Women's place in "The Great Gatsby" from Fritzgerald (PDF)

Essay from the year 2021 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg, language: English, abstract: This work is about the role and depiction of women in "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

When talking about "The Great Gatsby", you cannot omit the flapper, the New Woman of the Roaring Twenties, that is so typical for F. Scott Fitzgerald's time and novel. This novel depicts young women, neither bound to the housewife role nor prudes. But still, the female characters of the story are under the power of a patriarchal society, even if it is a more subtle one than twenty years before.

So, the work will argue that in "The Great Gatsby" the author presents New Women but still fails to emancipate them. It will start by analysing to what extent the female characters meet the type of the flapper in terms of their lifestyle and writing their own story. Then it will investigate the limits of their liberation, by analysing Daisy's association to the "golden girl" and how these women are objectified through men's desire.

Daisy Buchanan, the female protagonist, is often described as a flapper: they wore short skirt and hair, had a lot of makeup on and lived a leisure-full lifestyle. We cannot tell from Daisy's physical description that she meets the type of the flapper, since her description is based on character traits. But we can tell she is a flapper according to her lifestyle and personality.