The Great Gatsby Interpretations

A basic feminist approach might show us how the lives of characters in The Great Gatsby reflect patriarchal values.

Tom Buchanan is clearly an embodiment of those patriarchal values. He likes to exercise power over women, even to treat them as his possessions. When Myrtle upsets him, Tom asserts his authority through violence and breaks her nose.

Daisy often seems to have no will of her own and to follow helplessly in Tom's wake. When she does choose to exercise her will, visiting Gatsby's house, Tom gets angry and says, 'Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'll throw everything overboard and have marriage between black and white' (p. 124).

A Feminist critic might cite this as an example of how the traditional family unit in American society, dominated by the male's powerful role as husband and father, has constrained the lives of women, in their role as loyal wife and mother. In this outburst we can see how Tom's desire to maintain control spills over into overt racism.

The physical realities of his boyhood, growing up on a farm in the Midwest with ordinary parents, didn’t live up to the power of these desires, so Gatsby left his parents and severed contact with them.

By erasing his parents in this way, Gatsby was psychologically releasing himself to be born again. Meeting Daisy, he was introduced to a previously unknown way of life that in certain ways matched his unconscious desires.

His obsession with Daisy became a means to bring into existence the person he himself longed to be.

Nick tells us that Gatsby ‘knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God’ (p. 107).

In this psychoanalytic reading, then, Daisy is not in herself the object of Gatsby’s desire; she is just one more stage prop in his inner drama.

Gatsby’s love is actually self-love; he is driven by a powerful unconscious desire to become ‘The Great Gatsby’. In his attempt to become this fantasy self, he destroys James Gatz, destroys his parents and eventually destroys Jay Gatsby too.

1945 = 

Lionel Trilling wrote an essay of appreciation in which he suggested that Gatsby could be taken as a figure who represented America itself.

Influences =

There have also been essays which have suggested literary influences on the composition of the novel, notably Joseph Conrad’s fiction, the poetry of T. S. Eliot and John Keats, and a range of Christian and pagan myths.