A Critical Analysis of Frances Kerr's Critical Analysis of the Great Gatsby titled, "Feeling "Half Feminine": Modernism and the Politics of Emotion in The Great Gatsby."

Essay by john_a_castroUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, May 2004

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The in-depth critical analysis of the Great Gatsby by Frances Kerr gives an interesting insight into the narrative structure of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the psychology of its narrator, Nick Carraway, and the reflection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's femininity in his critically-acclaimed novel, The Great Gatsby. Frances Kerr's critical analysis also gives additional insight into the slight paranoia of Jay Gatsby about being viewed as feminine.

According to Frances Kerr's critical analysis, Fitzgerald told his secretary Laura Guthrie, "I don't know what it is in me or that comes to me when I start to write. I am half feminine, at least my mind is." Using this, Frances Kerr explains how F. Scott Fitzgerald's femininity may have led to the feminization of his characters in the Great Gatsby. According to Kerr's example, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Nick reveals his attraction to vulnerable men when he confesses, "I must have felt pretty weird by that time because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his [Gatsby's] pink suit under the moon."

(150) This quote from the Great Gatsby brings Nick Carraway's heterosexuality into question and makes most readers wonder if Nick Carraway has, in some way, homosexual tendencies. Added to this, the critical analysis also explains how Nick carefully guards but secretly indulges in "feminine" tendencies. Many readers acknowledge some sort of conjunction of gender, sexuality, and homoeroticism in the Great Gatsby, and this is what Frances Kerr's critical analysis investigates and studies.

To sum it all up, the slightly homophobic critical analysis of France Kerr, called Feeling "Half Feminine": Modernism and the Politics of Emotion in the Great Gatsby, examines how the feminine personality and complex sexuality of the Great Gatsby's author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, has created a sense of a...