New Money, Old Money, and Everyone Else

     In The Great Gatsby, there is a distinct difference between people such as Jay Gatsby who lives on West Egg and the Buchanans who live on the eastern counterpart. Readers, English teachers, and Sparknotes pages everywhere say that on West Egg, it's "new money"; on East Egg, it's "old money."
     New money refers to the newly rich--people who made their own fortune, as opposed to their great-great-great-great Puritan grandfather. For some reason, they happen to congregate in West Egg (or at least Gatsby does). With the title character being the only one who truly represents new money in the entire book, Fitzgerald takes liberties to deck Gatsby out in all the stereotypical traits of "new money". Excited by having finally achieved his lifelong love/dream of wealth, Gatsby spends his money lavishly (nice cars, rad parties, lawn services for his neighbor). Because this group of people is recently wealthy, they haven't had time to seclude themselves with only the snooty elites. They're still relatively grounded with "everyone else" 's customs, and they tend to be friendlier and more hospitable (cough when Gatsby sent a stranger partygoer a brand new $265 dress and threw parties every weekend and hired people to mow his neighbor's lawn without his neighbor's consent). In slight contrast, Nick Carraway may not be "new money" yet, but he seems on his way. More importantly, his I-want-to-make-it-on-my-own mentality differs from his family's (read: Daisy Buchanan) and defines the more worldly, goal-setting ideals of "new money".
    Old money refers to the rich people who inherited their fortune, and whose families have been wealthy for some time. Tom and Daisy Buchaaon represent old money, and the defining characteristic separating them and, say, Gatsby, is that they are "careless people", and they "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made." The "other people" who clean up old money's messes do it because of old money's wealth and power; because of that, old money rides through life never fully learning moral responsibility. From the very beginning, they are taught to be careful with their images (perhaps even to the point of facade) and expected to uphold suffocating airs of etiquette, etiquette that people such as Gatsby did not acquire along with their new wealth. At one point, Gatsby notes that Daisy's voice is "full of money"--and we can infer it's referring to the fact that she was born with money and raised so that wealth became such an instrumental part of her that not even an old lover could separate her from its effects.