The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald written in (year). It is very much a novel of it's time, based out of the decade in which it was written. The book is filled with scandals and affairs. I had been meaning to read it for a while, being that it's a book most people read in high school and as an English major I felt a little embarrassed that I had never read it. So, I read it for my senior project, intending to create a set of lesson plans around it which will incorporate the philosophy of New Historicism in the classroom.

The book had a bit of a slow start, but once it picked up I was caught. I can't really say why I thought it was slow at first. Maybe it's because it's more of the main character's background. While Nick isn't a particularly disagreeable character, I was impatient to meet Mr. Gatsby. I liked the novel, and I could certainly envision it in the time period it was set in. You could see the big parties and the trips to the city, but you could also see the interactions that were happening between Gatsby and the other characters. The novel did make me mad, however, as I had trouble not reading it through a feminist perspective. Feminist readings and New Historicism are certainly connected, but it was important for me to try to step outside of seeing the story only through that lens and putting other perspectives into it.

Since I read it through a feminist perspective (and since this blog is not part of the project but simply my own Reader Response reaction) I would like to share my concerns with you about this novel. I can't say what the author's intent with the novel was, and while certain schools of thought are interested in that, it's not usually my concern. I was particularly interested in what it said about society and our interactions in society, and that's when the feminist in me came out. As I said, there are multiple affairs and scandals that come about. Multiple people are sleeping with someone-or-others husband or wife. The problem is that the women are given the blame. A man finds out his wife is cheating on him and while he chastises her and tries to suppress her he is having an affair of his own as well. And while he sees issues with her having an affair, he never worries about his own, nor does he see the woman he is having an affair with as having morally implicated herself. Why is it that the women get all the blame? Does the man not have some involvement and therefore responsibility in the whole matter? We're talking about this issue in my human relations class right now. America (even today) is under the impression that men cannot control themselves when it comes to sexual urges and so women are left with the full responsibility of making sure things don't go too far. A woman is expected to look beautiful, sexy even, and meet the standards of beauty presented by society, but she is also expected to draw a thin line between "being sexy" and "being a whore." Why is it that a woman sleeping with a man becomes a "whore" but a man sleeping with a woman (or even multiple women) gains respect and a certain "higher status" among other men? How does this double standard help anyone? A man must sleep with a woman to gain this, but a woman must resist him in order to keep her own social status. There is no happy medium. There is no way for everyone to gain a sense of pleasure (and a certain sense of self) from the situation.

So, I guess my final thought on Gatsby is that while there are clear sexist implications throughout it, and while it shows the signs of it's time, there is still a real-world application of this text today and we can still use it today in connection with other texts and resources to teach out students about society as well as gender lines.