Gatsby's Terrible Women Fitzgerald's low opinion of women is evident throughout the novel. His personal experiences with the females in his life cross over to the novel's feminine characters. All female personalities in the Great Gatsby possess major character flaws. A correlation can be drawn between the negative traits Fitzgerald imbues his female characters with, and his personal disdain for women.
The main female character of the Great Gatsby, Daisy, possesses negative attributes which dominate her personality. She is insincere, shallow and self-absorbed.
Daisy displays her shallowness through her inane laughter, and constant meaningless chatter. She is the counterpart of Fitzgerald's wife Zelda, who also possessed the same characteristics. Zelda, according to James R. Mellow author of Invented Lives, portrays her shallowness in a letter to her daughter written from Hollywood. Here Zelda states, "Everybody here is very clever and can nearly all dance and sing and play and I feel very stupid" (Mellow 285).
The grave of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzger...
The cover of the first edition of The Great Gatsby...
The Great Gatsby (1926 film)She evidently sees these attributes of others as positive, meaningful parts of personality. Zelda missed the deeper part of a person's makeup, and looked only on the surface of things much like her counterpart Daisy. The text reinforces the same shallow aspect of Daisy's nature. In chapter VII this shallowness is evidenced when Daisy takes a very brief time to show off her daughter to Gatsby. She prattles with mawkish clichés which accentuates her shallowness. Her character comes across as depthless and phony. Later in the same chapter another glimpse of her shallowness is provided through the quote "What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon,? cried Daisy, and the day after that and the next thirty years " (Fitzgerald 125 )? Here she displays the aimless, meaningless existence of the shallow one dimensional creature that she is. The final substantiation of her shallowness is...