Real+Estate

Link: http://sites.google.com/site/greatgatsbyrealestate/

We created the real estate website, Eggwell Banker, to illustrate the difference between West and East Egg. In chapter 4, Fitzgerald portrays the differences between the people of the two Eggs through Nick Carraway's list of guest names. The people from West Egg, primarily Gatsby, represent the nouveaux-riche of the 1920s while the people from East Egg, like Tom and Daisy, represent the old aristocracy. Even though the book gives the description of Gatsby's mansion resembling "some Hotel de Ville in Normandy", we chose the Breaker, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s summer “cottage”, to represent Gatsby's mansion. We thought this comparison was appropriate for several reasons. First, Cornelius Vanderbilt went from rags-to-riches like Gatsby. Secondly, just like Gatsby's mansion, the Breakers was tremendously costly, requiring nearly $400 million to build. Gatsby bought the large, expensive, ostentatious mansion in the hopes of climbing the social ladder and winning back Daisy. We believe that both Gatsby's mansion and the Breakers are excessively ostentatious, almost vulgar in display, and lacking the same taste of the houses of the old aristocracy. We chose to portray the Buchanan's house as described by Fitzgerald - "A cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial Mansion". The noticeable differences between this house and that of Gatsby (West Egg) is that the houses are 25 and 5 years old respectively. Through the age of the houses we wished to represent the fact that East Egg is the old aristocracy, that has been around the American society for many generatiosn, versus the West Egg, which was comprised of the nouveaux-riche. We also made the price of the East Egg house cheaper than that of West Egg even though East Egg is where all the "true" aristocrats live. We made this decision because the people of the East Egg do not flaunt their material possessions as much as the nouveaux riche because they have the culture and the subtle elegance that the nouveaux riche do not have. They wouldn't feel the necessity to prove themselves to the people of West Egg since they feel, as Tom did, a moral superiority and authority over the nouveaux riche. In the additional pictures for both East and West Egg, we featured the details provided by the book. ~Grace Oh