ESSAY QUESTION:
Examine the presentation of male and female views of the central concerns or issues in The Great Gatsby.
The Roaring Twenties of America was an era of immense cultural dynamism, making many breaks with the Victorian attitudes of the previous period. With the 19th Amendment of 1920, which finally gave American women the vote, the biggest social change involved a revolution taking place in women’s lives. To be sure, it was an era in which American women, especially those of the lower classes, were finally playing an important role in the workforce, having been initiated into factory work in war-supporting industries such as iron and steel and automobile manufacturing, previously thought to be inappropriate for women. Jobs were aplenty given the post-war economic boom and many women also entered colleges and sought vocational training in a bid to carve out a future career for themselves. However, Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby gives us a more negative representation of the 1920s, focussing it on the upper classes, the old as well as the new rich, and the social ‘climbers’, showing us how the era meant more of a sexual revolution for women, exemplified in the ‘flapper’, than any freedom to work, or to think and dream differently from men. In The Great Gatsby, women seem to think like men, having similar views as men on issues such as the American Dream and social mobility, moral values, attitudes towards the family and equal rights and opportunities. This similarity of viewpoint suggests that the women’s movement of the time failed to deliver any true revolution in ideas, that it only meant that women abandoned their traditional female values such as compassion and virtue for inferior values. Fitzgerald depicts the Roaring 20s as an era when both men and women in Eastern cities like New York lost their moral and sexual anchors in Victorian values without coming up with a more progressive alternative. Women though are seen to be somewhat more unstable in their views, often contradicting their own expressed beliefs.
None of the men in the novel talk of starting a family and how they see their roles as father but neither do the women show concern about their roles as mothers. This seems to be even across class. The Buchanans never talk of their children in public and are more concerned about their marital relationship than about raising a child. Even the socially aspiring middle-class Wilsons don’t mention plans of raising a family one day—Wilson’s plan to move to another city is aimed at removing his wife from sexual temptation rather than to start a family. In a jazz song that Klipspringer plays on the piano for Gatsby, the lyrics, “ONE THING'S SURE AND NOTHING'S SURER/THE RICH GET RICHER AND THE POOR GET—CHILDREN,” we see the disdain of the upper class for the family. The only mother in the novel, Daisy, shockingly exhibits a tendency to view her maternal role as a tool she can use to construct her image and evoke pity from others rather than something that demands care from her. At the first presentation of Daisy in the novel, in the Buchanans’ East Egg home, Daisy doesn’t introduce her daughter to Nick but uses her identity as mother to seek Nick’s pity for her as the wife of a cheating husband. Through the use of Nick’s first-person narrative voice, Fitzgerald highlights the differences between Nick’s mid-Western values, which he still abides by, and Daisy’s exploitative character. Nick is concerned about what Tom’s infidelity will mean to the family and inquires many times after the welfare of Daisy’s child. But he gets no answers, until finally Daisy responds in an irrelevant manner, asking if Nick wants to know what Daisy had said when her daughter was born and her husband was out gallivanting. Her answer focusses on herself rather than her child:
I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool-- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
Her answer is calculated to evoke Nick’s pity on her and takes attention away from the child as object of pity, highlighting her feelings of abandonment and loneliness within marriage. The line “and so I turned my head away and wept” is particularly posed and striving for effect. We see the difference in Nick’s unstated view that is shared with the reader, “It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms--but apparently there were no such intentions in her head,” and Nick appropriately returned home “a little disgusted” with the Buchanans. This however is not a matter of a man’s view towards the family as being more responsible than a woman’s—Nick is the exception, somebody who, as is evident in the novel, does not belong to the Roaring 20s in terms of values. In the later part of the novel, we see that even Gatsby, the only person Nick approves of, seems to be stunned to discover that Daisy has a child when he is invited to her home, despite the couple having been married for five years. Daisy doesn’t even mention her motherhood to Gatsby and the latter is too absorbed with romantic love than with any wish to raise a family with the love of his life. In this scene, once again, Daisy uses her child to evoke feeling for herself, calling out her daughter in a showy pretence of introducing her to Gatsby. "’Bles-sed pre-cious,’ she crooned, holding out her arms. ‘Come to your own mother that loves you...’”. Said immediately after she has kissed her lover Gatsby in her marital home, the declaration seems insincere. The narrator highlights the lack of maternal love by depicting with irony, how the child is viewed as an object to be shown off, with a “freshly laundered” nurse leading her in to see her mother and then whisking her away when she has served her purpose. The novel shows us how the Roaring 20s meant a sharp departure from the Victorian regard for the family as the pillar of society and that even the women of the upper classes did not value their maternal role.
With regard to perspectives towards the American Dream, it seems to be class rather than gender than determines differences in viewpoint. Although the “American Dream” was first named as such only in 1931 in a book Epic of America by the American historian James Truslow Adams, the idea of America as a land where one could improve one’s lot in life, regardless of class and other social origins—where only individual choice and hard work were the crucial factors for success—has been an assumption since America’s frontier days. This dream of equal opportunity and unhindered social mobility certainly features in an implied manner in The Great Gatsby, with Gatsby exemplifying it, and the novel even ending with an allusion to the first European immigrants seeing the coast of America as a dream of paradise. However the established wealthy elite in the novel are depicted as being resistant to the idea of social mobility and are even suspicious of it whereas those from the middle-classes such as the Wilsons and Gatsby have more faith in it. At first Daisy and Jordan seem to be more liberal in their attitudes and more open to the idea of equality for all than Tom Buchanan: as seen in the way they mock his anxieties about “The Rise of the Coloured Empires,” of the white race being in danger of being “utterly submerged.” Daisy retorts ironically, “We’ve got to beat them down!” Yet almost immediately after, the two women tell Nick the story of the “butler’s nose”, making fun of their household employee who once polished so much silver for people that it apparently began to affect his nose, health-wise, so that he had to end up becoming a butler. Through this juxtaposition of Tom’s racism and snobbery with the two women telling this story, Fitzgerald allows us to see how the women are similar to Tom in their snobbery and lack of ability to see others as their equals. Later in the novel, when the Buchanans first attend one of Gatsby’s weekend parties, Gatsby introduces them to movie people and others living in West Egg, the residential area of the nouveau riche. Although Daisy says she loves these people, the narrator tells us that “except for the half hour she'd been alone with Gatsby she wasn't having a good time.” Revealingly, Nick also observes that “We were at a particularly tipsy table,” and that he had “enjoyed these same people only two weeks before….But what had amused [him] then turned septic on the air now.” Looking through Daisy’s eyes then, Nick is made to feel uncomfortable about anything that doesn’t reflect the culture of the old rich. Nick clearly disapproves of Daisy’s close-mindedness and intolerance in his narrative commentary that Daisy “was appalled by West Egg”, by its “raw vigour” and “saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand”, which is signalled through his use of strong judgemental words such as “appalled”, “awful” and “failed”.
Social snobbery and intolerance of other people’s ways do not suggest positive attitudes towards social mobility, a core value of the American Dream. Like her husband and other established wealthy men like Mr Sloane, Daisy carefully vets who she will associate with and believes in class barriers. If her young love with Gatsby suggests that she had once been open to marrying someone outside her class, the clanger is dropped in the denouement section of the novel when Gatsby reveals to Nick that he had led Daisy to believe that “he was a person from much the same stratum as herself—that he was fully able to take care of her.” By the time, the confrontation scene takes place when Gatsby reveals their affair to Tom, Daisy now knows Gatsby’s unstellar social background and the reader is able to see that Daisy has no intentions of marrying Gatsby and that she even might have embarked on the affair merely to rattle Tom’s sexual complacency about her.
In contrast to the elite class, men and women from the lower classes share more positive attitudes towards social mobility and invest faith in the opportunities to climb out of their class background. The only difference between Gatsby and Wilson in their attitude towards becoming rich one day is that the former has the imagination and talent to do what the latter is unable to achieve. Wilson works hard in his small auto business, hoping one day to take his wife out of the dismal Valley of Ashes and go West in search of a better life. From the start of the novel to the climactic scene, he is obsessed with buying Tom’s car and re-selling it to make a profit. His wife Myrtle too believes ardently in the American dream of moving socially upwards. However, being a woman and perhaps having fewer opportunities to work, she sees the way ahead in marrying into the upper class. Of course she is completely deluded in thinking that Tom would ever marry her but we realise from her quarrel with Tom, where she insists on her right to use Daisy’s name and talk about her, that she views herself as Daisy’s equal and sees herself challenging Daisy’s status as Tom’s wife. The narrator’s description of Myrtle Wilson as throwing “a regal homecoming glance” around the neighbourhood of Tom’s New York apartment where the couple meet for their dalliance, and the way she goes “haughtily in” to the apartment building indicates that Myrtle has long-term plans for this relationship and that it meets her dreams of a better future for herself. In a sense, Myrtle is a female version of Gatsby in unrealistically seeing the sky as the limit for her social aspirations.
As a novel of manners about 1920s’ society in the large Eastern cities, Fitzgerald subtly directs his satire at the social effects of the women’s movement. If one expects female society of that era to have had utopian visions of even greater gender equality now that they had won the vote, we are in for a surprise. The women in the novel seem to have very modest and limited notions of women’s emancipation, quite similar to the men’s grasp of what female liberty means. For Tom, freedom of women means sexual freedom, something that he views with both approval and disapproval, depending on the context. He happily exploits Myrtle’s desire for sexual freedom but is unenthusiastic about the sexual freedom of his wife and other women of the upper class. Nick highlights this hypocrisy by including in dialogue, a comment Tom makes on his wife having met Gatsby:
I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be old fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.
Daisy too doesn’t approve of this social freedom and complains about women who crash Gatsby’s parties, who come in uninvited and “simply force their way in,” seemingly imposing on Gatsby’s hospitality. Like her husband, she is not above seeing other women merely as sex objects, commenting on a woman who had attracted Tom’s attention as being “common but pretty.”
Fitzgerald uses the West Egg party scenes and party dialogue to highlight the negative effects of the Women’s Movement on the East Coast women, who seem to equate gender equality with sexual and social freedoms rather than with opportunities to enter the economic arena or seeking new modes of living. Fitzgerald makes satire out of the inane conversation of the women at Gatsby’s parties and their frivolous antics (one woman, for e.g. wanted Daisy to put her under a cold shower, while others stick their heads in the pool or do strange dances on stage). The flapper woman figure that Fitzgerald made famous represents the 1920s’ vision of female freedom. In Nick’s depiction of the women’s conduct, the reader can infer that the female party-goers enjoy the freedom of meeting men and being in an environment of sensual pleasure provided by the music, the food, the dancing, the men. Nobody illustrates the women’s limited notions of their gender freedom better than Daisy does. A woman who is independently wealthy cannot even contemplate the possibility of exchanging an adulterous and abusive marriage for a much happier one to a fabulously rich man who is totally devoted to her. Neither does it occur to her that she could simply flee her marital unhappiness and live a single life. There seems to be only one working woman in the novel, Jordan Baker, but she never discusses her ‘work’ or career, and lives with an aunt instead of running her own home. Jordan is clearly on the lookout for a husband and doesn’t object to Daisy’s plans to set her up with a man.
But what is most disturbing in Fitzgerald’s portrayal of women in the Jazz Age is that the gender equality movement seems simply to have made women into the moral doubles of men. If in their Victorian past, women were socially expected to be models of virtue as wives and compassionate and nurturing mothers, the Jazz Age has liberated them to be as awful as their men. Daisy carefully cultivates an image of sexual and moral purity from her adolescence onwards by always wearing white and even driving a white car and never drinking but the more we encounter her, the more offensive her moral vision seems to be. In addition to her snobbery, her artificiality and her hypocrisy (committing adultery even as she hated her husband for it), Daisy is able to hit a human being in a car and dash off without a modicum of guilt or compassion for her victim. Daisy’s description of Tom at the beginning of the novel as “a brute of a man” rings in our head with irony since she seems to have no less of a capacity for callous violence. In the novel, Jordan too can be seen to have a similar capacity for ruthlessness in her careless attitude towards driving and her cheating at golf. Indirectly, Myrtle’s reckless disregard for her husband’s feelings in her liaison with Tom fuels Wilson’s violence.
It may have been expected that in the era when women won the vote, that something new and positive may have entered the world, that the liberation of women may have brought good to society. Fitzgerald seems determined to indicate that this wasn’t true, that part of the moral corruption of the 1920s was enabled by women. In The Great Gatsby we see ironically how the women’s movement and other historical circumstances conspired to close the gap between men’s and women’s mindsets. As we have seen, class rather than gender causes differences in people’s perspective of life and their ideologies.