A Feminist Perspective Of Three Heroines In F.Scott Fitzgerald's Three Novels

F.Scott Fitzgerald is one of the greatest novelists in contemporary American literature. The Great Gatsby, his greatest novel published in 1925, painted a vivid picture of American society after World War I, provided a panoramic vision of the American dream, and was regarded as his most famous and deliberate novel by the critics. Its publication symbolizes his becoming an outstanding writer in American literary history.The Great Gatsby took a love tragedy as the major plot, carried on clear judgment, and made public the American contemporary society. The story occurred in a society of conspicuous wealth. During that period, the sole target of living was to pursue wealth and to seek pleasure. The novel, by depicting such women as Daisy, Jordan, Myrtle and others in such society, reveals vividly negative characterizations of women. In particular, Daisy seems poorly realized as a character. As Fitzgerald himself said, the women are "emotionally passive" and the novel is "a man's book". Over the past few decades, a strong growth of feminist criticism wept over the world of words, it is necessary and meaningful to reread the text from a new perspective.This thesis offers a rereading of the three books, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon, by means of close reading of the text and the application of a new literary approach to the textual analysis. It attempts to research it from a feminist perspective to throw a new light on the study of the text.This thesis consists of the introduction, four chapters and the conclusion. The first part is a brief introduction of the author, his works and his contribution to American literature. It illustrates the aims and significance of writing the paper. It also concludes a summary of the previous critical reviews on the three novels and the historical context which Fitzgerald and the heroines lived in. It traces the interpretive history of the women characters from various perspectives in the hope that it can equip our present feminist reading of the text with a rich and broad critical background.Chapter one discusses briefly the feminist literary criticism, the male sexism or patriarchal ideology in the texts. It focuses on approaching the women from the theory.Being the focus of the paper, Chapter two to four are textual analysis from the perspective of feminist approach to illustrating the images, especially the negative images of the three women presented in each novel and depicted by the critics. They also deal respectively with the causes of the production of the negative portrayal of the images from a feminist perspective. The above analyses lead to the conclusion of the study. Women are not innately immoral, the immoral images of whom are partly products of the society and of men, thus deserving sympathy. On the other hand, their negative images, to some extent, reveal their desires of self-realization and of gaining equality with men.