This PPT is an attempt to offer a feminist rereading of the American Novel The Great Gatsby against the grain.

1. Unit II: The Great Gatsby
M.A. Hon. Sem III
PAPER XIII (B)
Rereading Canonical Literature
Sachin Labade@Department of English, University of Mumbai
4/23/2020

2. Rereading
The Great Gatsby
Lecture II

3. The Great Gatsby through
the Feminist Lenses
• Patriarchal ideology works to keep women and
men in traditional gender roles and thereby
maintain male dominance.
• Patriarchy is sexist in that it promotes the belief
that women are innately inferior to men.
(Biological essentialism)
• patriarchy continually exerts forces that
undermine women’s self-confidence and
assertiveness, then points to the absence of these
qualities as proof that women are naturally, and
therefore correctly, self-effacing and submissive.

4. • Women are oppressed by patriarchy
economically, politically, socially, and
psychologically.
• woman is other, objectified and
marginalized

5. Questions to ask
• How do the portrayals (of women) relate to the gender issues
of the period in which the novel was written or is set?
• Does the work reinforce or undermine patriarchal
ideology?
• What does the work suggest about the ways in which
race, class, and/or other cultural factors intersect with
gender in producing women’s experience?
• How is the work “gendered”? (works attitude)
• Any possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of
• resisting patriarchy?

6. Rereading The Great Gatsby…
• Number of women characters
• Their positioning within the narrative
• Any narrative voice?

7. “Nowadays people begin by sneering at family
life and family institutions and next they’ll
throw everything overboard and have
intermarriage between black and white”
(137; ch. 7).

8. • Does the novel share Tom’s view of patriarchal
gender roles?
• The moral structure of society rests on the
stability of the patriarchal family and that the
stability of the patriarchal family rests on the
conformity of women to patriarchal gender
roles.

9. Pre and Post World War I America
• 1920s : known as the Roaring Twenties, or the
Jazz Age is also known for emancipation of
women through the right to vote.
• Before the war: Standard dress code for women
(long skirt, high-buttoned shoes, long hair etc)
• Post War “New Woman”: Change in dress code
and conduct in public spaces
• Does the novel embody its culture’s discomfort
with the post–World War I New Woman? How?

10. Major Women Characters
• Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Myrtle
Wilson despite their differences are versions
of New Woman.
• Does Nick’s description/perception of these
women have patriarchal biases?
• Since Nick functions as the moral center of the
novel, he is bound to influence many readers.

11. Minor Women Characters
• incarnations of the New Woman?
• A young woman who “dumps” down a cocktail “for courage”
and “dances out alone on the canvass to perform” (45; ch. 3)
• “a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest
provocation to uncontrollable laughter” (51; ch. 3);
• Two drunken young wives who refuse to leave the party
until their husbands, tired of the women’s verbal abuse,
“lifted [them] kicking into the night” (57; ch. 3)
• “Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply”
(63; ch. 3),
• Mrs. McKee and and Myrtle’s sister, Catherine (epitomizes all
that does into make a woman ‘unattractive’.

12. The sister . . . was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty
with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion
powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been
plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish
angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of
the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When
she moved about there was an incessant clicking as
innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down
upon her arms. She came in with such proprietary
haste and looked around so possessively at the
furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I
asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my
question aloud, and told me she lived with a girl friend
at a hotel. (34 ; ch. 2)

13. • Does that speak about any bias?
• If so, is it sexist or classist?

14. Daisy Buchanan,
Jordan Baker, and Myrtle Wilson
• Embodiment of the New Woman in
appearance and social freedom?
• Two are married and ‘openly’ unhappy
• All enjoy nightlife
• Namesake motherhood of Daisy
• All violate patriarchal sexual taboos (pre-
marital / Extra marital affairs)
• Myrtle’s accidental death & Daisy’s rash
driving

15. Jorden Baker
• A Career woman in Male dominated
profession (Golf)
• Portrayed as a liar and a cheat
• Physical traits:
• “She was a slender, small-breasted girl
• with an erect carriage which she accentuated
by throwing her body backward at the
shoulders like a young cadet” (15; ch. 1).

16. Point to Ponder
• Are the transgressive women punished by the
progression of narrative events?