A Feminist Perspective Of The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the famous American novelist in the 1920s, is known as the spokesman and laureate of the "Jazz Age". The Great Gatsby, his masterpiece, is considered an American classic and is still the hot subject by the critics. It is generally viewed among critics that it is a novel about the American society in the 1920s. A lot of essays on it focus either on its quintessential vision of the American dream, romantic hope and its disillusion or on the narrative techniques. Up till now, however, almost no essayists or critics have made a thorough and detailed analysis on the fiction from the feminist perspective.F. Scott Fitzgerald created the "Romance of Money" in The Great Gatsby, which confirms his eternal contribution to American literature. However, One can readily acknowledge that in general the women characters are quite secondary to the males. There are even negative characterizations of women. In particular, Daisy seems poorly realized as a character. As Fitzgerald himself says, the women are "emotionally passive" and the novel is "a man's book". Because of the strong growth of feminist criticism over the few decades, it is necessary and meaningful to reread the text from a new perspective.This thesis offers a re-reading of The Great Gatsby by means of close reading of the text and the application of a new literary approach to the textual analysis. It attempts to approach it from a feminist perspective to throw a new light on the study of the text.The thesis consists of five parts— the introduction, three chapters and the conclusion.The first part is a brief introduction of the author, his works and his contribution in American literature. It also illustrates the aims and significance of writing the paper.Chapter One is a summary of the previous critical reviews on The Great Gatsby and the historical context which Fitzgerald and Gatsby lived in. It traces the interpretive history of The Great Gatsby 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 Two discusses briefly the feminist literary criticism, one of whose major tasks is to explore the male sexism or patriarchal ideology in the androtexts. It focuses on the possibilities of approaching The Great Gatsby from the theory.Chapter Three is a textual analysis from the perspective of feminist approach. It is the focus of the thesis. A series of events and examples in the text illustrate the misunderstanding and misogyny of the narrator. By rereading of Daisy, Nick's patriarchal narrative discourse is dismantled. Therefore, it can be concluded that it is unfair for the critics and readers to judge the women in the text only guided by Nick's limited view. Rather than a victimizer, Daisy is the victim of Gatsby's American dream. And the negative characterizations of women in the text reveal the writer's feminist value and discomfort with women in the Jazz Age in the 1920s.