Feminist Criticism of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Essay exam

Feminist Criticism of The Great Gatsby The pervasive male bias in American literature leads the reader to equate the do it of world American with the experience of being male. In F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, the background for the experience of disillusionment and betrayal revealed in the novel is the discovery of America. Daisys nonstarter of Gatsby is symbolic of the failure of America to live up to the expectations in the imagination of the men who spy it. America is female to be American is male and the quintessential American experience is betrayal by woman. Fetterley believes that power is the issue in the political sympathies of literature. Powerlessness characterizes womans experience of reading non only because her experience is not articulated, clarified and legitimized in art, provided more significantly because to be customary in American literature is to be not female. The Great Gatsby is an American respect story centered in hostility to women. The v ision of love is played out as a struggle for power in an elaborate pattern of advantage and disadvantage in which romance is further a strategy for male victory. Gatsbys imaginative investment in Daisy is spare in his description of her as the first nice girl he had constantly known. The quotation marks around nice indicate that the word is being used not as a reference to personality but as an index to social status and that Jay Gatsbys interest in Daisy Fay lies in what she represents rather than in what she is. She is for him symbolic rather than personal he later remarks to Nick that Daisys relation to Tom was just personal. Gatsby thinks of Daisy in relation to the objects that band her. He cannot separate his vision of her from his vision... ... Gatsby, in the eyes of a womens rightist critic, is based on a lie of a double measuring that makes female characters in classic literature not persons but symbols. It makes womens experience no part of that literatures concer n. The male romantic imagination wants women to remain outsiders so that they can be forever available as occasions for the sublime gestures of men and as scapegoats for the failure of mens dreams. Works Cited Feminist Criticism. http//www.cumber.edu/engl230/femcrit.htm Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting reviewer A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1978. Lee, Elizabeth. Feminist possibleness - An Overview. http//ursula.stg.brown.edu/projects/hyp...t/landow/victorian/gender/femtheory.html Meese, Elizabeth A. Crossing the Double-Cross. Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 1986.