Essay On Gender Roles In The Great Gatsby

I have been doing some research and I’ve seen that in just about all of Fitzgerald’s books/novels, women are seen as “decorative figures of seemingly fragile beauty,” though they are also “ vain, egotistical, even destructive and ruthless and thus frequently the survivors.” With this information I have found, I believe that he has sort of stepped down with gender roles in this book. In ‘The Great Gatsby,’ social and sexual freedom is portrayed through female characters such as Daisy, Myrtle Wilson, and Jordan Baker. There were also more women whose names were not listed, they were just women who had attended the parties of Gatsby’s. Though I am stating that gender roles have stepped down in this novel, that doesn’t mean that I am saying the roles have completely gone away. Women are still treated differently. It is sad how women were shown as sexual objects. What was even worse was how they knew it and were, to a certain extent, okay with it. One example of this is how Daisy thought that the war was a time for young women to go roll bandages and flirt with the officers.
Myrtle is introduced in this novel through a phone call. This call interrupts dinner speaking loud and clear that either she isn’t a very pleasant character or that people just don’t think pleasantly of her. To me, she is rather an odd character. When overlooking what I have read in this novel, she is devious in a way. She is a part of lower-class but doesn’t let that get in the way of anything. She is unlike the other female characters. She is devious yet ambitious, not caring at all of what others think. The place in this novel where the roles of gender is completely gone to me is when she confronts her husband, Tom, in the garage yelling at him and telling him to “‘Beat me!’ he heard her cry. ‘Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!’” She is shown as demanding and vital but not in a good