‘Where’s Daddy?’

Feminism and Emasculation in 'The Great Gatsby'

Hundreds of thousands of students read The Great Gatsby without understanding what it's really about or how it diagnosed the disease of the modern world. 1917-1926 were the years of the most aggressive Soviet feminism, and Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel explores the flaws in the movement towards sexual liberation that had already started in the US in the 1920s but wouldn't take full form until the 1960s — long after Stalin had tried to steer the Soviet Union away from its disastrous effects.

The story is familiar to most people, but a brief look at the outline reminds us that it focuses on the fact that sex isn’t private. It’s a liberal delusion that what people do in the bedroom stays in the bedroom and is nobody’s business because it’s not hurting anyone. No, Fitzgerald says, sex has public consequences — and people can easily get hurt.

The love triangle: Tom, Daisy and Gatsby

Nick Carraway, in his mid-twenties, has taken a job as a bond salesman in Wall St. After returning from the Great War, Nick’s home in Middle West felt ‘like the ragged edge of the universe’. Now he lives on West Egg — a spit of land off Long Island populated by new money — and thinks of himself as ‘a pathfinder, an original settler’.

Nick’s house adjoins Gatsby’s. Is Gatsby a gangster? A war hero? A foreign aristocrat? Nobody knows for sure, but he throws big parties. He was born the son of a poor farmer, but Dan Cody, a ‘debauched’ mining magnate, took him under his wing at first, and then a Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfshiem did. ‘Foul dust’ floats in the wake of his dreams.

The other spit is more exclusive and old money: East Egg. Tom lives there, Nick’s classmate at Yale and a star footballer there. He cheats on his wife Daisy (who knows it) and only cares about his polo ponies and mistresses — the most recent of which is Myrtle.

Daisy had been engaged to Gatsby before marrying Tom after Gatsby was delayed in Europe several months after the war ended. And now Gatsby thinks his money will help him get Daisy back now that he’s now a high-value man. So while Nick has an affair with Daisy’s friend Jordan, Gatsby has an affair with Daisy.

After it’s revealed, Tom and Gatsby confront each other, and Daisy can’t say which man she loves for sure. Daisy then hits Myrtle while driving Gatsby home after the confrontation because Myrtle thought it was Tom’s car and ran out to elope with him.

Gatsby won’t say Daisy was driving, so Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, Wilson, that Gatsby was driving. Wilson then shoots Gatsby before shooting himself. Nick knows the truth but won’t say it, and Tom and Daisy move on with their life together:

‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’

Each main character thus explores an aspect of the dysfunction of sex at the outset of modernity. Gatsby, for example, is the man-child who refuses to grow up because he wants sex without responsibility. He doesn’t really love Daisy. He’s just in love with the idea of love. He can’t commit, and Daisy’s daughter with Tom terrifies him.

Although Tom’s machismo initially seems like the foil to Gatsby’s foppery, actually he’s equally effeminate in his attachment to pleasure, neglecting his wife and child for a string of affairs. He’s the "alpha" too weak to control his own lust or lead his family.

Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, ends up not sexually liberated but lost. She ironically craves the deeper connection that offering herself cheaply makes impossible. At the end of the novel, after being hit by a car, she lies on the ground with her 'left breast...swinging loose like a flap’ — a symbol of ruined femininity. ‘Her thick dark blood' that stirred with passion now mingles 'with the dust.’

Myrtle

And Daisy is the selfish mother dreaming of freedom from her family. She largely ignores her daughter, Pammy, who she hopes will grow up to be ‘a beautiful little fool’ because that’s ‘the best thing a girl can be in his world.’ And it’s rarely pointed out that Pammy turns out to be the most important character in the novel because children suffered most as a result of the Sexual Revolution.

In the main scene featuring Pammy, Daisy wants to show off her daughter to her guests:

“Bles-sed pre-cious,” she crooned, holding out her arms. “Come to your own mother that loves you.”

The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her mother’s dress.

“The bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowy hair? Stand up now, and say—How-de-do.”

Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand.

Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before.

“I got dressed before luncheon,” said the child, turning eagerly to Daisy.

“That’s because your mother wanted to show you off.” Her face bent into the single wrinkle of the small white neck. “You dream, you. You absolute little dream.”

“Yes,” admitted the child calmly. “Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress too.”

“How do you like mother’s friends?” Daisy turned her around so that she faced Gatsby. “Do you think they’re pretty?”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“She doesn’t look like her father,” explained Daisy. “She looks like me. She’s got my hair and shape of the face.”

Daisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held out her hand.

“Come, Pammy.”

“Goodbye, sweetheart!”

With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to her nurse’s hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.

The power of Daisy’s voice is noted often in the novel. ‘There’s something in that voice of hers,’ Nick says, and for Gatsby ‘the exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.’ And ‘crooned’ here suggests that her own daughter, too, falls under its spell — her loneliness briefly soothed — while the heavy-handed display of ‘your own mother that loves you’ makes sure that nobody watching misses this rare maternal display. Daisy wears the role of mother like another one of her outfits.

Gatsby, deep into his affair with Daisy, ‘kept looking at the child with surprise’. Like the womanisers of the manosphere today, he’s forgotten that sex is first and foremost about children. To him, Daisy has existed only as an object of his imagination and an instrument for self-satisfaction.

But even Daisy herself refers to her daughter as not just ‘a dream’ but an ‘absolute little dream’. On the surface, this might suggest that Pammy is like a a dream come true, but the way Daisy treats her reveals that she’s actually a dream in the sense that she barely registers in the reality of her life.

Pammy, Daisy and Tom

Significantly, little Pammy notices that ‘Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress too’, and Daisy’s response is to ask if ‘mother’s friends’ are ‘pretty’. As Matthew J. Bruccoli notes in his Apparatus for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1974), Jordan Baker’s name combines two cars: ‘the sporty Jordan and the conservative Baker electric’. Beneath the civilised veneer of this gathering, Jordan represents the new woman that Daisy wants her daughter to become. She’s ‘incurably dishonest’ and has a ‘hard, jaunty body’.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to sympathise with Daisy. She’s had ‘a very bad time’ and is now ‘pretty cynical about everything,’ she tells Nick. When Pammy was born, ‘Tom was God knows where’ (having an affair with a chambermaid, it turns out), and now Daisy thinks ‘everything’s terrible anyhow’ because ‘everybody thinks so—the most advanced people.’

In one of her most important lines in the novel, she then explains,

“And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!”

This attitude is shared by Daisy’s intellectual descendants today, who believe that we’re in a post-marriage world. And many of them are male and, without realising it, looking to live Tom’s life. Yet Fitzgerald exposes it as hollow: Tom is ‘one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax.’ And it’s here that Tom has the most lessons to teach us.

Excellence as a husband and father — as a virtuous man — doesn’t concern him. Instead, he’s always ’seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game’. For Tom, sex takes over from football. When he cuckolds Wilson, he says that ‘he’s so dumb he doesn’t even know he’s alive,’ imagining that this proves his own superiority.

But what Tom doesn’t realise is that he’s dead on the inside. Instead of going to war, he stole Gatsby’s promised bride. He also cheated on Daisy on their honeymoon with a chambermaid. ‘Once in a while,’ he says, ‘I go on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her [Daisy] all the time.’

But this simply shows that, in his childishness, he thinks of love as a mere feeling rather than as willing the objective good of the beloved. Perhaps this is why he casually breaks Myrtle’s nose. He is also afraid to tell the truth. Myrtle’s sister Catherine, for example, says Tom has told her ‘it’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and they don’t believe in divorce.’ But the truth is Tom doesn’t really believe in marriage.

The feminist “alpha”

Accordingly, at the end of the novel, Nick says, ‘I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.’ And Myrtle — aptly named after a fleshy, climbing plant, reflecting her voluptuous sensuality and social climbing — is also presented as childish. Not only does she buy a dog without thinking about how to look after it, but what attracted her to Tom was that ‘he had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes,’ and ‘his white shirt-front pressed against my arm’. He’s just another accessory.

By contrast, she says her own husband isn’t ‘fit to lick my shoe,’ and she resents him for having borrowed ‘somebody’s best suit’ to get married in. What she imagines as freedom ends up destroying her — an early casualty of the cultural car crash of feminism.

An air of futility hangs over this novel. Gertrude Stein described its historical period as ‘a lost generation of men and women adrift in a chaotic hell of their own solipsism,’ and in many ways that’s still us today.

There are over 450 time words in the novel, and time menaces the characters because they have lost touch with eternity. Turning thirty, Nick sees before him nothing but ‘the promise of a new decade of loneliness’, and Daisy laments that ‘we’re getting old.’ But instead of eternity they have a false infinity: “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” It’s not how short life is that pains her but how intolerably long.

T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land inspired Fitzgerald while he was writing The Great Gatsby, and at its heart is the line ‘I can connect nothing with nothing.’ That is what Daisy means when she says she doesn’t know what to do. She can’t even connect to her own daughter.

‘Humankind,’ Eliot wrote elsewhere, ‘cannot bear very much reality,’ and Fitzgerald’s novel concerns the characters’ attempts to sedate themselves with sex and escapism rather than allow themselves to be transformed by suffering. ‘I’d rather look at all these famous people in — in oblivion,’ Tom says at Gatsby’s first party.

At that party, one single woman ’dumps down’ a cocktail, a wife hisses ‘like an angry diamond’ and other wives, totally drunk, are carried ‘kicking into the night’. But feminist critics like Juliet Fetterley are wrong to conclude from this that The Great Gatsby is just ‘another American “love story” centred on hostility to women and the concomitant strategy of the scapegoat….Not dead Gatsby but surviving Daisy is the object of the novel’s hostility and its scapegoat,’ as she describes it in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1977).

It’s not hostility to women that characterises the novel but hostility to feminism — both male in the form of Nick, Tom and Gatsby and female in the form of Daisy, Jordan and Myrtle.

As Queen Victoria warned,

“I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights', with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were women to 'unsex' themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings, and would surely perish without male protection.”

As if to underscore her point, Myrtle bleeds out in the dust while Daisy, wounded, totters back to Tom.