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Examples Of Feminism In The Great Gatsby

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Reader’s perception is one of the most essential aspects of a novel, this refers to what the audience brings to the novel and determines whether a book is transcendent. The perception can be affected by several factors such as the format, the language and the message of the novel in general. A book can be interpreted differently according to culture, ideology, and even gender. The novel, The Great Gatsby written and published by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925, is faced with reader-response criticism by two different social groups; feminist, that want to achieve equal cultural and social representation for women, question the treatment the women in book receive by the men, yet view the novel as an example of the empowerment of females in during the 1920’s. Then Marxists, who analyse class relations, social conflict and social transformation, interpret the book by analysing the representation of a materialistic elite class and the struggle of the middle class to fit into their world.
In this novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, feminists question the treatment the women in book receive by the men. An example of this is when the author writes, “Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same in physical personal, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before” (p.63). This quotes shows the way women were treated in the society of the 1920’s, this was the time in which women started changing their behaviour
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