The Great Gatsby Research Projects. In the Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald shows us in his book the corruption through industrialism and gender roles in the 1920’s. The 1920’s saw the peak of fifty years of rapid American industrialization. New products seemed to burst from American production lines with the potential of revolutionizing American life. Other products that had previously been toys (cars and luxury materials)for the rich were now available to a percentage of Americans. The standard of living increased as the economy grew stronger and stronger. The results were spectacular. A woman of 1920 would be surprised to know that she would be remembered as a “new woman.” Many changes would enter her life in the next ten years. Significant …show more content…
Gender roles started to blur. No longer was it a given that the mother would be around the house all of the time, and it was no longer assumed that women did not have the skills necessary to make it in the workforce.” Before World War I, there was a very strict and role of families and gender in society. The women stay home to cook, clean and take care of the children. Women would not have to work hard and make the money but to stay home and do her womanly duties. They would not commonly deal with money, make government decisions or not obey their husband’s ideas. Men would be the money makers of the family, own house and make the government decisions. Basically the men owned the women and controlled them. The man of the house, he worked hard each day to provide for his woman and their children, it would be disrespectful for the woman to disobey her husband's wishes. In the book The Great Gatsby the women in the book are discriminated and thought less of, depending on the man that they were with. Myrtle was screaming at Tom “Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!, I’ll say it whenever when I want to! Daisy! Dai” Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand. She still stood with him even after he hit her because she didn’t want to lose her other life of glam. There is another woman in the story that is independant and feels she doesn't need a man to complete her, although she does like to keep them close. That character is Jordan, Daisy’s close friend. She seems to be single but always seems to have admirers. She has the attitude of, “I don’t need a
Unlike Daisy, who comes from old money, Myrtle is from the lower middle class. Myrtle hopes to climb the social ladder by cheating on her husband with Tom Buchanan.
“I hope she’ll be a fool - that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (Fitzgerald 20). This quote is as true now as it was when Daisy Buchanan said it about her daughter in The Great Gatsby. Women grow up in a box of expectations. They are told to act a certain way and do certain things. Daisy knew that this was the world that her daughter was going to be growing up in, and that if she grew up to be a fool then she would fit into the world very nicely. If she grew up and became someone who noticed inequality, or who wanted independence, she would struggle in the world. While woman are no longer put in such a black and white box, there are still many expectations and limitations that woman have to face in their
In Leland S. Pearson, Jr.’s essay “Herstory” and Daisy Buchanan,” Pearson explains why Daisy’s character is incomplete in the novel. Particularly in this paragraph:
With the increasing popularity of female-oriented post-secondary education, the growing number of women working outside the home in professional occupations and the newly granted right to suffrage, women directly challenged the traditional notions of American Womanhood in the 1920’s. In just seventy one years since the Seneca Falls Convention, feminists in America accomplished sweeping changes for women politically, economically, and socially. Attempting to reconcile the changing concept of womanhood with more traditional female roles, male writers often included depictions of this “New Woman” in their novels. Frequently, the male writers of the Progressive Era saw the New Woman as challenging the very fabric of society and, subsequently, included
The twentieth century was filled with many advances which brought a variety of changes to the world. However, these rapid advances brought confusion to almost all realms of life; including gender roles, a topic which was previously untouched became a topic of discourse. Many authors of the time chose to weigh in on the colloquy. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, gender role confusion, characteristic of modernist literature, is seen in Nick Carraway and Edna Pontillier as they are the focal points in the exploration of what it means to be a man or a woman, their purpose, place, and behavior in society.
Daisy Buchanan is the most significant female character in The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald writes her as the most significant female because she is most like his wife, Zelda (Donaldson). Daisy is Gatsby’s motivation for wealth and why he wants to accomplish so much. He has longed for her because she has always been unattainable. Fitzgerald, like Gatsby was often rejected by women in a class higher than him (Donaldson). Zelda was Fitzgerald’s motivation for writing The Great Gatsby and many other works (Donaldson). It was a way for him to express his frustration and love for his wife. Zelda was the main female role in Fitzgerald’s life, much like Daisy is for Gatsby. Fitzgerald writes his relationship in order to cope with what is happening
During the 1920’s, the role women had under men was making a drastic change, and it is shown in The Great Gatsby by two of the main female characters: Daisy and Jordan. One was domesticated and immobile while the other was not. Both of them portray different and important characteristics of the normal woman growing up in the 1920’s. The image of the woman was changing along with morals. Females began to challenge the government and the society. Things like this upset people, especially the men. The men were upset because this showed that they were losing their long-term dominance over the female society.
There are times when Tom loses his temper because people don't obey him, like when Myrtle Wilson started shouting “Daisy!, Daisy!, Daisy! . . . I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy. Dai —. . . With a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand” (pg.41).
A woman’s need to pursue society’s expectations of her can corrupt her entire view on relationships and human interactions. In the novel The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, suggests that an individuals desire to achieve a standard of perfection in society can demoralize them into engrossing only what is best for themselves during conflict. Daisy is the epitome of a woman during the 1920’s, she wants nothing more than the appearance of a perfect family life, so when her future is indefinite she hides behind Tom’s wealth, and certainty to achieve her desires.
Even if they disagree about other issues, all feminists believe patriarchal ideology works to keep men and women confined to traditional gender roles so male dominance may be maintained. Utilizing the precepts of Feminist criticism, it could be argued “The Great Gatsby” promotes a thinly veiled patriarchal agenda. Through Fitzgerald’s treatment of the three women in “Gatsby”, as well as masking the possible homosexuality of a central character, the novel seems to promote only the traditional gender roles, swaying uncomfortably from any possible variance.
From the start of the book we can see that women in the book are
Tom and George both show their treachery towards women on multiple occasions. Tom’s first physical violent act is towards Myrtle when she constantly says, “Daisy! Daisy! Daisy! I’ll say it whenever I want to!” Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke
Gender roles are society’s concept on how men and woman should behave. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hamlet by William Shakespeare, gender roles are evident in how characters act and distinguish each other.
Women’s role in society changed quite a bit during WWI and throughout the 1920s. During the 1910s women were very short or liberty and equality, life was like an endless rulebook. Women were expected to behave modestly and wear long dresses. Long hair was obligatory, however it always had to be up. It was unacceptable for them to smoke and they were expected to always be accompanied by an older woman or a married woman when outing. Women were usually employed with jobs that were usually associated with their genders, such as servants, seamstresses, secretaries and nursing. However during the war, women started becoming employed in different types of jobs such as factory work, replacing the men who had gone to fight in the war in Europe. In the late 1910s The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) had been fighting for decades to get the vote for women. As women had contributed so much to the war effort, it was difficult to refuse their demands for political equality. As a result, the Nineteenth Amendment to the constitution became law in 19...
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald took place in the 1920’s when the nation was undergoing rapid economic, political, and social change. Looking through different literary lenses the reader is able to see the effects of these rapid changes. The marxist lens reflects the gap between rich and poor while the feminist lens showcases the patriarchal society.