A Man's Fool: The Literary Archetype of Women with Allusions to Greek Mythology

Fitzgerald writes, ”I hope she’ll be a fool–that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool,” (17). Women in literature are typically regarded as foolish, dating back to when Pandora was foolish enough to open her box. In fact, a woman is not so much a character as a literary tool whose purpose is to help develop the character of a man and whose only significance is tied to him, alone she is nothing. Women are portrayed as property to be purchased with material possessions, essentially selling themselves to the highest bidder. In Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s literary masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, he plays on the classic archetype of the role of the woman using symbolism and allusions to Greek mythology. However, Fitzgerald contradicts the insignificance by portraying women as not helpless, but feigning helplessness to manipulate and control men such that a man’s actions are not of his free will, but of hers.
A desirable woman must be inferior to a man and is therefore reliant on him for everything as she is considered his property. Much like children, they are thought to be helpless and since they cannot take care of themselves, they need a man to take care of them. To reinforce this perception, Fitzgerald describes a scene in which two drunken women are forced by their husbands to leave the party, “both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night,” (52). This creates a very child-like image; the women are throwing temper tantrums because they don’t want to leave and so someone has to carry them off. The husbands automatically assume that they know what’s best, and regardless, their wishes come first and they want to leave. Daisy plays into this child-like persona to seem more desirable. This helpless ...

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... into these narrow categories, but a person does not. Behind the persona a woman is expected to have, lies the true person who has no gender; Tom, Nick, Daisy, Jordan, Gatsby, and Myrtle all have similar underlying motivations. Everyone wants to be significant and remembered: Nick claims, “[He] is one of the few honest people that [he] has ever known,” (59); Daisy wants to have the status that being wealthy brings; Gatsby’s worst fear is being a nobody; Jordan cheats to win a golf tournament; Tom needs to be superior and in control at all times; Myrtle wears an expensive chiffon dress and describes it as “a crazy old thing,” to seem like she is so wealthy that a fancy dress is of little consequence to her (31). Ultimately, men may use women to get what they want, but women manipulate men to do the same. Women are more capable than literature portrays them to be.