Class status and class mobility—both upward and downward—are central concerns in This Side of Paradise. Amory starts the novel with a middle-class, moneyed family, but by the end he has no inheritance. The novel ultimately hints at the meaninglessness and futility of chasing money and worshipping class hierarchy: wealth is shown to be impermanent and undependable, and it’s also implied in the novel that a person’s financial status is no guarantee of integrity, character, or happiness—and in fact, often quite the opposite.
Amory’s views on money, class, and hierarchy shift dramatically over the course of the novel. He’s initially enthralled by luxury and aristocratic tastes and values, and he wants to go to boarding school because it will gain him entrance into elite society, and he chooses Princeton because it seems idyllic and “aristocratic.” But when he arrives at Princeton, he feels out of place for being “middle class,” wishing that he had been born at the top of the class hierarchy and saying he does not want to appear to work for anything. Amory particularly idolizes Dick Humbird, who seems to him the model portrait of an aristocrat to which Amory aspires. But Amory is shocked to learn that Dick’s father came from poverty and made a fortune, revealing the superficiality of the virtue that Amory assigned to Dick’s lineage. And when Dick is killed in a car accident, Amory realizes that Dick’s money didn’t protect him from a gruesome death, which he views as “unaristocratic,” “close to the earth,” and “squalid”—in short, Amory sees that money and status could not buy Dick dignity.
Later in the novel, despite the rapid diminishing of his family’s fortunes due to bad investments, Amory cannot come to terms with his vanishing wealth and quits his low-paying advertising job because he finds it meaningless. With his declining class status, Amory also learns that money often infuses a certain superficiality into romantic relationships: when Rosalind Connage leaves him to marry Dawson Ryder, a wealthier man whom she does not love, he further sees the injustice of class hierarchy. By the end of the novel, Amory believes in socialism, a system of belief that contrasts with the capitalistic, money-obsessed ethos of American culture. While he still dislikes and fears poverty, he sees that a social and economic system that prioritizes money will always punish those who live for love or other deeper, less superficial values.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Money and Class ThemeTracker
Money and Class Quotes in This Side of Paradise
All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.
Amory’s secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.
“Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.”
“But just now, Amory, you’re only a sweaty bourgeois.”
Amory lay for a moment without speaking.
“I won’t be—long,” he said finally. “But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know.”
“No,” declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks, shod by Franks, “I’ve won this game, but I feel as if I never want to play another. You’re all right—you’re a rubber ball, and somehow it suits you, but I’m sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go where people aren’t barred because of the color of their neckties and the roll of their coats.”
The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the admiration he had had for Humbird[…]. Amory was struck by Burne’s intense earnestness[…]. Burne stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting toward—and it was almost time that land was in sight.
This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine ever grew, nourished as they were in the stuff of the nineties.
SHE: Well, Amory, you don’t mind—do you? When I meet a man that doesn’t bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it’ll be different.
HE: Odd, you have the same point of view on men that I have on women.
SHE: I’m not really feminine, you know—in my mind.
ROSALIND: Amory, I’m yours—you know it. There have been times in the last month I’d have been completely yours if you’d said so. But I can’t marry you and ruin both our lives. (…) I can’t Amory, I can’t be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You’d hate me in a narrow atmosphere. I’d make you hate me.
“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, why am I a girl? (…) Here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.”
“Well,” said Amory, “I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation—with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.”
