Daisy's Gender Roles In The Great Gatsby

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The Roaring Twenties was an era that transformed America's views on women's gender roles and relationship standards. The Great Gatsby is a story of a wealthy man named Jay Gatsby told through the view of Nick Carraway. Gatsby has been living in the past his entire life with his one true goal of reuniting with his first love Daisy Buchanan. Throughout the story we see the ups and downs of being a rich elite in society and the values of life and scandals in the 1920s. Gender roles and relationships of the 1920s influenced F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby because Jordan defies the common girl gender role, Daisy wants her daughter to be a fool, and Tom abuses women physically and mentally.
The first example of how gender roles influenced …show more content…

Throughout the story Tom is seen flaunting women around and making them think that he is in love with them when he could care less about them. “What I say is why go on living with them if they can’t stand them? If I was them I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away...it's really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and they don’t believe in divorce. Daisy was no Catholic…”(Fitzgerald 33). Tom is making Myrtle think that he would marry her if only Daisy was not Catholic, but that is not the case. Tom just likes Myrtle to be there for him if he gets bored or annoyed with Daisy but would never want to marry her since she is not seen as significant in society being that she is not wealthy. “This surplus created the basis for economic inequality, and in turn prompted a ceaseless striving for upward mobility among people in the lower strata of society” (Medvedev 198). It is seen throughout the book that Myrtle tries to appear rich even though she has no money. Some of her love for Tom might be based on the fact that he has a lot of money and she wants to be wealthy considering many people during this era would look for anyway to move up in society. If Tom were to divorce Daisy who comes from a wealthy family and marry Myrtle who has no money, in his mind he would be moving down the “social ladder” which is the last thing Tom would want seeing that he strongly values his possessions. During the time period of the roaring twenties F. Scott Fitzgerald was very wealthy. Using his experiences with how he feels about being very important during this time, heavily affected the words he used to illustrate Tom’s character and his love for being rich and showing it off. Being a rich elite in the Jazz age was very thrilling and exciting because there were many new inventions and the United States was becoming very industrialized. A lower class individual during this time did not get to enjoy the

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