The Big Read at Reed

The Women of The Great Gatsby

Big Read at Daniel A. Reed Library

Presenters: María Núñez and Connor Burton

On April 15th, 2015, we led a discussion at Fredonia State University's Daniel A. Reed Library, or Reed Library for short. Our Discussion focused on the female characters in the classic novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

       The goal of the Big Read is to spread the appreciation of great works of literature throughout towns in the United States. Our Big Read community was able to enjoy discussions, presentations, and workshops on The Great Gatsby. Reed library is located on the Fredonia campus which gave us the opportunity to engage in an academic discussion. We decided to focus our discussion on Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Myrtle Wilson. Our personal goal was to discuss their impact as characters, their place as women, and their motivations in the novel. We also wanted to discuss any parallels that we could see between these characters and women in our own modern culture.

Our discussion had ten people in attendance. Every person who attended was engaged in the discussion. The majority of the attendees were already Gatsby fans and had discussion points of their own. A few attendees came up to us afterwards and told us that they had not yet read the novel, but wanted to after seeing how lively a discussion about the novel could be. We discussed gender roles in 1920’s society and in society today. The audience seemed to especially enjoy comparing the fetishization of flapper women and women in the entertainment business today, like Lupita Nyong’o and Beyonce.

Our discussion then was directed towards analysis of the female characters of the novel. We provided poster boards on each female, with artwork painted by María Núñez, that the audience could look at before the presentation. We discussed whether Daisy was truly a love interest or a prized object for both Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan. We looked at Daisy as a maternal figure, the only one in the novel. We looked at Jordan Baker as the novel’s independent woman, and how socioeconomic class can affect a woman’s ability to be independent. We also looked at Myrtle Wilson’s promiscuity and how she intended to used it to elevate herself from the Valley of Ashes to Upper class apartments when she sleeps with Tom Buchanan.

Our audience was lovely. We ran over the time that we had projected and would have stayed longer if we could have. We enjoyed looking at the female characters because we could discuss them as women and also as stand alone characters. Fitzgerald gave each one their own personality, goals. We gave our audience a taste of each character. We hope that we gave our audience a different entrance point into the novel, whether they are first time readers or going through the novel for the tenth time.