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Buying the Most Beautiful Woman: A Marxist-Feminist Critique of The Great Gatsby—100 Years Later
Locke, Cassidy Alexandra
Locke, Cassidy Alexandra
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Abstract
The Great Gatsby is one of the most widely read classic novels, usually presented to readers for the first time in high school. While a plethora of criticism and analysis of the novel exists, this essay presents a new framework through which to read and teach the novel. Most scholars have discussed Fitzgerald’s authorial intention of writing a capitalist critique, yet I examine how the anti-capitalism gets lost in the misogynistic, patriarchal nature of the story. I put the novel, its literature review, and Fitzgerald’s own economic ideology in conversation with each other by tracing his personal writing and development. I suggest that Marxist feminism is a necessary intervention, since it has not been applied yet in a thorough, sophisticated way. Marxist feminism, as a literary framework, uses a Marxist foundation to look at the ways in which capitalism exacerbates the effects of the patriarchy, reducing women to commodities in a capitalist system, being traded, bartered for, and fetishized. Using this definition as the main framework, I closely analyze the relations between women and men in the novel—how their relationships can be viewed as transactional and parallel to the relationship between commodities and capitalists in a Marxist system. By critiquing The Great Gatsby through a Marxist-feminist lens, I argue that Fitzgerald’s novel serves as a poignant depiction of women’s oppression under capitalism, particularly in the 1920s, that remains relevant today. As readers continue to read this novel as required literature, I contend that this new framework can modernize the study of this much-loved classic.
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2023-05-31
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University of Kansas
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986386_1.pdf
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American literature, Women's studies, feminism, jazz age, marxism, marxist-feminist theory, the great gatsby