Maggie And The Great Gatsby

Women, the Best Reflection of the Spirit of the Era

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen Crane are two prominent novelists in the American history. Best known for his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald is considered a prestigious member of the Lost Generation and completed four novels during his lifetime. Sharply pointing out the hollowness and fallibility of the American dream, Fitzgerald was one of the most critically acclaimed novelists in the twentieth century America. His novel The Great Gatsby is set in Long Island, New York and features the love story between Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire out of bootlegging, and Daisy Buchanan, the wife of Tom Buchanan who comes from an aristocratic family. The narrator Nick Carraway is the neighbor

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was published during the time of industrialization when the United States almost completed the transform from an agriculture society to an industrialized nation in the late 1800s. A tremendous amount of people came to New York and contributed to the rapid growth of population in the urban New York. While these immigrants helped the United States to develop economically, the progress is accompanied by poverty. Maggie, the lovely protagonist, is representative of the lower class people who suffer from poverty. “City poverty, violence and prostitution” showed up in American slums, and the Bowery city Maggie lived in was “an assembly of criminals” (Mahma 16). Although the environment she grows in is extremely terrible and disgusting, Maggie remains her innocence and desires to escape from the bleak world of Bowery. In comparison, The Great Gatsby describes the Jazz Age, a period in the 1920s when the unprecedented prosperity in Long Island led to moral decline and criminal activities. People are trapped in their unsatisfied desire for money and higher social status. That time period is also referred as “The Roaring Twenties” due to social, cultural and economical

Daisy is a perfect example to illustrate this attitude. When Gatsby leaves Daisy, she promises to wait for him, but she breaks her own promise and marries Tom Buchanan whose “family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach” so as to stabilize her status in the upper class society (Fitzgerald 8). She is a superficial, sardonic and beautiful woman with “an absurd, charming little laugh” who knows how to make full use of her advantages to improve her own life (Fitzgerald 11). She is “warm, feverish, thrilling, intoxicating—a siren, an enchantress, a blossoming flower” who draws the attention of everyone (Baker). With the support from her family, she betrays Gatsby and marries Tom Buchannan not out of love but out of realistic concern. However, when Gatsby comes back as a mysterious millionaire with a lavish lifestyle, Daisy falls for him again. According to Daisy, the reunion with Gatsby is miserable not only because of the rekindled flame between the two past lovers, but also because Gatsby now has the upper-class lifestyle she yearns for, yet she is not with him (Gam). Her love is based on his attraction which comes not from Gatsby himself but from his money and material luxury. People around her gradually