Author(s)

Xiaowen Yu ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Qufu Normal University, Lucheng Street, Qufu, China

Corresponding Author

Xiaowen Yu

ABSTRACT

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the renowned American novelist of the 1920s, is often hailed as the spokesman and laureate of the "Jazz Age." His masterpiece The Great Gatsby is considered a classic of American literature, widely discussed for its theme of the disillusionment of the American Dream. However, feminist interpretations of the novel remain relatively scarce. This thesis attempts a feminist re-reading of The Great Gatsby, exploring the depiction of female characters and their societal implications. Although Fitzgerald creates a "romance of money" in The Great Gatsby, the women in the novel are generally portrayed as secondary to the men, with negative characterizations, especially Daisy, who is often seen as the embodiment of emotional passivity. This paper applies feminist literary criticism and close reading to analyze the patriarchal consciousness of the narrator, Nick, and his misogynistic views toward female characters. By reinterpreting Daisy, the study deconstructs Nick's patriarchal narrative, arguing that Daisy is not a perpetrator, but rather a victim of Gatsby's American Dream. Furthermore, the negative portrayals of women in the novel reflect both the societal gender norms of the time and Fitzgerald's own views on women.

KEYWORDS

Fitzgerald, Feminism, Patriarchal Ideology, Misogyny

CITE THIS PAPER

Xiaowen Yu, An Interpretation of the Great Gatsby from the Perspective of Feminism. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2025) Vol. 8: 17-23. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2025.080103.

REFERENCES

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[8] Maggie Gordon Froehlich. (2011). Gatsby's Mentors: Queer Relations between Love and Money in the Great Gatsby. The Journal of Men's Studies(3), 209-226. 
[9] Sanabil A. Suleiman & Kamal H. Hussein. (2024). Multimodal Representations of the American Dream Theme: A Comparative Analysis of The Great Gatsby in Film and Novel. Theory and Practice in Language Studies(11), 3424-3430.   
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