Excellent question. This is of course one example of the
importance of every phrase and word that Fitzgerald has carefully selected in this
novel. Note what we are told about the history of the mansion that Gatsby purchases in
Chapter Five:
A brewer had built it early in the "period"
craze a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes
on all the neighbouring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with
straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family--he went
into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on
the door. Americans, while occasionallly willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate
about being peasantry.
It is
clear that some crucial parallels exist between the former and present owner. Both have
emerged from the obscurity of the lower classes to rise up above their roots, and have
built or purchased this mansion to make a very definite comment about their prestige,
wealth and status now. The brewer's crazy scheme to get other houses to put thatch on
their roofs demonstrates both his excessive wealth and his own sense of superiority as
he tried to get others to do what he wanted. This of course finds its parallel in the
childlike belief that Gatsby has that he can re-make the world according to his own
personal desire, with barriers such as Daisy's marriage to Tom and her daughter proving
to be nothing to his dominant will.
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