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Gender Quotes In The Great Gatsby

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F. Scott Fitzgerald tackles numerous grave themes in his renowned novel The Great Gatsby, one of the most prominent being sexism and the disparities of gender equality in the 1920s. The novel tells the story of several upper class men and women navigating prohibition and their own personal drama in their otherwise almost wholly uneventful lives. Every character, regardless of their gender, ends up dead, alone, unhappy, or some combination of the three by the end of the story. But as with most literature, the journey is paramount in comparison to the destination. The way Fitzgerald frames the outcomes of each character varies significantly based on their gender. It is not as simple as “all of the men continue without consequences and get the girl while all the women are either hit by a car or stay in unfaithful marriages” or vice versa. No one gets an entirely, or even mostly, favorable ending. It is instead the reason why one’s finale is inauspicious that must be examined. Men are nearly exclusively characterized in older fiction as being aggressive doers; they are the ones that the story is about and they drive their stories forward. Women, on the other hand, are passive reactors; they are the secondary plot devices to be used to propel the story forward. The men of the novel end up miserable because of things that happen to them, while the women of the story have cheerless conclusions because of actions they took that actively landed them in that place. The Great Gatsby

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