Women In The Great Gatsby

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Women in the Prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald Introduction F. Scott Fitzgerald is the best known as a chronicler of the adolescent 1920s – “a time delineated by the two world wars and the increasing emancipation of women that combined suffrage with the spectre of sexual liberation and the transit of American womanhood from rosy cheeked Gibson Girl to bob cut flapper” (Rasula 158). Fitzgerald, together with his wife Zelda Sayre, “identified, portrayed and popularized the flapper,” a female representative of The Roaring Twenties and a “New Woman” of a modern era: Flapper represented a new philosophy of romantic individualism, rebellion, and liberation patriarchal society did not know how to deal with. Therefore, flapper in Fitzgerald’s works embodied…show more content…
Fitzgerald. The study will be based on the one Fitzgerald’s great novel, The Great Gatsby, one short story “Winter Dreams” and will be encompassed with Basil and Josephine Stories- a short story collection. The main focus will be in the feminist approach, thus, in what female characters of Fitzgerald’s fiction represent in order to enhance the overall understanding of the position of 1920s women, generally, and their role in Fitzgerald fiction, specifically. However, in order to enhance all the different perspectives and possible interpretations of Fitzgerald cultural production, the Marxist, historical, and biographical criticism will also be used in the studying the image of woman in Fitzgerald’s fiction. The historical approach will be used to put Fitzgerald’s female characters in the specific socio-historical context. The Marxist approach will dig into economic motives behind the characters in the novel. The biographical approach will, finally serve as a guidance to possible interpretations of Fitzgerald’s…show more content…
Judy Jones Judy Jones is a beautiful young woman. She is funny, liberated and led by desire - she is a flapper. On the one side, she symbolises Dexter Green’s dreams, “the glittering stuff” he yearns about. Judy Jones is Dexter’s Golden Girl, his ticket to the elite class, his alluring American Dream: She was arrestingly beautiful. The color in her cheeks was centred like the color in a picture it was not a "high" color, but a sort of fluctuating and feverish warmth . . . This color and the mobility of her mouth gave a continual impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes (Winter Dreams, 132). On the other side, Fitzgerald’s flapper is used as a symbol of something alluring but genuinely false which results in his heroine being desperately unsatisfied and leads readers towards Fitzgerald’s controversial approach: "I'm more beautiful than anybody else” she said brokenly, "why can't I be happy?" Her moist eyes tore at his stability - her mouth turned slowly downward with an exquisite sadness: "I'd like to marry you if you’ll have me, Dexter. I suppose you think I’m not worth having, but I'll be so beautiful for you,
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