Tom Buchanan Reflects Important Attitudes and Values in Real-Life American Society in the 1920s.”

Jan 2012: “Tom Buchanan reflects important attitudes and values in real-life American society in the 1920s.”
Tom Buchanan is arguably the least likeable character in Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’; misogynistic, cavalier in his attitude to his wife and characteristically purposeless as part of the ‘Lost Generation’, as a representative of a society he repels the reader. Is he, however, an accurate emblem of the Jazz Age?
Tom himself never claims to be entirely comfortable with the new hedonistic society; instead, he seems to have a preference for remaining within the strictly stratified, pre-war society, in which social convention was more stringent and his place was assured. He was at Yale with Nick, a fact which instantly implies his social background due to the wealthy connotations of the university; and even then he had a freedom with money which was a cause for “reproach”. Nick details the “string of polo ponies” he owns – another purchase which instantly conveys the social standing of Tom. For Tom, these are not merely possessions – they are the terms on which he approaches society. Fitzgerald deliberately includes the price of the “$350,000 string of pearls” which are his engagement present to Daisy. Instead of showing his love as Gatsby appears to have done, Tom approaches her with a purchased, expensive object and the “external force” which she is seeking to shape her life. This also could be an indication of his ostentatious nature – perhaps further evidence of an obvious carelessness with money.
In conversation, too, Tom trades on his possessions. He converses with Gatsby about his car, and how no one else has ever “turned a garage into stables”. Although here Tom seems perfectly in keeping with the bourgeois modernity and materialistic society of the Roaring Twenties, with an explosion in consumerism fuelled by the development of mass production