. He is, in his own phrase, “within and without,” drawn to the glitter of the moneyed world and wary of it at once. That doubleness is itself a form of social dread: the watchfulness of someone who could be seduced into a world that might never fully accept him, and who protects himself by keeping a measuring distance.
This explains the texture of his irony. Nick’s wit, his careful noticing of how people perform their status, his eye for the shirt and the dress and the studied phrase, is the attentiveness of a man alert to class signals because his own position is uncertain. He registers Gatsby’s formality as “just missing absurd” because he is reading for exactly the thing Gatsby fears being caught at. He notices Myrtle’s hauteur because he is fluent in the anxiety it conceals. The novel’s famous descriptive precision is, in part, the precision of a narrator who has learned to read social fear because he carries a quieter version of it himself.
The retrospective frame deepens the effect. Nick tells the story after the fact, from a distance of disillusion, having returned to the Midwest in retreat from the East and its moneyed glamour. His narration is the account of a man who came close to the world of the secure rich, felt its pull and its dread, and pulled back. The whole novel is thus filtered through a sensibility shaped by class anxiety, narrated by someone who experienced it as temptation and chose distance over immersion. When Nick delivers his final verdict on the careless rich, he speaks as a man who has weighed that world from inside its gravity and found it wanting. His authority on the theme comes from having felt it.
Reading the narration this way guards against a common error, the assumption that Nick is a neutral window onto the events. He is not. He is a class-conscious narrator with a stake in the social world he describes, and his anxiety colors what he sees and how he judges. This does not make him unreliable so much as situated. The story of class dread reaches us through a teller who lived a measure of it, and that is part of why the theme feels so total. There is no character in the book, not even the one holding the pen, who stands fully outside the fear.
The Counter-Reading and Why the Stronger Reading Wins
The most common objection to this reading is intuitive and worth taking seriously. Class anxiety, a skeptical reader might say, is obviously the strivers’ problem. Of course Gatsby is anxious; he is a fraud one phone call from exposure. Of course Myrtle is anxious; she is clawing at a ceiling. But Tom and Daisy have arrived. They own the world. To call them anxious is to flatten a real distinction, to pretend that the man with the inherited fortune and the woman in the white dress feel the same dread as the bootlegger and the garage wife. Surely security means something. Surely the point of having money is that you stop being afraid.
This objection deserves a real answer, not a dismissal, because it identifies a genuine difference the novel does not erase. Tom’s anxiety and Gatsby’s are not identical, and a careful reading should say so. Gatsby fears being unmasked; Tom fears being displaced. Gatsby’s dread is acute, a single exposure away from ruin; Tom’s is chronic, a low background hum he can mostly manage with money and force. The strivers’ anxiety is sharper and the stakes for them are higher, since they can lose everything while Tom can only lose his sense of supremacy. To deny this would be to misread the book in the opposite direction.
But the objection fails where it matters most, because it mistakes the absence of acute danger for the absence of dread, and the novel is at pains to show these are not the same. Reread the opening dinner. Tom is not calm. He is the most agitated person at the table, working himself into a vision of racial apocalypse over a comfortable meal. Reread the investigation. A secure man does not investigate. The energy Tom pours into classifying and destroying Gatsby is the energy of someone who feels the ground shifting, who senses that the old arrangement that crowns him is not guaranteed. And reread the final image: Tom condemned to drift “forever seeking,” restless to the last. Fitzgerald gives the secure man no peace because the book’s whole argument depends on his having none.
The deeper reason the stronger reading wins is structural. If anxiety were only the strivers’ burden, the novel would be a simple cautionary tale: stay in your lane, do not reach, and you will be content. That is not the book Fitzgerald wrote. By saturating the top of the order with dread, he makes a more radical claim, that the hierarchy itself produces fear at every altitude, that the prize of arrival is not peace but a new and equally restless form of want. The secure are not exempt from the system’s cost; they pay it in a different currency. This is why the theme is not “ambition is dangerous” but something harder: rank gives no rest to anyone, because there is always a position to defend, a rival to fear, a self to maintain. The counter-reading shrinks the novel to a lesson about strivers. The text keeps insisting on something larger, and the something larger is the reading worth defending.
There is one more move the counter-reading misses. Tom’s defensiveness and Gatsby’s exposure are not separate phenomena; they are the same anxiety meeting itself across the class line. Tom investigates because Gatsby climbs; Gatsby performs because men like Tom are watching. Each one’s dread is the other’s mirror. The novel’s social world is a single nervous system, and to touch it anywhere is to make the whole thing flinch. That is why the behavior of every major character, the racism, the bootlegging, the costume changes, the careless retreat, can be traced back to the same root. Class anxiety is not a trait some characters have. It is the medium they all swim in.
Turning the Theme Into an Essay Thesis
A theme becomes an argument only when you can state it as a claim someone could dispute. For class anxiety, the strongest essay thesis refuses the easy version and commits to the harder one. A weak thesis says the novel “shows that ambition leads to anxiety,” which is both obvious and only half the book. A strong thesis says something like this: in The Great Gatsby, class anxiety operates at every level of society, so that the secure rich are shown to be as fearful as the strivers, and the novel uses this universal dread to argue that social hierarchy gives no one rest. That sentence has an opponent built into it, the reader who thinks anxiety belongs only to the strivers, and an essay that answers that opponent will have something to prove.
From there the class-anxiety map becomes a writing tool. Each row supplies a paragraph. One body paragraph reads Gatsby as the anxiety of climbing, anchored in the reunion scene where his dread becomes physical. A second reads Myrtle as the anxiety of slipping, anchored in the dress that rewrites her personality. A third, the paragraph that wins the essay, reads Tom as the anxiety of defending, anchored in the opening dinner and the investigation, and uses him to prove that the dread reaches the top. A fourth can handle the counter-reading directly, conceding the real difference between acute and chronic anxiety before showing why the difference does not save the secure from fear. Structured this way, the essay does not merely list anxious characters. It builds a case.
The discipline that separates a high mark from a middling one is analysis over summary. It is not enough to report that Tom gives a racist speech; the essay must read the speech as an expression of class dread, must show the fear underneath the ideology. It is not enough to note that Myrtle changes clothes; the essay must read the change as the novel’s theory of status as costume. The evidence is only as strong as the close reading attached to it. To gather and annotate that evidence, you can read and annotate The Great Gatsby free on VaultBook, which keeps the full text alongside close-reading and annotation tools, a searchable quotation bank, and theme and motif trackers, so the passages that carry class anxiety are easy to collect, mark, and compare as your argument takes shape. The library keeps adding works and tools over time, so it grows into a wider companion as you move beyond a single novel.
How do I write an essay about class anxiety in The Great Gatsby?
Build a thesis that the dread reaches every social level, not just the strivers. Devote a paragraph each to Gatsby’s climbing fear, Myrtle’s fear of slipping, and Tom’s defensive fear, then answer the counter-reading. Anchor every claim in a close-read passage rather than plot summary.
Closing Verdict
The Great Gatsby is a book about fear wearing the clothes of desire, and the fear has a social address. Strip away the parties and the romance and what remains is a society organized so that no one inside it can rest. The strivers are afraid of being unmasked, the slipping are afraid of being dragged back down, and the arrived, for all their walls and money, are afraid of the next wave of strivers and the changing world that sends them. Fitzgerald’s achievement is to show this dread operating at every altitude at once, so that the green light and Tom’s racist panic and Myrtle’s borrowed dress all turn out to be the same emotion expressed in different dialects of class.
The verdict the novel reaches is bleak and exact. Hierarchy does not deliver the security it promises. It manufactures the opposite. The whole point of climbing is supposed to be that you arrive somewhere safe, and the book’s deepest cruelty is that there is no such place. Tom has arrived, and Tom is last seen drifting, restless, seeking something he cannot name. Gatsby gave his life to reach the far shore and died with his guests gone and his light still burning across an indifferent bay. The system promises an end to anxiety and delivers anxiety as its permanent product. That is the universal cost, and everyone in the novel pays it.
This is why the easy reading, the one that confines dread to the strivers, sells the book short. The harder and truer reading is that class anxiety is the condition of the entire world Fitzgerald built, the weather that never breaks, the thing the green light has always been pointing at. No one is secure, even the secure. Hold that sentence next to any scene in the novel and watch how much of it suddenly comes into focus. The book is not warning you against ambition. It is showing you a society where the prize for winning is to keep being afraid, only with a better view.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is the theme of class anxiety in The Great Gatsby?
It is the idea that social position generates fear at every level of Fitzgerald’s world, and that the fear is the system’s universal cost rather than a private flaw in a few characters. Those reaching upward dread exposure and failure, those near the bottom dread slipping further, and the established rich dread a changing order that threatens their place. The novel insists that rank buys no peace. Gatsby fears being unmasked, Myrtle fears falling back to the valley, and even Tom, secure beyond practical danger, is the book’s most agitated man. By spreading the dread across the whole social ladder, the theme argues that hierarchy itself manufactures unease, so the prize for arriving is not contentment but a new and equally restless form of fear.
Q: How does class anxiety appear at every level of society in the novel?
Fitzgerald distributes the dread by social altitude, giving each tier its own version. At the bottom, George Wilson is trapped and exhausted in the valley of ashes, and Myrtle performs a borrowed status to escape it. In the middle, Gatsby strains upward, terrified that his invented self will be seen through. At the top, Tom guards an inherited position he half-suspects he cannot keep, and Daisy retreats into a willed foolishness because clarity feels unsafe. The opening dinner plants the theme not with a striver but with Tom, the most established figure, working himself into a panic over civilization’s decline. The placement is deliberate. By starting the dread at the top, the novel forecloses the idea that anxiety belongs only to those climbing, and shows instead a single nervous system running through every rung.
Q: Why is Tom anxious and defensive about his class position?
Tom has inherited wealth and faces no real threat to it, yet he behaves like a man under siege, which is exactly the point. His class dread is defensive rather than aspirational. In the opening dinner he frets that “civilization’s going to pieces,” dressing a fear of a changing order in the language of race. When Gatsby appears, Tom demands to know who he is and launches a private investigation, because an unknown newcomer inside his world must be classified and expelled. At the Plaza he weaponizes Gatsby’s bootlegging to enforce the border between old and new money. None of this is the behavior of a secure man. It is the behavior of someone who senses the ground shifting beneath a position he did not earn, and who knows, beneath his bluster, that the wall protecting him is thinner than it looks.
Q: What is Gatsby anxious about regarding his class and exposure?
Gatsby’s deepest fear is that his constructed self will be unmasked as James Gatz in costume. Everything he does defends against that exposure. His studied manners, which Nick says “just missed being absurd,” the borrowed phrase “old sport,” the invented Oxford past, and the museum of imported objects all work to certify a breeding he does not have. His dread becomes physical at the reunion with Daisy, where he turns pale, sleepless, and stiff with strain, because she is the verdict on his entire project of rising. To win her is to be confirmed as a member of the world he counterfeited his way into; to lose her is to be sent back to the bottom. Gatsby shows how aspiration and fear are the same motion, the reaching arm and the racing pulse fused into one gesture across the water.
Q: Do even the secure rich feel class anxiety in The Great Gatsby?
Yes, and this is the reading that separates a strong analysis from a shallow one. The secure rich are not exempt from dread; they simply pay it in a different currency. Tom owns the world and is still the most restless, agitated figure in the book, forever sensing enemies and moving to crush them. Daisy, protected by old money, hides inside a willed ignorance because seeing clearly would threaten her safety. Nick’s final image of Tom drifting “forever seeking” confirms it: arrival has bought him no peace. The novel could have confined the dread to strivers and become a simple cautionary tale. Instead it saturates the top of the order with fear, making the harder claim that hierarchy gives no one rest. The prize for reaching the summit is not calm but a new and chronic form of want.
Q: How does class anxiety drive the characters’ behavior throughout the novel?
Almost every consequential act in the plot can be traced to social dread. Gatsby’s whole career, the parties, the bootlegging, the performance of ease, exists to defend against exposure and win Daisy’s confirming approval. Myrtle’s affair, her costume changes, and her contempt for her husband all flow from her terror of staying at the bottom. Tom’s racism, his investigation of Gatsby, and his Plaza cruelty are the reflexes of a man defending a threatened order. Daisy’s retreat into money and her emotional evasions protect a security she dare not examine. Even the violence that ends the novel grows from this root, since Myrtle’s reckless flight toward a passing car is the last gesture of a woman desperate to escape her station. The dread is not background feeling. It is the engine of the story.
Q: What is Myrtle nervous about when she performs a higher status?
Myrtle is terrified of being fixed permanently at the floor of the social world, and her whole performance is built to deny that fate. When she changes into the dress Tom bought her, Nick observes that her personality changes with it, the garage vitality “converted into impressive hauteur.” She believes station is a costume, that the right clothes make a person a member of the rank they imitate. So she scolds the apartment’s servant, lectures her guests, and recalls her marriage to Wilson with contempt, saying she “almost made a mistake” by marrying a man she now considers beneath her. The cruelty is revealing. Myrtle has absorbed the same class logic that holds her down, measuring her own husband by the standard of people who will never accept her. Her dread of slipping has curdled into snobbery toward the only world that would have her.
Q: How is class anxiety different from the broader wealth and class theme?
The broader theme concerns how money sorts the characters and decides their fates, the structure of who has rank and who does not. Class anxiety is the emotional residue of that sorting, the feeling left in the body after the verdict has been delivered. You can diagram the novel’s class structure as a map of positions; the anxiety is what that map feels like from inside. The wider theme answers the question of who can rise and who cannot. Class anxiety answers a different question: what does living inside this hierarchy do to a person’s nerves. That is why the theme lives less in what characters own than in how they behave when their standing is touched, in Tom’s agitation, Gatsby’s strain, and Myrtle’s performance. The structure is the cause; the dread is the felt effect, and Fitzgerald is finally more interested in the effect.
Q: Is class anxiety only a problem for the strivers trying to climb?
No, and assuming so is the most common misreading of the theme. It is intuitive to think dread belongs only to those reaching upward, since Gatsby and Myrtle are obviously exposed and obviously straining. But the novel plants its first and loudest expression of fear in Tom Buchanan, the most secure figure, over the most comfortable dinner. A genuine difference does exist: the strivers’ dread is acute, a single exposure from ruin, while Tom’s is chronic, a low hum he manages with money and force. Yet a difference in kind is not an absence. Tom investigates, bullies, and panics precisely because he feels the order shifting. Confining anxiety to the strivers shrinks the book to a lesson about staying in your lane. The text keeps insisting on something larger, that the hierarchy produces fear at every altitude, including the top.
Q: How does class anxiety appear at Gatsby’s parties?
The parties are a vast nervous rehearsal of belonging. The crowds that fill Gatsby’s lawn come to drink, gawk, and trade rumors about a host most of them have never met, and beneath the gaiety every guest is auditioning for a world they have not yet entered. The party performs an ease that none of them feels. Gatsby himself embodies the strain most fully when he appears: his formality is studied to the edge of parody, his manners applied a shade too carefully, in the manner of someone who learned the rules of a class from the outside. The grandeur is a defense, an attempt to certify a position through spectacle. When the parties end after his death and not one of those guests attends his funeral, the truth surfaces. They were never his friends; they were attendees at an audition that has closed.
Q: Which scenes most clearly dramatize class anxiety in the novel?
Four scenes carry the theme most sharply. The opening dinner shows defensive dread, with Tom working himself into a vision of civilizational collapse over a comfortable meal. The apartment scene in the valley chapter shows the fear of slipping, as Myrtle’s personality reorganizes itself around a new dress. The reunion with Daisy shows the climber’s terror made physical, with Gatsby pale, sleepless, and stiff with strain. And the Plaza confrontation shows the defending anxiety detonating, as Tom weaponizes Gatsby’s bootlegging to enforce the border between old and new money. Each scene attaches the dread to a different social position, so that read together they map the theme across the whole order. The closing pages then deliver the verdict, with the careless rich retreating behind their money and Tom left drifting, restless to the last, proving that arrival cures nothing.
Q: Does Nick Carraway feel any class anxiety as the narrator?
Nick carries a quieter, observational version of the theme. He describes himself as “within and without,” close enough to the moneyed world to be seduced by its glamour and outside enough to feel the dread it conceals. He comes from comfortable but modest stock, works in bonds, and rents a small house beside Gatsby’s mansion, a position that lets him watch both the strivers and the secure without fully belonging to either. His irony is partly a defense, a way of holding the seductive world at arm’s length so it cannot fully claim or exclude him. The famous opening reflection on tolerance and his father’s advice about advantages “parcelled out unequally” mark him as someone keenly aware of social difference. Nick’s anxiety is the watcher’s anxiety, the unease of a man who can see the system clearly enough to distrust it but not clearly enough to escape its pull.
Q: How does class anxiety connect to the American Dream in the novel?
The two themes are bound at the root. The American Dream promises that anyone can rise through effort, that the self is something a person can author and improve. Class anxiety is the shadow that promise casts, because a society where you are supposed to be able to climb is also a society where you can fail to climb, or climb and be exposed, or arrive and still be excluded. Gatsby is the Dream’s purest believer, and his dread of unmasking is the Dream’s cost made flesh. The novel does not reject aspiration so much as reveal its underside: the freedom to remake yourself comes braided with the fear that the remade self is a forgery. Where the Dream says the top is reachable, the book answers that the top, once reached, offers no rest, only a new position to defend against the next climber coming up behind.
Q: What does the theme of class anxiety reveal about 1920s America?
The theme reads the Jazz Age as a moment of unusual social churn, when new fortunes from bootlegging and speculation pressed against old inherited money, and the resulting friction produced fear on both sides. Tom’s panic about a changing order, expressed through pseudo-scientific racism, captures the established elite’s dread of newcomers and outsiders altering the world that flatters them. Gatsby’s strain captures the new money’s terror of never being accepted no matter how much it accumulates. Myrtle’s doomed reaching captures the working class glimpsing mobility that mostly stays out of reach. Fitzgerald uses these private dreads to diagnose a society in which prosperity had not produced security, where the surface promised boundless opportunity while the structure underneath kept its hard lines. The decade’s glittering confidence, the novel suggests, sat atop a deep collective unease about who belonged where, and whether the old arrangements would hold.
Q: How do I write an essay about class anxiety in The Great Gatsby?
Start with a thesis that refuses the easy version. Rather than arguing that ambition causes anxiety, argue that the dread reaches every social level, so the secure rich are shown to be as fearful as the strivers, and the novel uses this to claim that hierarchy gives no one rest. Then let the class-anxiety map structure your body: one paragraph on Gatsby’s climbing fear, anchored in the reunion scene; one on Myrtle’s fear of slipping, anchored in the dress that rewrites her personality; one on Tom’s defensive fear, anchored in the opening dinner and the investigation. Devote a fourth paragraph to the counter-reading, conceding that strivers feel sharper dread before showing why the secure feel it too. Throughout, practice analysis over summary. Do not just report that Tom gives a racist speech; read the fear underneath the ideology. The close reading is what earns the marks.
Q: Why does class anxiety make some characters more sympathetic?
Seeing the dread behind the behavior complicates easy judgments. Myrtle is snobbish and cruel to her husband, yet once you read her contempt as the panic of someone terrified of staying at the bottom, she becomes a figure of pity as much as scorn, a victim of the class logic she has internalized. Gatsby’s pretensions can look ridiculous until you feel the terror of exposure driving them, at which point the performance becomes poignant. Even Tom, the novel’s bully, gains a strange pathos in the final image of him drifting “forever seeking,” restless despite everything he owns. Fitzgerald does not excuse these characters, but by showing that their worst behavior grows from fear rather than mere malice, he makes them human. The anxiety is the thread that connects their cruelty to their vulnerability, and recognizing it keeps the novel from becoming a simple gallery of villains.
Q: How does class anxiety contribute to the tragedy of the ending?
The catastrophe is the dread collecting its bill. Myrtle’s desperate flight toward what she thinks is Tom’s car, the act that gets her killed, is the last gesture of a woman frantic to escape her station. Gatsby’s death and his deserted funeral realize the climber’s worst fear: the man who spent everything to belong is abandoned by the world he spent it on, his guests vanished, his light still burning across an indifferent bay. George Wilson’s collapse and his murder of Gatsby grow from a life crushed at the bottom of the social order. And the survivors, Tom and Daisy, retreat behind their money, careless people who smash things and step back unharmed. The tragedy is not random misfortune. It is the predictable output of a system that fills every level with fear, then lets the secure walk away while the strivers and the trapped pay with their lives.
Q: What is the difference between class anxiety and snobbery in the novel?
Snobbery is one of the behaviors that class anxiety produces, not a separate thing. Snobbery is the outward act of looking down, of asserting rank by despising those below. Class anxiety is the inward fear that drives the act. Myrtle’s snobbery toward her husband, her sneering at “these people” who must be supervised, is the visible surface; underneath it lies her terror of being recognized as one of those people herself. Tom’s snobbery toward Gatsby, his mockery of the Oxford claim, masks his dread that the border between old and new money is collapsing. The novel suggests that the most aggressive snobs are often the most frightened, since contempt for those below is a way of reassuring yourself that you are not among them. Read this way, snobbery is anxiety turned outward, a defense mechanism, while the anxiety is the wound the defense is protecting.