Gatsby Critics

• Fitzgerald

  The book contains no important female character
• Critic

  His work is an outright condemnation of women and their failure to live up to the male hero’s romantic dreams
• Critic

  ‘Myrtle is a mockery of everything she aspires to imitate
• Green Light Critic

  ‘Represents everything that haunts and beckons Gatsby; the physical and emotional distance between him and daisy, the gap between the past and the present and the promises of the future’
• Critic

  Gatsby’s hamartia is his infatuation with Daisy
• Trilling


  ‘Gatsby could be taken as a figure who represented America itself’
• Critic


  ‘Fitzgerald portrays the new social and sexual freedom enjoyed by women through the lives of Daisy, Jordan baker and Myrtle Wilson’
• Critic

  ‘the men constitute ’the world’ the women are merely its mistress’
• Critic

  Fitzgerald gives us a mediation on some of the country’s most central ideas…preoccupation with class
• Dyson

  ‘in one sense Gatsby is the apotheosis of his rootless society…He believes in himself and his illusions
• Critic


  ‘an emptiness that we see curdling into viscousness of a monstrous moral indifference‘
• Faulkner

  ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past’
• Bastos

  ‘There’s the current and were beating against it with out little wooden oars of grasping ego and money and pride’
• Tanner

  ‘the green light offers Gatsby a suitably inaccessible focus for his yearning’
• Critic

  ‘it is the elusive Gatsby, the cynical idealist , who embodies America in all of its messy glory’
• Flanagan

  ‘Gatsby lives in the world of romantic energies and colours’
• Critic

  ‘Fitzgerald intended TGG to warn us against the attempt to deny reality”
• Bloom

  ‘So much of the meaning in Gatsby comes out in the imagery, its texture and the complexity of its motive’
• Lewis

  ‘the acquisition of money and love are both part of the same dream , the will to return to the quintessential unity that exists only at birth and at death
• tanner

  The green light offers Gatsby a suitably inaccessible focus for his yearning
• Tyson

  ‘ a drama of dysfunctional love’
• Critic

  ‘the light, the bright, shining embodiment of his ideal Daisy’
• Samuel’s

  ‘her siren voice was merely full of money‘
• Lewis

  ‘the acquisition of money and love are both part of the same dream the will to return to the quintessential unity that exists only at birth and at death’
• Sanderson

  ‘the flapper is ‘spoiled, sexually liberated, self-centred, fun loving and magnetic’
• Lewis

  ‘ironically as even that relationship may contain is embedded in the past, the future, uncertain and without love is a kind of death‘
• Frohlich argues that Jordan’s sexual ambivalence towards men, her desire to keep unintelligent men around, and her dishonesty indicate that she is gay and trying to hide her sexuality.
• Sarah Tripp on masculinity: “it came to be defined more and more in opposition to femininity”, thereby “divorc[ing] itself from the softer virtues of compassion and emotional sensitivity that were previously a component of the male identity”
• Marxist literary theory (AO5) would critique the morals and ethics of 1920s American society as it promotes an artificial dualism of the individual as they aim to assert their chosen identity. (Gatsby)
• A Marxist criticism of this would highlight how Myrtle’s American Dream commodifies her as Tom freely treats her like an object whose value decreases in his eyes when he sees fit.
• Marxist critics take the view that Gatsby is a personification or extended metaphor of America’s path towards the American Dream, and with his death we see the failure of this idealised concept which motivates many of the novel’s characters.
• The objectification of Daisy calls forth a feminist perspective. Women are always forming a part of men’s stories, secondary objects whose feelings are silenced. Daisy is objectified by Gatsby; she becomes a projection of his desires. 
• Leland S. Person Jr: ‘Daisy in fact, is more victim than victimizer; she is a victim first of Tom’s ‘cruel’ power, but then of Gatsby’s increasingly depersonalised vision of her.’