In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the relationship between America’s aristocracy of old and its turn-of-the-century industrialists—a relationship of struggle and symbiosis, one whose intermingling would birth an all-new nation—is symbolically manifested as two rival towns, each one half an “egg.” East Egg represents the entrenched “old money” elite to which men like Jay Gatsby aspire but never truly belong. Instead he’s situated, across the divide of both the “courtesy bay” and an entrenched class system, in West Egg, a town that may regard itself as parallel to its eastern neighbor, but is seen by East Egg as nothing but a haven for the “nouveau riche” and the many pretenders who rent its vacation homes, who are similarly playing at wealth and sophistication. Throughout the novel, that rivalry reveals itself time and again in the cold attitude East Egg inhabitants display toward Gatsby by turning up at his parties, only to stand apart in a condescending cluster, sneering at the tackiness of it all. That disdain not only underscores Gatsby’s yearning for Daisy, and the social standing he knows he can never buy, it also mirrors the real-world suspicion the upper class felt toward the new generation of bootstrapping entrepreneurs and bootlegging criminals moving in on their own, equally illusory territory.
