Gender Roles In The Great Gatsby

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In the memoir, An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard, and the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, both set in the US with An American Childhood fixed in Pittsburgh during the 1950s, following a child’s lower-middle class upbringing, and The Great Gatsby taking place on Long Island and throughout New York City over the early 1920s, watching a great number of “main” characters in a drama surrounding a secret love between a certain Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Within both of these books, any newcomer to the US would see multiple similar examples in general topics such as gender roles, the class system and corruption that portrays a very different upbringing style from other countries. However, even though the books were set long…show more content…
Nevertheless this was a clear cut complication in these stories with the women often seen as looked down upon and on a lower level than the men. Annie Dillard describes in her account that the boys would end up going into Fortune 500 companies and that they would hold positions in important places like churches, hospitals and etc. Dillard describes the woman’s position as dismal and that, “The boys must have shared our view that we were, as girls, in the long run, negligible—not any sort of factor in anybody’s day, or life, no sort of creatures to be reckoned in, at all. For they could perhaps see that we possessed neither self control nor information, so the world could not be ours” (91). This exhibits how the boys were seen as having much more to give to the world and that because of that, they would be able to go much further in life than the girls. Although at a slightly different point of view since the women in The Great Gatsby are in a powerful position, gender roles are still prominent and clearly seen in many examples throughout the novel. “Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans” (15). This shows that the wife, in those times, was not
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