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The Great Gatsby Gender Issues Feminity Masculinity

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The Great Gatsby Gender Issues Feminity Masculinity
GENDER ANALYSIS IN F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S
“THE GREAT GATSBY”
PAPER
Submitted to fulfill the requirements of General Outlook of Literature
Mid-term & Final Exams

Arranged by:

Name
:
Mohammad Soni
NIM
:
147835129
Class
:
P2TK
Phone
:
085793539905

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION
POST GRADUATE PROGRAM
STATE UNIVERSITY OF SURABAYA
2015
INTRODUCTION
The Great Gatsby published in 1925, has been considered as a great masterpiece of American fictions until now. It portrays the life style and spiritual affairs of American youths vividly after the First World War. The story tells us a young man who comes from the lower class struggles to fulfill his "ideal" -- to marry a beautiful and also rich lady of the upper class, but finally is abandoned by her. The novel was written and is set in the decade following World War I, which ended in November 1918. The Roaring Twenties, or the Jazz Age, a term coined by Fitzgerald, was a period of enormous social change in America, especially in the area of gender roles (including women’s right). This paper is aimed at analyzing the gender issues in the novel including the roles of gender and femininity and masculinity.
DISCUSSION
The Great Gatsby takes place during an extremely new, exciting, but volatile time in American history. Women just received the right to vote, were beginning to not only work, but work in jobs that men had previously been the only source for, and gained new freedoms never felt before in our country. These changes are nowhere more apparent than within the depiction of gender roles and how the characters interact within this novel. Men are constantly depicted as powerful, physical, and dishonest. Women are shown in a terrible light that casts the majority of them as tempting, submissive, passive, and petty. The gender of roles in the Great Gatsby is portrayed within the characters, particularly in Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Jay Gatsby, Jordan, Nick, and Myrtle Wilson. The traditional gender roles in the Great Gatsby


References: Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. 1998. The Great Gatsby. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press Samkanashvili, Maia. 2014. The Role of Women in the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Journal in Humanities Vol. 2 No. 1 pp. 47-48. Štrba, Ivan. Emancipated Women of the Great Gatsby. ENGLISH MATTERS II No. pp. 41. http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/how-men-portrayed-great-gatsby-what-standard-157925 Accessed on January, 2015
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