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Comment on The Great Gatsby

---Analyses on Daisy’s tragedy

F.Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most important novelists in America in the 20th century. His masterpiece, The Great Gatsby established his status as the embodiment of the spirit of the Jazz Age in American literature. The author skillfully uses his imagination to give the deeper meaning to this love tragedy: destruction of the American dreams. Besides, successfully using the double-mastered writing style, he put his own experience and the individual part of his personality into his works, interpreted the American teenagers’ common mentality and his own point of view towards the world and recurred the outlook of American Jazz Age . It is so vivid that we cannot even figure out whether it’s just a novel or a real life.

As the spokesman of “the Jazz Age”, F.Scott Fitzgerald’s creation has close links with his life. The prevailing customs and ideological trend during this age have been fully embodied in his works and also influenced his creation. Being a transitional period of prosperity from tradition to modern after World War 1, the Jazz Ages saw varied women groups which are focused on money and marriage. In this age, the capitals have accumulated in a fast speed, consumer consciousness soared, people are urgent to manifest themselves immediately and do things unconventionally or unorthodoxly. In the world of old and new, the traditional convention has been shackled and been changed quickly. In a broad sense, Fitzgerald made use of jazz form of artistic expression as the metaphor to satirize the spiritual essence of this age and realize an unique artistic effect.

The ladies created by F.Scott Fitzgerald are all described as a group of execrable and frivolous girls, and almost all of them are negative images. Especially in the novel---The Great Gatsby, which has the title of the annual the Jazz Age. In this book, we can see a picture of unmoral female images who are

frivolous, indulgent and advocate substance. The author applied unique narrative, the symbolic meaning of color words and Bibical quotation to describe a panorama of corrupt feminine in the carnival era.

People always think that Gatsby’s girl in dream---Daisy is an unmoral lady who is beautiful and elegant in appearance but superfacial and heartless in virtue. But I think that idea is not fair. Actually, Daisy is also a victim of that the sexist world, just like the destruction of Gatsby’s American dream.

In this transitory stage from tradition to modern, this novel discusses how females balance money and marriage in a much more open way. More and more people are condemn females for their double-standard of love and marriage: at first, they own beauty, rich family and pure value of love, but hey created tragedy to themselves because of the temptation of their families and the age and the male chauvinism. However, this is also a material age. Daisy is the incarnation of Gatsby’s dream. But Daisy’s charm is linked with wealth. In Gatsby’s eyes, she is also the incarnation of wealth, a “golden lady”. Actually, his pursuit of Daisy is also the manifestation of the pursuit of wealth.

The Jazz Age is the period when F.Scott Fitzgerald had the most vigorous creation, and the age’s features determine the females’ personality in his novel. During that time, females’ social status is very low and people live luxury and dissipation lives. The traditional dependent economic situation, the Mammonism, nihilism and corruption swelled. All those led t o Daisy’s tragedy.

In my opinion, people always criticize Daisy’s one part of her characteristics, but ignore the age’s decisive impact. Daisy is a victim of the Jazz Age because she was influenced by the social background. In fact, she was unlucky in her family, changes of her personality and her marriage. She had to compromise to the male chauvinism and money-talks value. In fact, she didn’t want to be reduced to that, but she had no strength to struggle. The religious constraint and the American dream drove her to seek a balance among the female’s ambivalence and male’s profligacy, independence and dependency, self-achievement and self-sacrifice. The hateable women were also in