On the Three Female Characters in The Great Gatsby了不起的盖茨比人物分析

On the Three Female Characters in The Great Gatsby20111151121 中国青年政治学院外语系潘思岑1.General introductionThe "American dream" is a unique cultural phenomenon in American history, also is a everlasting theme in American literature. Fitzgerald, most good at writing about "American dream", is a genuine author born under American culture and the "American dream". Fitzgerald is outstanding in literary circles in the United States along with Hemingway, Faulkner. The Great Gatsby is the representative work of Fitzgerald, published in 1925. By describing the protagonist Gatsby pursuing the American dream, achieving the American dream and eventually becoming a kind of sacrifice during the process of the American dream, the novel critically reflected the corruption, erosion and the strong criticism of the American society under the a flashy, bright and exciting surface. This work has been praised as the most profound contemporary American novel, which has been recognized embodiment of creative thinking and artistic style of Fitzgerald. The author himself also acknowledges that the novel is his conscious artistic achievement from creative thinking. It is Gatsby, as one of Fitzgerald protagonists in the novel, who has been a typical figure in the world literary gallery and recorded into the western literary classic(114).In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald exquisitely and accurately depicts the “jazz age”. The three important female images are particularly impressive: Gatsby's dream lover, Daisy Buchanan from a noble family, Daisy's girlfriend, also a golf player Jordan Baker, and Tom Buchanan's mistress Myrtle Wilson. As for Jordan Baker who always keeps skeptical for the world, “there are only people just pursuing and beingpursued, also the busy and leisure in the world.”(107). What leads to the decay and parasitic values for life of these women, we think, is the era they live in. In the novel "The Great Gatsby", Fitzgerald created 3 different female characters with different social class, different culture background, different personality temperaments. But they share an important thing in common that they live depending on man and try their best to realize their life value from the pursuit of men. This suggests that the decadent parasitic life style and consciousness of these female characters in the field reflects the female psychological structure and ethics of the "jazz age".As Malcolm Cowley, an American literary critic, states that Fitzgerald has been infatuated with money when he was young, but then he broke the pale with luxurious life and got poisoned by money. So he has a profound understanding of the value of money and can vividly depicted a …romance of money‟for upper class(3). Admittedly, from his own experiences and feelings in the book Fitzgerald focuses on the performance of the American tragedy and the tragedy of the times.2.Daisy BuchananDaisy Buchanan, a beautiful and young rich woman, was Nick's cousin, and was also Gatsby's lover. Gatsby won Daisy's heart with a handsome gentleman image, and they fell in love. Daisy promised she would always wait for him. In fact, Gatsby was in love with Daisy on purpose, that is, he wanted to satisfy his vanity to be in love with such a beautiful girl, and once he get Daisy's heart, he felt dull. He even once wanted Daisy to end the relationship with him. As the result of war, they were separated. This made Daisy feel the invisible pressure. Just like other millions ofwomen, Daisy liked to enjoy an extravagant life. She would not sacrifice her interests for Gatsby‟s so-called dream. It is biased for us to think Daisy as a mammonist only because she loved money .Maybe it is right for that kind of poor girls who always wanted to be a Cinderella, but it‟s not for her. Daisy was just born with wealth. Charlotte Gilman, a feminist critic, once pointed out that in the booming l920s of the United States, the U.S. women's social status was still under the influence of male discourse, that was to say, women's family background and marital status determines their social status. When a girl wanted to get a sense of security only through a respectable marriage, Gatsby was poor and couldn't give her this spiritual security. In order to pursue true inner desire, Daisy had no such power to resist the present system only by herself. So, the only thing she could do was to resist such disharmony of happiness with another form. In the end, she ended the relationship with Gatsby, and chose to be Tom Buchanan's wife. However, because of Tom's selfish and merciless, in other word, it represented another patriarchal system and such marriage would be a nightmare for Daisy.When she talked about her situation to Nick, Daisy said: "I think everything is bad in my life."Seemingly, simple words revealed her lost of inner heart. Indeed, her love, marriage, and even herself had deviated from the normal track, which made her lost herself. Soon, she found that Tom, vulgar and rude, treat emotional relation with infidelity. Although she had tried to challenge the authority of Tom, all efforts were in vain.In the noisy l920 s, divorce was not accepted by the public, and the divorcedwomen had to bear more pressure and criticism than men. Even if Daisy could escape from the cage of marriage, it did not mean that Daisy could get spiritual freedom. Without independent economic rights, she might eventually return to family. Therefore, it was reasonable that Daisy was unable to break through layers of obstruction for the pursuit of individual freedom. Although her husband's behavior was unacceptable, the only thing she could do was to pretend to graciously accept the so-called "happiness", because she had no choice. For this, why was it not a silent resistance? Just as in the novel, Daisy cried to ask: “what can we do this afternoon?”As a modern female in Fitzgerald's work, Daisy had a strong female consciousness. She is a rich and vivid person, and also a victim of the emotional infidelity. Under her hypocrisy, she owns love, mature, honest and is full of romantic fantasy. No doubt that she was the representative of new women. She didn't want to become a pregnant tool, and the life around the kitchen all day was not what she wanted. What she wanted was different from the traditional women's marriage, motherhood and changeless state of life. The novel from beginning to end treats Nick as the main role to tell the whole story. When Nick and she accidentally talked about children, Daisy didn't show the passion and excitement in her eyes, but said calmly, "if I do not guess wrongly, she should have been talking and could eat anything. I wish she is a fool –I think it is the best way out for a girl in the world as a pretty idiot."Daisy knew that consciousness and restraint made her feel tangled and confused, and more deeply knew the weak position of women in the patriarchal society. If her daughter clearly realized her situation in the future, and was unable to pursue ownfreedom and happiness, then she would live a painful life like her. So, such words she said can precisely reflect a strong maternal tenderness of woman to her children, reflect the hard choices for women under the patriarchal system, and also express her criticism of the patriarchal system and a disguised form of resistance.3.JordanJordan is a middle-class woman with great concentration upward. In the eyes of readers, Jordan Baker is an insouciant woman who didn't care about everything particularly. If the color with coding meaning in culture is used to show personality characteristics, Daisy is the red-Bengal, while Jordan is chrysanthemum yellow coming from a middle-class family. The pursuit of fame and wealth was buried in her indifferent face. Jordan was a smart woman she can play any role the moment it needed to be and wore a pair of mask with her arrogance. At the age of 16, she considered Daisy as the largest admirers of all older girls because Daisy owned the wealth and status which she couldn‟t equal to. At the same time, “Daisy was the most popular Miss Louisville”(58). Actually, her worship of Daisy was the worship of fame and wealth. It was also the real reflection of her money worship and vanity psychology.Daisy influenced Jordan constantly until she grew up which could be seen from many places in the book. When Jordan appeared, she and Daisy were dressed in a white dress like a big balloon floating in space with the white gauze dancing in the wind”(8). When visiting Daisy with Gatsby and Nick, her daughter said: “aunt Jordan is also wearing a white dress”(90). When Jordan recalled Daisy‟s girlhood, shespecifically mentioned “she is wearing a white dress driving a white car.” (58). This white coding meaning means the unity of pure nobility and ugly-humble, good and evil. It lies between the right and wrong, the virtual and real, which expresses the Fitzgerald's the misty sense of female and the Daisy‟s profound influence on Jordan. In other words, Daisy was what Jordan desires for life.However, in the relation with Daisy, she involuntarily felt a kind of depression and low self-esteem -- this was in contrast to Daisy…s inherent sense of the superiority. Although with beauty, Jordan lacked the charm as Daisy that is irresistible to the male. In addition, she also couldn‟t equal to her on wealth and status. Golfer as a career let her deeply be aware of the fierce and cruel competition. In the competition, she by hook or by crook or despicably intended to gain the victory. She obviously seemed to be much more aged than rosy Daisy living in the green house and never kept the already fading dreams in her heart one year after year (92). She bravely chose to straight to the target. As a result, she lost a lot of sensibilities and lingering that Daisy revealed distinctively.Moreover, Jordan was a quite realistic character from the beginning. This reality also performed on her attitude towards men. As to her love for Nick, critics Stanley Cooperman had a penetrating discussion: “Jordan felt his inner honesty and moral firmness (Nick represents old tradition that focus on character and moral sense of responsibility, just as Gatsby represents a new world composed of moral deterioration and false dreams), so she realized that only staying with Nick, she could take her own way and Nick must always follow up her mess. In a word, for Jordan baker, her loveto Nick was “jus t another calculation of hers.”(99)In this era, with people‟s spiritual world filled with crumbling walls, Jordan learned it that "everything is skeptical of the world", so her performance always was laid a brand by egoism in all aspects. She just went for the sake of her own needs and never did anything to her for nonsense. She was very careful to protect herself, directly regardless of her own resp onsibilities. In her eyes, the “re sponsibility”is ot hers‟ business while only her need counts for the most important and others must make way for her interests. So, when Nick left her, she was devastated. To keep mentally balance, she even told Nick that she had an engagement with others in order to psychologically reverse her embarrassment. She didn‟t care about losing Nick, but got angrily for Nick dumped her rather than she deserted him. The distorted soul made her have no ability to love a person.We re gard Jordan as the “pale yellow” color. The reason, on the one hand, was that Jordan used her exclusively captivating smile to take the man's loves. Thus, she could cover up the heart of indifference and the use of men to earn her own interests. On the other hand, her smile was hidden under the desire for money and the pursuit of it. On the big stage of the "jazz age", Jordan made herself trapped in an awkward situation with her middle-class origins. She was eager to enter the upper-class society, but mentally kept a certain distance. She chose a pair of “arrogant face”to protect herself out of fear that a rejection by this ecstatic sociality bringing her faint fear and inferiority which gripped her all the time. Therefore, in many respects, she seemed to be more sophisticated and much more powerful than Daisy. In the stage of the "jazzage", as it were, Jordan Baker drastically and perfectly portrayed the psychology of a middle-class woman4.Myrtle: love and sacrificial objectsAt the bottom of the social class, Myrtle Wilson in the novel is similar to a clown. Myrtle, as a poor dealership owner, apparently lost the origin of the traditional morality and escaped from the cultural roots. With caustic taunt and slavery to her husband, she blindly believes that “the only crazy thing is to get married with him(Wilson), and he even doesn‟t deserve to lick my shoes(106). She shows indifference and even no love for her husband. As such a vulgar, ridiculous woman, she cannot even compare with beautiful and elegant Daisy.Tom‟s playing with her just appeared to be no better than a picky nobleman who occasionally changes his taste on folk snacks on eating habits. What he did was just playing with her and regarded her as a toy doll. His contemptuous attitude towards her can be shown when Myrtle called Daisy by her first name. When hearing that, Tom‟s face darkened and beat her for he thought Myrtle was unworthy of calling that name. That wasn‟t an act out of drunkenness, but an idea regarding Myrtle as a inferior person and wasn‟t qualified to be treated as equal as Daisy. “It‟s no wonder that every ego belongs to specific cultural environment, even though it is in a system of the same language, culture and language.”(Zhang255). Myrtle‟s self-consciousness was dislocated. The phallus centralism of the upper class, represented by Tom, was fully shown in front of Daisy. Myrtle‟s feeling of Tom was originated from her admiration of vanity. When Modal first met with Tom, she was totally enchanted by him andcouldn‟t help looking at him for his formal-attire and patent leather shoes. The origin of her love to Tom represented her thirsty for a wasteful life and a higher status.For Daisy, she has no intention of knowing this woman, for she know that this woman can pose no threat to her wealth and her status (two things that compose all the things she has). But to Myrtle, Daisy is the biggest hindrance for her pursuit of ideal life. So she run desperately into the road, trying to stop Daisy‟s car, hoping that she can get rid of her “enemy”. It is this behavior, one going beyond her status, that cost her life. The stratum Myrtle belongs to makes her possess certain instinctive hatred against those women from upper class, but as a result of that age, she also want to have the kind of life that those women have, one that is full of joy and pleasure. 5.ConclusionThese three women come from different social classes, with different character, temperaments. But they share an important thing in common that they live tightly depending on man and try their best to realize their life value from the pursuit of men and even having sex with men. Those women take it for granted to prove their own survival significance from extravagant confused life men bring to them. However, they have common view of value in the Jazz Age as a woman: to abandon the traditional female image as a model, that is to be pious, virtuous, tender and housekeeping and instead to pursue a taste of wild living style and treat the material wealth as the only measure of success in life. Although “we hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit ofhappiness”(G.Hocmarel8), the lower social status of women cannot be separated from their economic position. From the analysis of these three women characters from three different social classes, we can understand that in order to change that kind of unequal situation, women should not only form the realization of equality to men, but also struggle and try hard to achieve their life value.Reference:Cooperman, Stanley: F.Scott Fitzgerald‟s The Great Gatsby. Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press, 1996.Cowley, Malcolm．F．S．Fitzgerald-Ramance of Money[M]．The Viking Press，1973. Fitzgerald, F．S．．The Great Gatsby[M]．New York：Charles Scribner‟s Sons，1952 G.Hocmarel etc. The American Dream.New York: Longman Inc. 1982.Xie, Jingliang(ed.). A Dictionary of Western Literary Allusions and Quotations.Beijing: China Prospect Press,1986.Zhang Jinyuan．Post-colonial Theory and Cultural Criticism [M]．Beijing: Peking University Press，1999.。