The Role Of Myrtle In The Great Gatsby

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She cut her hair and donned revealing dresses. She partied. She engaged in affairs. She smoked and drank excessively. She was the flapper. A new breed of unladylike individuals had emerged, defying all conventional rules of the public. Regardless, such independence failed to disenthrall women from the confines of domestic tradition. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald characterizes the newfound societal freedoms of the 1920s, yet fails to give this liberation to the female race. Through the portrayals of three distinct, divergent, but stereotypically dependent girls, he carefully reconstructs the setting of the quintessential patriarchal system. Fitzgerald does not tell the story of a woman’s valiant pursuit of the American Dream, but …show more content…

Her risqué self serves as a foil to both Daisy’s fragile beauty and Jordan’s masculine lifestyle. At her very core, she symbolizes the American dream of “rags to riches,” but Fitzgerald’s descriptions of Myrtle’s sultry use of her body makes her despicable. From her initial appearance, she is overwhelmingly erotic and “carrie[s] her surplus flesh sensuously,” wearing her sexuality openly with “wet lips” (25). Fitzgerald proclaims her role as a seductress, spoiled by her lover and ignorant to other members of her lower class. He further declares that “there [is] an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering” (25). Myrtle is a coarse adulteress, outspoken and brash and uncontent with her current situation. She craves a finer life but lacks the social graces necessary to thrive in such a society. She is ultimately punished for her sexuality, “her life violently extinguished” (144) by an automobile—something commonly associated with men. Upon death, her breast “swing[s] loose like a flap” and her mouth is “wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long” (137). In this vividly sadistic illustration of male brutality, Fitzgerald turns Myrtle into the literal representation of a flapper, and her death serves as a warning to any young women underhandedly seeking change for the

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