Essay On The Role Of Women In The Great Gatsby

Words: 620
Pages: 3

The story, “The Great Gatsby,” has a setting of New York in the pre depression 1920’s, to be more precise most of the major characters live in East and West Egg. Three of the main major characters are women, that Fitzgerald contrasts as Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s lower class mistress; Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy socialite with marital problems; and Jordan Baker, a professional golfer with a shady past. Fitzgerald writes about gender roles in a quite conventional manner. In his novel, men work to earn money for the maintenance of the women. Mostly men are dominant over women.
Myrtle Wilson is the wife of a mechanic in the “Valley of Ashes,” and is Tom’s traitorous mistress. She is a wannabe socialite who denies her place in society. She sneaks away
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He claims that Daisy and Myrtle supposedly personify the typical female who is basically living to fulfill her husband's needs instead of getting a degree and making a living and Fitzgerald also claims that when women try to overcome being trapped by feminine stereo-types, it ends in disaster. Typically his outlook on the subject of women and feminine empowerment is very negative. He is practically stating that men are the only ones that can actually do something with their lives, which is definitely not true at all, because women can do just as much as a man can do either way.
Although the three women came from three different socio-economic backgrounds they were still all treated the same in the novel “The Great Gatsby”. The men in the story were always dominant over the three, they couldn’t get a degree and make a living on their own, and if they tried to shake the stereotype it would supposedly end in a terrible outcome or disaster.
All together the outlook that Fitzgerald conveyed was negative towards women and feminine empowerment mostly because women was portrayed as inherently weak individuals needing men to protect them because they cannot take care of themselves, which is completely not true at