The Great Gatsby Homosexual Analysis

1527 Words7 Pages

The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a novel about a young man named Nick Carraway who fell into the corrupt world of the wealthy and affluent over the course of a summer. Nick formed a close relationship with a man named Gatsby, which the story revolves around to a certain extent. Fitzgerald may have secretly been a homosexual in real life. Because of this, The Great Gatsby has a startling amount of queer subtext focused on the protagonist Nick Carraway.
Tyson defines heteronormativity as social environments and assumptions that pressure a person to be sexually conventional, or in other words to be heterosexual. (305) A large symptom of heteronormativity is internalised homophobia. Internalised homophobia means a form of self hatred that is imbibed into a LGBT+ person due to heteronormativity and homophobia throughout society. (Tyson 305) Heteronormativity is rampant throughout The Great Gatsby, which specifically is shown in Nick Carraway, the protagonist and narrator of the novel.
“...I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. “Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . . Brook’n Bridge. . . .” Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning …show more content…

This overwhelming amount of stigma caused Fitzgerald to live in fear of being his true self, if he was anything other than straight. The Great Gatsby may have been a coping mechanism for Fitzgerald as Nick Carraway seems to harbor a subtle form of love for Jay Gatsby. Both of these people are extensions of each other to symbolise the suppression of sexuality in one's self. Fitzgerald may not have been able to make his own choices in life regarding whom to love, but Nick was able to show this yearning in a subtle, yet still noticeable