Female Characters In The Great Gatsby

“And I hope she 'll be a fool – that 's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (Fitzgerald 17). This quote was said by Daisy Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. Throughout the novel, women are very present and Fitzgerald created mesmerising and contradicting personalities for each character to draw in the readers. During the flapper movement, many women were cutting their hair, raising the hemlines on their skirts, smoking, drinking, and even driving (Kennedy, Cohen, Bailey 745). Nevertheless, many women were still afraid to speak their minds, even if they followed the fashion and social trends. Fitzgerald embodied this by creating female characters that were bored, superficial, and lost.

Jordan Baker, Daisy’s best friend, is the female character that stands out in the novel as being bored (Fitzgerald 57). This is proven by the fact that she is invariably telling lies throughout the

Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s mistress, is the female character that was lost throughout the novel. Myrtle lives in The Valley of Ashes, which is the grimy, poor town in-between East and West Egg (Fitzgerald 23). The location in which she lives is lost in between the luxury and beauty of the two Eggs. Myrtle is dissatisfied with the life she is living currently with her husband, George. The only excitement she gets is whenever Tom visits. She desperately worships Tom, knowing that he is her only chance of getting out of the life she is stuck in. Myrtle let’s Tom boss her around, hit her (37), and blatantly use her sex; eventually her devotion to Tom is what led to her death (137). The only poor woman in the story being used for sex shows that the upper class viewed the women of the lower class as nothing but a cheap date.

Through the examples given in The Great Gatsby, it is clear that Fitzgerald portrayed the women in his novel as bored, superficial, and lost to bring to the surface the non-progressiveness of the flapper feminist