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Puppies and Power in The Great Gatsby

June 24, 2025
/
Literature
Art
Maggie Lemak
Creative Director and Lead Curator at Bond & Grace

At Bond & Grace, our team spends almost an entire year immersed in one work of classic literature. Dissecting it, analyzing it, and dreaming about it. Turning its language into visuals, picking apart its scenes, finding new meaning in a story that has been examined time and time again… all in the making of The Art Novel. 

As Creative Director and lead Curator, it’s my job to become obsessed with seemingly unimportant moments in the book, like this one from Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby, and figure out why they make me tick. I always begin my creative process by listening to the audiobook, never by watching the movies or digging into the novel’s representations in media. I simply let the story sink into my mind. With my headphones in, sometimes while painting, I’ll jot down any and everything that paints a mental picture, alludes to pop culture, or creates some sort of interesting pattern as the book evolves. 

(Side note: There are legitimate perks to audiobooks. When you’re not physically looking at words, it turns out your brain has more space to take in the meaning of language. This was fun to learn, as I tell all our artists to listen each year!)

When it came to Gatsby, my hands were active, I’ll just say that! The patterns and symbolism were sharp and strong. The structure of Fitzgerald’s lyrical writing emulates a screenplay from start to finish, which kept me fully immersed at every moment. But one chapter stuck out in particular, and I couldn’t help but pick it apart—Chapter 2, when we’re first introduced to the Valley of Ashes.


Throwing my paintbrush aside, I jotted down “Chapter 2 / The Underbelly of Boys Will Be Boys.”

Buried in the gray rubble and soot of the Valley of Ashes—and amid Tom's unabashed infidelity and physical violence towards his mistress Myrtle—was something soft and delicate: an innocent pile of Airendale puppies. What I picked up on instantly was a metaphor for power shaped by the very thing that does not seek it.

In this chapter, we see Myrtle—in a bleak situationship with Tom—desparately seeking a form of validation or way to brandish power for herself. She says of her own husband, Wilson, “I married him because I thought he was a gentleman… I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.”

Notice how the language she uses when referring to her husband mirrors language typically reserved for dogs, the very thing she desires to possess. Desire, money, and power all collide through the puppies. Only through Tom is she able to afford one; it is Tom who throws money at her to buy it. But after getting a puppy, she immediately moves on, rattling off a list of other things she’s “got to get:”

     “A massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother’s grave that’ll last all summer.”

Materialistically minded, Myrtle’s list showcases her desire for the luxuries of wealth, which she will obtain with Tom’s money. But, naturally, power-hungry Tom does not care to help Myrtle find her own power; after all, she is his power trophy, and their relationship depends on her reliance upon him. Instead, he embarrasses her and abuses her when she asserts herself. He waterboards her excitement with intentional language:

     “Is it a boy or a girl?”[Myrtle] asked delicately.

     “That dog? That dog’s a boy.”

     “It’s a bitch,” said Tom decisively. “Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.”

Still, the picture isn’t fully painted until the closing scene of the chapter. As if Fitzgerald cannot afford for us to miss the metaphor, he places both sides of this stark contrast between powerlessness and control close together, in a single excerpt, so that we experience it all in tandem:

     “The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.

     “Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai—”

     Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

     Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women’s voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain.”

From the delicate puppy to Myrtle becoming collateral (which is perhaps foreshadowing), the portrait of Tom’s power is complete.

While there is warranted hate for Tom as a brutal man who desires power, we must also see that Myrtle aspires for power, too, sometimes in brutal ways. Just 500 words earlier, we’d heard Myrtle speak of her own husband as powerless simply for borrowing a suit to marry her.

     “The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out: ‘Oh, is that your suit?’ I said. ‘This is the first I ever heard about it.’ But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon.”

Still yet, the deepest level of irony at play is not in Myrtle’s lack of power, nor in Tom, but in the very location where this tragedy transpires. 

Beyond the shadows created by infidelity and atop the bloody abuse from Tom, exists another layer of darkness. The very neighborhood where Myrtle lives holds an entire population in its grasp—a people limited by class mobility. “This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke.”

The Valley of Ashes—a bleak place of industrial pollution and debris—is not uninhabited, but instead, intentionally left for impoverished communities to toil and labor, doing the city’s most undesired and noxious work. 

To honor Fitzgerald’s exploration of Myrtle’s class entrapment and Tom as a symbol of patriarchal capitalism—both figures who exist a million times over in our divided culture today—we commissioned two specific artworks for Chapter 2, each highlighting a different side of this stratified coin.

Left: Basket of Puppies by Alicia Hobbs; Right: Queens by Cass Waters

Basket of Puppies, an acrylic painting by Alicia Hobbs, was commissioned to demonstrate the hope and the brightness that exists even in places that are both physically and emotionally polluted. Her artwork features softly illuminated puppies sitting helplessly in a basket, Alicia describes her painting: “The soft fluff of the puppies’ fur against the harsh, ashen landscape echoes the moral decay around them, where purity is fleeting and love is corrupted.”

Likewise, Queens by Cass Waters was commissioned to visualize the harsh reality and physical barriers between the rich in the poor. Cass’s work is painted in mixed media on a broken masonite panel that further demonstrates its rough edges. She states, “This work presents the modern Valley of Ashes as the periphery of JFK airport in Queens. Instead of industrial pollution, the character in this scene is accosted by noise pollution. The diagonal composition converges at the ear of the portrait, symbolizing the intensity and abrasiveness of sound in many built environments, especially those in low-income areas. The chain link fence is used to create both a visual barrier between the subject and their environment and to emulate a repeating pattern that echoes sound waves.” 

And just like that, one singular line, one tiny moment, opens up a whole world of visual and literary exploration. In the Gatsby Art Collection, a puppy is never just a puppy, and a windowsill is a gateway to America; each scene a vivid glimpse into Fitzgerald’s world of symbolism-laden brilliance. So, cue up the audiobook, tune into our Lit Talk* podcast on The Great Gatsby, and get ready to uncover Gatsby like never before, because pre-order for The Great Gatsby Art Novel begins July 11!

Send me a note if you’d like to see any early preview of the Great Gatsby Art Collection: mlemak@bondandgrace.com

The Secret Garden Art Novel next to flowers

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