《了不起的蓋茨比》中的女性形象及愛情觀分析漢語(yǔ)言文學(xué)專業(yè)

I摘要摘要了不起的蓋茨比是美國(guó)現(xiàn)代小說家菲茨杰拉德的代表作，也是美國(guó)文學(xué)史上最偉大的作品之一，深受世界讀者的喜愛。小說寫于第一次世界大戰(zhàn)和經(jīng)濟(jì)危機(jī)爆發(fā)期間，它深刻地展示了爵士時(shí)代人們迷惘、空虛的生活狀態(tài)。在以男性為主導(dǎo)的社會(huì)中，女性不可能憑借自己的能力取得成功。小說中的女性雖有脆弱、虛偽的一面，但仍有奮力抗?fàn)?、主?dòng)追求、努力實(shí)現(xiàn)自我價(jià)值的愿望。本文通過分析了不起的蓋茨比中的不同女性形象，進(jìn)而從女性主義視角解讀女性的愛情觀。此外，小說中所展示的愛情悲劇對(duì)現(xiàn)代青年人的愛情選擇也具有重要的警醒與啟示作用。關(guān)鍵詞關(guān)鍵詞：女性形象；愛情觀；女性主義；父權(quán)制社會(huì)； IIAbstractThe Great Gatsby is the masterpiece of Fitzgerald, a modern American novelist and is also considered as one of the greatest works in American literature which has been favored by readers all over the world. This novel is written between the World War I and the economic crisis, and it shows peoples perplexed and inane living state at Jazz Age. In the society dominated by the male, it is impossible for females to be successful. Although these females in The Great Gatsby are vulnerable, hypocritical, and unable to withstand any temptation, they still strive to achieve their aspirations and struggle to realize self-value. All in all, this thesis aims at analyzing different female images and interpreting the view of love in The Great Gatsby from the perspective of feminism. In addition, the love tragedy in The Great Gatsby has played an important role in enlightening and awakening teenagers in the choice of love. Key words: female images; perspective of love; feminist; patriarchal society; IIITable of ContentsACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.I摘要.IIABSTRACT.IIITABLE OF CONTENTS .IVINTRODUCTION .1PART ONE THE AUTHOR FITZGERALD AND THE GREAT GATSBY.21.1 THE SKETCH OF FITZGERALD.21.2 ABOUT THE GREAT GATSBY.31.3 LITERATURE REVIEW.4PART TWO FEMALE IMAGES AND FATE IN THE GREAT GATSBY.62.1 THREE FEMALE IMAGES IN THE NOVEL.62.1.1 The Image of Protagonist Daisy Buchanan.62.1.2 The Image of Jordan Baker.72.1.3 The Image of Myrtle Wilson.82.2 IMAGE OF FEMINIST CLOSELY RELATED TO MALES ATTITUDE.82.2.1 The Narrators Attitudes to Women.82.2.2 The Authors Attitudes to Women.92.3 FEMALES FATE LOVE IN PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY.10PART THREE LOVE IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF FEMINIST IN THE GREAT GATSBY.123.1 FEMINISM AND TYPES OF LOVE IN THE GREAT GATSBY.123.1.1 Feminist Consciousness.123.1.2 The Love of Material Women.133.1.3 The Love of Independent Women.133.2 AN ANALYSIS ON THE FAILURE OF LOVE IN THE GREAT GATSBY.143.2.1 A Chasm between Wealth and Social Status.143.2.2 Weakness in Womens Character .15IV3.2.3 The Influence of Traditional American Dream.16CONCLUSION.17WORKS CITED .191Introduction F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the famous American novelist in the 1920s, is a brilliant star in the American literary world, and is known as the “poet laureate” and “Chronicle” in Jazz Age. The authors life is legendary and epic but tortuous and short. To a certain extent, Fitzgerald is considered as a cultural hero in Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby, his representative work, is also regarded as an American classic.The Great Gatsby is superficially a tragic love story, but the theme of the novel is actually more than the love itself, and it has a more profound significance of the day. This story happening in Long Island is a meditation on American society in the 1920s, and displays peoples living state in Jazz Age. The protagonist Gatsby is such a typical example, living in the gone past and a hopeless future. The world of Gatsby is only the reconstruction of the past whenever he lives in. Gatsby refuses to acknowledge the passing of time, fantasies in an old dream that Daisy will come to him. Meanwhile, the reason why we call him “the Great Gatsby” is not only for that he is simply advocating materialism in the materialistic society, but for that he works with all the emotions and energies. The accumulation of wealth and the ultimate goal for Gatsby is attributed to not only the ideal of the spirit, and even the courage to bear the consequences of a car crash that made by Daisy for the sake of love. Unfortunately, the dream girl Daisy is a typical “golden girl”. Beneath seemingly pure appearance hides a greedy heart. Daisy is emotionally indifferent and morally degenerate. No wonder, it is far more than the representative of the last generation with romantic spirit. The tragedy of The Great Gatsby also exposes the dark society and human weaknesses. The hypocrisy of the social relationships has reached the peak at the end of the novel.In this novel which reflects the American dream, the author vividly depicts the female images from different classes of the United States in the twentieth century. This thesis attempts to discuss love in The Great Gatsby from the perspective of feminism, which mainly includes four parts. The first part is an introduction of the author, the novel and its historical context, which provides a broad background for this paper. The second part gives a detailed analysis of the three women and the views of the narrator Nick and the author Fitzgerald on the fate of women in the patriarchal society. In the third part, it gives a deep analysis on female love and the causes of the love tragedy in The Great Gatsby. And the last part makes a brief conclusion and distillation of this thesis. 2Part One The Author Fitzgerald and The Great GatsbyF. Scott Key Fitzgerald, a modern American writer, is one of the most excellent novelists in American literature and has won a high evaluation and reputation in literature circle at home and abroad. The famous novel, The Great Gatsby has been adapted for movies for several times in the United States, which produces an extensive reading in the world. Furthermore, Fitzgerald wrote this novel in the 1920s the period of Jazz Age flowed by excessive lust. In real life the author Fitzgerald enjoyed himself with the extravagant life and the material wealth. Hence, Fitzgeralds real life also reflects a living state of disillusionment and perplexity about the Lost Generation in depth. 1.1 The Sketch of Fitzgerald F. Scott Key Fitzgerald, as one of the most brilliant American novelists, is an important novelist in the Lost Generation. He grew up in Minnesota, St Paul and studied at Princeton University. After the outbreak of World War, he joined the army, but he had never been to Europe and was discharged in 1919. In 1920, Fitzgerald became distinguished and married a girl of the upper class for publishing of his first novel This Side of Paradise. Fitzgeralds marriage gave him an opportunity to understand and experience the life of the upper class, which made a great influence on the writing of his representative work The Great Gatsby. And the publication of this novel had laid an important position for him in the history of literature. However, Fitzgeralds fame, marriage and extravagant life made him indulge in the upper society, thus he was down and out and his health was greatly damaged. Under this sorrowful condition, the novel Tender is the Night, as well as the novel The Crack-up was written and published after his death. In order to make a living and revive his reputation, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and wrote script for the film company in 1937. In 1940, Fitzgerald passed away at the age of 44 because of a burst of coronary heart disease and his last novel The Last Tycoon did not been completed. Although Fitzgeralds writing career lasts only twenty years, he writes a total of 4 excellent novels and more than 160 short stories. His works vividly reproduce the original look of the history and truly reflect the spirit and the social character of Jazz Age and also expose the emptiness behind the glitz and the illusory nature of the “American Dream” (Wu Weiren 2011). It is popular with young people from generation to generation, and gets much attention from the literary circles of all countries. As more commentators keep eyes on the affirmation of his works, Fitzgerald has been famous as a writer again. And his works have been translated into many languages and accepted by people from different cultural backgrounds. Some of his works 3have been put on the Broadway stage and Hollywood movie, to promote the dissemination of these works. Some of his stories have been included in high schools textbook, and even become the classics in English Literature. Fitzgerald is really an outstanding writer (Wu Jianguo 2002). 1.2 About The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby told a love story about a young man named Jay Gatsby. Gatsbys early sweetheart Daisy married a rich and arrogant man named Tom Buchanan. In order to attract the attention of Daisy and win back Daisys affection, Gatsby hold a grand party every night in the opposite to Daisys palatial mansion with the accumulation of wealth that was got by illegal business. Through the introduction of Daisys cousin Nick, Gatsby finally met his sweet lover Daisy again. He displayed his gorgeous mansion and wealth to Daisy to re-capture the love of Daisy and try to evoke the romantic past. However, the tragedy occurred at that time. Daisy killed Toms lover Myrtle who was a garage owners wife by chance and everything changed. Gatsby loved Daisy so deep that he did not tell anyone the truth. Unfortunately, the garage boss Wilson considered Gatsby as the murderer who killed his wife and killed Gatsby by the misleading of Tom. Nick was full of sympathy for Gatsby and held a funeral for Gatsby alone, but no one attended. Daisy and Tom also disappeared from the city. At the end of the story, Nick returned to a quiet life in Minnesota where people still respected the traditional values. The Great Gatsby was written in the period of the Lost Generation which was one of literary schools and composed of a generation of young American writers growing up during 1920s. Most of the members had experienced the World War, which left some wounds to their bodies and souls, so the majority of them were terribly dissatisfied with the reality of society and became an unprecedentedly lost generation in American society. The Lost Generation has a strong desire for money and the lavish profligacy of the upper class which could be seen from the gorgeous party in The Great Gatsby. During this particular epoch, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were two outstanding talented novelists in the American literature. They were the excellent leaders and outstanding representatives of the Lost Generation. What is more, Fitzgerald referred to the period of 1920s in the United States as Jazz Age. Jazz Age was a short period in the history of the United States with the prosperous economy as the background. It was full of money, fame and huge crisis. The whole society was showing the trend of the tragedy. Fitzgerald put his experience with his wife Zelda Sayre into The Great Gatsby to restore the reality of Jazz Age which was filled with a luxury surface and the empty soul (Li Xin 78-80). With his keen observation, Fitzgerald elucidated the interactions of young people of post-World Warand put forward the concept of Jazz Age for the first time. 41.3 Literature Review According to the data collected from the Internet at present, the research of Fitzgerald in foreign countries has achieved a fairly high level and made some fruitful results whether in the scope of the study or the depth of research. However, the comments on Fitzgeralds works are not entirely positive. The criticism of his works has also experienced the evolution from snub to hot pursuit. The rise of “the Fitzgerald Renaissance” in the 1940s and 1950s made Fitzgerald popular once again and his literary status was further improved. In the 1940s and 1970s, the foreign studies were mainly about Fitzgeralds life or the overall analysis of his works, and emerged a large numbers of biographies of Fitzgerald. In the 1980s, it was the period of the in-depth study of Fitzgerald. The research of Fitzgerald focused on three aspects at that time: the biography of Fitzgerald, the novels written by Fitzgerald and the films adapted from Fitzgeralds works. By 1996, on the occasion of the 100 anniversary of the birth of Fitzgerald, the study of his works reached a climax. Many critics actively analyzed Fitzgeralds works with all kinds of new theories, including structuralism, post structuralism, postmodernism and so on, among which feminism, psychoanalysis and narrative theory were applied more frequently. The acceptance of Fitzgerald in China has gone through a procedure from negation to acceptance and then to affirmation. There is no doubt that the process was long and difficult. In the 1980s, the field of literary translation in China did not paid enough attention to the works of Fitzgerald, which limited the translation and dissemination of his works in China. With the policy of reform and opening-up, the situation has been improved enormously. In particular, the professor Wu Ningkun translated and published Fitzgeralds masterpiece The Great Gatsby in 1983. Generally speaking, the academic study of Fitzgeralds works at present is not comprehensive and systematic both in depth and breadth, and far less than the research on Hemingway, Faulkner and other American writers. In addition, the focus of Fitzgeralds works is also limited to the novel The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. People pay less attention on his letters, autobiography and other works. What is more, the documented cases about The Great Gatsby on the Internet have reached about 1227. However, there were only a handful of published articles in the last century. Entering the twenty-first century, the number of the studies on The Great Gatsby has been soaring. Especially after 2008, the study on The Great Gatsby is developing faster and faster, and even the annual number of papers has been more than 100 articles. And in 2013, the papers about The Great Gatsby have reached more than 370. Nevertheless, the studies on the interpretation of female imagines and love in The Great Gatsby from 5the perspective of feminist have been found little in China. Most of researcher only analyze female images, or just mention the concept of love, and few people explore love from the perspective of feminist in The Great Gatsby. This thesis serves to open another window for the research of The Great Gatsby and try to bring a new light on the study of the fiction. 6Part Two Female Images and Fate in The Great Gatsby2.1 Three Female Images in the Novel In The Great Gatsby, the author Fitzgerald vividly depicts the female images in different classes of the United States in 20th Century, such as, Daisy upper class; Jordan middle class; Myrtle lower classes. There is no doubt that a lot of papers have described the three major females in The Great Gatsby as false, selfish and merciless (Chen Xuhong 2005). However, we should pay attention to the reality of females in this novel who lived under the oppression of the patriarchal society. It is hard to understand and comprehend the real love of the female, not to mention an interpretation of love from the perspective of female. As we all know, The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick. In his point of view, Daisy is merely a superficial stupid “golden girl”. What is worse, the view of Nick greatly affects readers judgments on the female love. One-sided point cannot reflect the real and comprehensive images of female veritably in the 1920s in the United States. 2.1.1 The Image of Protagonist Daisy Buchanan Daisy Buchanan is born in an illustrious family of the upper class. She is so excellent and pretty that Gatsby has refused to give up the pursuit for her. But to many people, Daisy is just a gold-digger. Fitzgerald describes it incisively and vividly when Daisy first comes to Gatsbys mansion. She could not help doing up her hair with a gold comb in Gatsbys bedroom. And she does nothing but cries by holding these beautiful clothes when Gatsby throws his luxurious clothes one by one. She still cannot forget Gatsbys yacht when she appreciates his old photos. Gatsby has to admit that Daisy has a mouth which is full of money. Even her voice is filled with money and tries to attract all the people. In the fifth chapter of this novel there are some descriptions about this: “They are such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because Ive never seen suchsuch beautiful shirts before.” “I adore it!” exclaimed Daisy. “The pompadour! You never told me you had a pompadouror a yacht” (Fitzgerald 2016: 186-188). On the other hand, Daisy is an innocent woman. When she is an artless little girl, she falls in love sincerely with Gatsby and she even wants to go away with Gatsby in spite of the prejudice of the society. In addition, Daisy loves Gatsby so deep that she feels painful when she holds the wedding with another man who gives her a string of pearls. Until the day of the wedding, Daisy gropes around in a waste-basket and pulls out the string of pearls. She yells out hysterically, taking them downstairs and giving them back to anyone. She 7begins to cry cry and cry. Daisy wants to change her mind and she cannot forget Gatsby. She pours in every ounce of power but cannot change it at all. In addition, Daisy is also a conservative woman. Although Tom is a playboy, Daisy just tolerates all of this and hopes her daughter to be a fool girl before she meets Gatsby again. She says that her daughter will become a beautiful little foothat is the best thing a girl can do in this indifferent or cruel world (Wu Duanming 73-75). To be honest, the most critical things about Daisy is that she leaves Gatsby without saying goodbye, even without participating in the funeral of Gatsby. In the mind of the reader, she has become a symbol of heartlessness and ingratitude and she does not deserve the devotion of Gatsby. Yet Daisy has no choice but to betray or to abandon her family in the patriarchal society. What is more, materialism is a deeply rooted consciousness and it has existed for thousands of years in the world. It is also beyond doubt that Daisy could not abnegate wealth and status. 2.1.2 The Image of Jordan Baker Jordan Baker grows up in Louisville. The middle-class family background makes Jordan impossible to live a life in clover like Daisy, and she chooses a different way to go. At the age of seventeen, she participated in the League and later became a successful professional golfer whose photos appeared in the press of events from time to time. When Jordan was eighteen years old, her father died. From then on, Jordan lived with an old aunt. In a sense, it relieves the constraints of the historic patriarchal culture that most women bear in the process of growth and development. In terms of her dress, manner, temperament, and behavior, Jordan is so different from Daisy. Jordan has no intention to maintain the attitude of the lady or to try to please men as Daisy with sweet smile and voice. In the presence of Nick, she still dares to eavesdrop on Buchanan couples conversation. At the prior of invitation, Daisy has never been to Gatsbys party, but the maverick and independent Jordan has been on more than once. She is smoking, drinking, and moving around in the big hotel, club, and private house. Jordan is a light, strong, tough woman to Nick. Just as Nick describes, he is not actually in love, but he feels a sort of tender curiosity, and the bored haughty face that she turns to the world con (Wu Ningkun 1999). Although Jordan who represents new women is fresh, vigorous and gradually moves to independence, she is also very dishonest, cunning and arrogant in some situations. She leaves a borrowed hood in the rain without pulling up and makes a lie. In the first major golf championships, someone sees her ball moves from a bad position but she does not feel regretful and flee from her responsibilities by bribery. She is incurably selfish with no sense of duty, just like Tom and Daisy. Nick certainly considers that Jordan is not able to 8endure being at a disadvantage and always keeps cool, insolent smile to the world in order to satisfy the demands of her very jaunty body (Tian Ye 75-86). Maybe, Jordan just tries to change herself but suffers a crushing defeat in the patriarchal society. 2.1.3 The Image of My