Compare the ways in which gender roles and relationships are presented in both The great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald and Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.<\/p>\n
While Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Miller\u2019s Death of a Salesman (1949) have disparate subject matter, they have some similarities in the ways that gender is portrayed. Traditional \u2018male\u2019 and \u2018female\u2019 roles are rigidly enforced, even where it is clear that characters long to break out of them. Willy is preoccupied with becoming a \u2018great man\u2019, something which he measures in terms of wealth and popularity. Gatsby, too, is fixated on becoming the kind of man he thinks he ought to be, primarily in order to achieve his goal of winning Daisy\u2019s love. In order to do this, both men fixate on something particular: Gatsby on reinventing himself, Willy on recreating his son as a more successful version of himself despite Biff\u2019s unwillingness. Women, however, are portrayed as generally helpless; they primarily serve as foil for the men. Women in The Great Gatsby are not expected to be intelligent or independent; on the contrary, these traits are considered to be dangerous, as echoed in Daisy\u2019s wish for her newborn daughter to be \u2018a beautiful little fool\u2019 (Fitzgerald, 1925, n.p.). Upper class women are referred to as \u2018girls\u2019 throughout the novel, a diminutive term which further emphasizes their lack of agency: the word \u2018woman\u2019 is reserved for lower class women and servants. Gatsby\u2019s steadfast defence of Daisy demonstrates the extent of the vulnerability he perceives in her \u2013 even when commits manslaughter, he feels that she cannot take the blame. Similarly, Willy\u2019s wife, Linda, is passive and docile, despite arguably being the character who sees the events most clearly. Willy does not value her opinion and repeatedly ignores her sage advice \u2013 as a woman, she is deemed unable to understand the demands placed on men. Gender roles, then, can be argued to shape the trajectories of characters in both texts.<\/p>\n
Fitzgerald, F. S. (1925). The Great Gatsby. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.<\/p>\n
Miller, A. (1949). Death of a Salesman. London: Penguin Classics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Compare the ways in which gender roles and relationships are presented in The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2921,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n