Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson's affair

Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson's affair is a central relationship in The Great Gatsby that exposes the moral corruption, class hypocrisy, and violent undercurrents of the Jazz Age elite, serving as a direct catalyst for the novel's tragic climax. The affair, conducted openly in New York City while Myrtle's husband George Wilson remains oblivious in the Valley of Ashes, reveals Tom's casual cruelty, Myrtle's desperate social ambition, and the careless destruction that follows when the wealthy treat human beings as disposable possessions.

Origins and First Meeting

The affair began on a train, where Myrtle Wilson first encountered Tom Buchanan. She was traveling to New York to visit her sister Catherine, and Tom was wearing a dress suit and patent leather shoes. Myrtle could not keep her eyes off him, though every time he looked at her she pretended to be studying the advertisement over his head. When they reached the station, his white shirt-front pressed against her arm, and she told him she would have to call a policeman—but he knew she was lying. She was so excited that when she got into a taxi with him she hardly realized she was not getting into a subway train. All she could think, over and over, was "You can't live forever; you can't live forever." Myrtle later explained to Nick Carraway that she had married George Wilson because she thought he was a gentleman, but he borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in and never told her, and the man came looking for it one day when George was out. She gave it to him and then lay down and cried all afternoon. Tom was her first sweetie in eleven years of marriage.

The Valley of Ashes and the Garage

The affair was geographically anchored to the Valley of Ashes, the desolate industrial wasteland between West Egg and New York City. Tom's mistress lived above the garage her husband operated, a dim, unprosperous establishment where the only visible car was a dust-covered wreck of a Ford crouching in a corner. George Wilson was a blond, spiritless, anaemic man, faintly handsome, who had no idea his wife was unfaithful. Tom would stop the train at the ashheaps, force Nick Carraway off with him, and walk to the garage under the persistent stare of the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. When Myrtle appeared in the office door, she blocked out the light with her thickish figure. She was in her middle thirties, faintly stout, but carried her surplus flesh sensuously. Her face contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her, as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering. She smiled slowly and walked through her husband as if he were a ghost, shaking hands with Tom and looking him flush in the eye. She then wet her lips and told her husband to get chairs so somebody could sit down. Tom told her to get on the next train and meet him by the news-stand on the lower level. George Wilson, emerging with two chairs, remained utterly deceived, believing his wife went to New York to see her sister. Tom dismissed him as so dumb he did not know he was alive.

The New York Apartment and the Party

Tom maintained a small apartment on the top floor of a building on 158th Street in New York, a cramped space with a living-room crowded with oversized tapestried furniture featuring scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph of Myrtle's mother, which looked like a hen sitting on a blurred rock until it resolved into a bonnet. Copies of Town Tattle and Simon Called Peter lay on the table. Myrtle changed into an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon that rustled as she swept about the room, and under its influence her personality underwent a transformation: the intense vitality so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air. She bought a dog from a man who resembled John D. Rockefeller, an Airedale that cost ten dollars, though Tom insisted it was a bitch. She telephoned her sister Catherine and invited the McKees from the flat below. Catherine was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid, sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white; her eyebrows had been plucked and drawn on at a more rakish angle. Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man who worked as a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Myrtle's mother. His wife told Nick with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married. The afternoon descended into heavy drinking, and Myrtle, sitting on Tom's lap, grew increasingly loud and affected. She told the story of her first meeting with Tom, and later, when the conversation turned to Daisy's name, Myrtle shouted "Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" repeatedly. Tom Buchanan, making a short deft movement, broke her nose with his open hand. Then there were bloody towels on the bathroom floor, women's voices scolding, and a long broken wail of pain. Myrtle lay on the couch, bleeding fluently, trying to spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of Versailles.

Exposure and Consequences

The affair remained hidden from George Wilson until the summer's end, when he discovered a dog leash—made of leather and braided silver, apparently new—wrapped in tissue paper on Myrtle's bureau. He confronted her, and she tried to explain, but he knew something was wrong. The shock made him physically sick; he told Michaelis, the young Greek who ran the coffee joint beside the ashheaps, that he had been wised up to something funny and wanted to get his wife away out West. He locked Myrtle in her room above the garage. On the same afternoon, Tom Buchanan, driving Gatsby's yellow car into New York, stopped at Wilson's Garage for gas, and Wilson, pale and shaking, asked about buying Tom's old car, saying he needed money to move away. Tom, startled, realized Wilson had discovered the affair. Myrtle, peering down from the window above the garage, saw Jordan Baker in the car and, in jealous terror, mistook her for Tom's wife. That evening, after the confrontation at the Plaza Hotel, Myrtle escaped from her room and rushed into the road, waving her hands and shouting. Gatsby's car, driven by Daisy Buchanan, struck her, killing her instantly. Her left breast was torn loose like a flap, her mouth wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long. Tom, arriving at the scene, wept and called the driver a coward for not stopping, though he knew the car was Gatsby's. Later, he told George Wilson that Gatsby owned the yellow car, directing Wilson's vengeance toward Gatsby. Wilson shot and killed Gatsby, then himself.

Thematic Significance

The affair between Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson crystallizes the novel's critique of class and moral corruption. Tom treats Myrtle as a possession, flaunting her in public restaurants while maintaining the fiction of respectability with his wife. Myrtle, in turn, uses the affair to escape her dreary existence in the Valley of Ashes, adopting the pretensions of the wealthy she admires. The relationship is built on mutual exploitation and self-deception, and it ends in violence and death. Tom's willingness to let Gatsby take the blame for Myrtle's death—and his active role in directing Wilson toward Gatsby—reveals the casual cruelty of the very rich, who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness." The affair also underscores the novel's geography of moral decay: the Valley of Ashes, presided over by the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, becomes the site where the consequences of the wealthy's careless pleasures are made manifest in blood and dust.