Women In The Great Gatsby And Their Eyes Were Watching God

The novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is about societal difference between men and women the 1920s. Throughout the novel this theme is played through our main characters: Tom, Myrtle, and Daisy. Fitzgerald uses the possessive relationships between these characters to enlighten the reader about women’s social ranking. He demonstrates how men were able to control women by making them feel inferior. The author describes the importance of social class for women in the 1920’s through the possessive and ultimately destructive relationship of Tom and Myrtle.

A narrator, by definition, is how an author chooses to portray information to readers in their work. An author’s choice, in how to tell a story is ideal to the effect it has on readers. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless classic The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway tells the entire story as a first-person, peripheral narrator. Fitzgerald purposefully chooses Nick as a partially removed character, with very few emotions and personal opinions. By doing so, readers experience the same ambiguity of other character’s thoughts, are carried smoothly throughout the plot, and Nick’s nonjudgmental character lets readers form opinions of their own.

Zora Neale Hurston’s highly acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrates many of the writing techniques described in How to Read Literature like a Professor by Tomas C. Foster. In Foster’s book, he describes multiple reading and writing techniques that are often used in literature and allow the reader to better understand the deeper meaning of a text. These of which are very prevalent in Hurston’s novel. Her book follows the story of an African American woman named Janie as she grows in her search for love. Hurston is able to tell Janie’s great quest for love with the use of a vampiric character, detailed geography, and sexual symbolism; all of which are described in Foster’s book.

ATTENTION GETTER In Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald depicts the life of an everyday broker named Nick, and an elegant man named Gatsby. As an American writer, Fitzgerald did a great job symbolizing different things in The Great Gatsby. Throughout the story, eyes and lights are the symbol most important because the eyes symbolize that somebody is always watching and judging your every movement, also Fitzgerald uses lights to symbolize how unobtainable happiness is.

Since society has existed, women have been known as different from men. For the longest time, women have been known as the “weaker sex” when compared to the male. There purpose, especially in the olden days is to obey and please the men. However nowadays there seems to be a more equality between the two genders. But even today discrimination between male and female takes place all over the world. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, you can see a lot of discrimination between the two sexes. The story takes place in the 1930’s and it has a bad view on women, they just got the right to vote for presidents, mayors, and senators. However most men thought that the women should only stay home and raise children, that they should not be involved in politics, and their ideas were not valuable. Women were treated as “house slaves” at times when all what they did all day, every day, was work around the house trying to improve the living for their husband and kids.

In "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, he shows women, treated and presented as worse than men, and are rather disregarded and neglected by the male characters. Even Fitzgerald describes and creates the traits of the women in the book in a negative manner.

In the novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, the authors choose to exhibit the theme of acquiescent wives. Stella, from A Streetcar Named Desire, and Janie, from Their Eyes Were Watching God, are both subject to disrespectful treatment by their husbands. During the 1930s-1940s, it’s viewed as abnormal and looked down on to separate from one’s spouse. Janie however breaks this stereotype, marrying three different men; while Stella tries to keep her dying relationship alive. Throughout the novels, Janie and Stella display a constant submissive behavior whenever told to do something, even when being abused physically or mentally by their spouse. Despite the various times Stanley beats Stella, her love for Stanley is blinding as she doesn’t mind his temper and considers it as passion; while Janie acts submissive to Joe, to avoid both his physical and verbal abuse. Although Stella and Janie’s voice throughout both novels are quite passive, Janie advocates more for herself than Stella.

During the 1930s, Americans were experiencing social and economic change during the Great Depression. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, African American Zora Neale Hurston sets the novel in the 1930s in Eatonville, Florida, and demonstrates the emotional growth and maturity of the African American protagonist, Janie Crawford, who reflects Hurston’s own life. Through her three marriages, Janie Crawford experiences the hardship many women face during her time, such as gender roles and traditional customs. However, she learns to break free from most of them. As a result, this novel empowers women through Janie’s voice that challenges social norms, her pursuit of achieving her dreams, and her confidence to stray from the traditional role of a woman.

“Writers consistently use novels as a lens through which they scrutinise society.” To what extent do you agree with this view?

After reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I was able to gather a small playlist of songs that can relate to the book. The lyrics in these songs relate to scenes, symbols, and different characters in the book.

Lavish parties, rich man, huge house, drinking everywhere, rich and poor. This is the lavish life of Jay Gatsby. The Great Gatsby is a story of a man who has almost everything, Money, Huge house, but he is missing one thing, his true love, Daisy. He bought a huge mansion in west egg just to be across the bay from Daisy who lives in east egg. The central theme in the Great Gatsby is that you cannot have everything no matter how rich you are.. In the Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald shows many different sides of the complicated character Jay Gatsby, some good and some bad. While Gatsby shows many different sides of him, the sides that are most prevalent are his traits of having a complicated history based on relationships or

“‘Jay… You can’t repeat the past.’ Gatsby wheeled around… ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why of course you can.’”(Luhrmann). The Great Gatsby greatly deals with people trying to relive past relationships and parts of their lives. This why a common theme for the Great Gatsby is that you can’t repeat the past. This is shown when Gatsby dies trying to repeat the past and return to a relationship and feelings that had been gone for 5 years, “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. ”(Fitzgerald 110). The movie better displays the theme that you can’t relive the past because of its style, the symbolism, and the point of view taken in the movie.

The Jazz age or the Roaring 20’s was a vital time for women in America. One reason this was a vital time was because on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote. This was also a vital time because America was changing from a more conservative country to a liberal one. The female characters in Fitz Gerald’s’ The Great Gatsby embodies the way women were back in the 1920s. Women before the 1920s were only seen as caregivers. In this story, the women were the total opposite of that. They changed from things such as clothing, smoking, and dancing. Daisy, Jordan, and Myrtle were all portrayed as the “New Woman”. There was Daisy who married into money but had a secret lover. There was Jordan who was this independent woman

In “The Great Gatsby” a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald discusses the American Dream and the Pursuit of Happiness. He expresses throughout the novel how the idea of the American Dream is romanized and ultimately impossible to achieve, which is shown through the careless and selfish social values and through the ‘easy’ money (made by Gatsby) causing this idea of the American Dream to become warped and and corrupted. The large contrast between the two social classes of the upper class- ‘old money’ and ‘new money’ is also expressed throughout the novel, where Jay Gatsby portrays the self-achieved newly rich, while Daisy and Tom Buchanan represent the aristocracy of the ‘old money’. Fitzgerald portrays this large contrast

Societal ‘norms’ surrounding gender have continuously remained prominent internationally. Although these standards and expectations continue to shift, women still face oppression today. The novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, demonstrates the expectations of women and their relationships to men in 1920’s New York City through one of the main characters, Daisy Buchanan. A vast majority of Daisy’s actions are to entice and cater to the superior men of the novel. Through this, I was able to reflect upon the evolution of society’s stereotypes surrounding women from the 1920’s. Initially, from reading the novel, I learned about the period of the roaring twenties and how the aspect of class affects the