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Female Characters In The Great Gatsby Essay

1296 Words6 Pages

2.2. THE GREAT GATSBY Considered as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby offers a similar point of view about women in the 1920s. In this novel, there are three remarkable female characters. The first of them is Daisy Buchanan, the leading female character. She represents Jay Gatsby’s lifegoal; she is a pretty, young woman who had an affair with Gatsby before he went to the Great War. She is married to Tom Buchanan and is Nick Carraway’s (the narrator) cousin. Secondly, Jordan Baker; she is cynical and self-centered. A competitive golfer; she is a stunning boyish woman who is romantically involved with Nick Caraway eventually. Last but not least, Myrtle Wilson; she is Tom Buchanan’s lover. A fierce and lively woman who, tired of her …show more content…

It is inevitable for Nick, when describing her for the first time, to pay attention to her boyish features and the hardness of her body’s lines:
“I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she ‘got done.’ I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before” (9).
She is as cruel, cynical, strong-willed and hard as Marjorie. She seems to flirt with Nick for the same reasons Marjorie would flirt with a “sad bird” (as she called them in the short story). Once Jordan knows that she will not take anything from him, she leaves him and starts looking for a more suitable man. She is a side-show character but, by being there, Fitzgerald is remarking the role of these new women which, in this case, seem to have the same flaws as in “Bernice Bobs Her …show more content…

Women in Fitzgerald’s literature cannot achieve their goals; it does not matter if they belong to the “old” or the “new” school, nor the upper or lower stages in the social scale. It is hard to determine if the woman’s question was as Fitzgerald depicts but, anyhow, he is mirroring the society where he lives in many different aspects. As a male author, he probably cannot provide a complete view of this topic. Notwithstanding, he masters the narrative technique to portray 1920s’ American society and his work can be considered as a faithful chronicle of that

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