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Role Of Women In The Great Gatsby

Decent Essays

A social group is a group of people, who share common characteristics and can be grouped together by a common theme. Marginalization is the treatment of a person, group or concept as insignificant. Social groups, such as women, are often marginalized from the rest of society due to unequal views on women. Gender marginalization stems from the concept that men and women are not created equal leading to disparate conduct and views of a gender. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, gender roles are clearly recognized and the female being is presented as the less powerful, unimportant sex. Through the examination of their own marginalization, the loss of identity of the emancipated women of the Jazz Age and the unbalanced standards to …show more content…

Furthermore, women in The Great Gatsby are marginalized by the social patterns of the Jazz Age resulting in a deprivation of their own identity. Despite their recent liberation, women are replicas of each other; nothing more than impersonal, faceless objects. In August, 1920, the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote, gave way to the emancipated women. Women or flappers, as they are referred to, with their short hair and shiny dresses are identical in appearance, with little or no individuality. While reflecting on the attendees at Gatsby’s parties, Nick infers, “Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before” (Fitzgerald 62). As Nick observes, due to their similarity it makes it difficult to determine if it is a woman’s first time at one of Gatsby’s parties. This exemplifies women’s conformity to an unwritten social code and their morphism into undistinguishable beings, simply an object of men’s desires. Additionally, Nick’s nightmare after Gatsby’s death illustrates another example of women’s marginalization as a result of their adherence to the social standards of the times. He dreams about a drunken woman in a white evening dress being carried home by four men. “Gravely the men turn in at a house – the wrong house. But no one

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