A FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGICAL STUDY OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S THE GREAT GATSBY

Abstract

This research conducts a feminist criminological study ofF. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). The thesis explores how crime is embodied and how the body, as a changing reality influenced by varying gender norms and shifting socio-economic dynamics, directly impacts the criminal action and behavior of women in the selected text. Drawing on Kathleen Daly and Meda-Chesney Lind's feminist criminology theory, Judith Butler's theory of performativity, and Judith Lorber's socially constructed body theory, the study foregrounds the role of the body in the interplay of crime and gender while taking into account social factors such as race, class, and socio-economic status. Daly and Lind's explication of gender is used to identify the patriarchal social structures, constructions of masculinity and femininity, and the prescribed gender roles as represented in The Great Gatsby. Butler's theorization of the social construction of gender norms and the performative nature of gender are drawn on to analyze how characters disrupt gender norms of the 1920s US through performative acts in The Great Gatsby. Insights gained through this analysis help challenge the definition of crime provided by James W. Messersclunidt. As opposed to his explication of crime as an exclusively male phenomenon, crime is represented as a common behavior among both men and women characters in The Great Gatsby. Indeed, crime can be reevaluated in the context of the performative gendered body. As such, characters enact or perform crimes as subversive acts in order to resist hegemonic ideologies and repressive structures. The thesis concludes that The Great Gatsby represents crime as a 'subversive' socio-lingual and bodily ' act' enacted or performed by a female criminal to resist patriarchally constructed gender identities and to traverse male-dominated and male-restricted spaces. Hence, crime becomes a means to attain subversive identities and agency.