Feminist Criticism of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Essay exam

feminist criticism of The Great Gatsby The pervasive male bias in American books leads the reader to equate the have it off of existence American with the experience of being male. In F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, the background for the experience of disillusionment and high treason revealed in the novel is the discovery of America. Daisys failure of Gatsby is symbolic of the failure of America to endure up to the expectations in the imagination of the men who discovered it. America is pistillate to be American is male and the quintessential American experience is betrayal by woman. Fetterley believes that power is the issue in the politics of literature. Powerlessness characterizes womans experience of reading not only because her experience is not articulated, clarified and legitimized in art, but more significantly because to be universal in American literature is to be not female. The Great Gatsby is an American love reputation centered in hostility to women. Th e vision of love is played kayoed as a struggle for power in an elaborate prescript of advantage and disadvantage in which romance is but a outline for male victory. Gatsbys imaginative investment in Daisy is evident in his rendering of her as the first nice girl he had ever known. The quotation tag around nice indicate that the word is being used not as a reference to personality but as an big businessman to social status and that Jay Gatsbys interest in Daisy Fay lies in what she represents rather than in what she is. She is for him symbolic rather than personal he later remarks to Nick that Daisys copulation to Tom was just personal. Gatsby thinks of Daisy in relation to the objects that surround her. He cannot discern his vision of her from his vision... ... Gatsby, in the eyes of a feminist critic, is based on a lie of a double standard that makes female characters in classic literature not persons but symbols. It makes womens experience no partition of that literature s concern. The male romantic imagination wants women to remain outsiders so that they can be forever available as occasions for the heroic gestures of men and as scapegoats for the failure of mens dreams. Works Cited Feminist Criticism. http//www.cumber.edu/engl230/femcrit.htm Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1978. Lee, Elizabeth. Feminist Theory - An Overview. http//ursula.stg.brown.edu/projects/hyp...t/landow/victorian/ sexuality/femtheory.html Meese, Elizabeth A. Crossing the Double-Cross. Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 1986.