This essay uses Gerard Genette’s theory of intertextuality – in particular, architextuality - in order to establish the connection between Shakespearean tragedies and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last novel, The Last Tycoon. The essay relies mainly on known Shakespeare critic A.C Bradley and the categories he uses in order to establish what makes a Shakespearean tragedy a Shakespearean tragedy. This framework will then be used to further elaborate upon the architextual connection between Shakespeare and Fitzgerald. The essay also compares the characters from The Last Tycoon directly to characters from Shakespeare’s tragedies in order to further show the intertextual connections. For example, Fitzgerald's main character Monroe Stahr is compared to Julius Caesar, from Shakespeare's play of the same name, while the antagonist Mr Brady is compared to both Cassius from the previously mentioned Julius Caesar, as well as Iago from Othello

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald encapsulates the Roaring Twenties, a period of social and political change. The economy is thriving, and the American Dream, with its promise of monetary wealth, happiness and upward mobility, is seemingly within reach. Females gain suffrage, and a New Woman emerges, the flapper, who can be seen challenging stereotypical gender roles with her short skirts and bobbed hair. Ostensibly enjoying increased freedom, she dances the night away at speakeasies, a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, defying Prohibition. This essay aims to evidence that the American Dream as constructed in the novel is a dream available only to the male gender, as the women remain shackled by a patriarchal society. By looking at The Great Gatsby through a feminist lens and with the help of well-established concepts within feminist critical theory and feminist narratology, this essay analyzes how the female characters are portrayed, along with their language, and their actions. The result reveals that in Gatsby’s world women orbit around the men, maneuvering for their attention, affection, and material wealth. Any transgressions of stereotypical gender roles result in punishment: loss of status, withheld affections, dismissal, or death. Consequently, instead of following their own American Dream, women are limited to pursuing the man who most successfully embodies it. Thus, for the females in The Great Gatsby, the American Dream stays an elusive idea as they remain reliant on the men to manifest it.

This project is a discussion of the continuing need to address gender issues while teaching core curriculum in English classes at the secondary level.

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ABSTRACT This study focuses on twenty-one particular texts published in 1925 as contemporaries of The Great Gatsby. The manuscript is divided into four categories—The Impressionists, The Experimentalists, The Realists, and The Independents. Among The Impressionists are F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, Willa Cather (The Professor’s House), Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter), William Carlos Williams (In the American Grain), Elinor Wylie (The Venetian Glass Nephew), John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer), and William Faulkner (New Orleans Sketches). The Experimentalists are Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans), E. E. Cummings (& aka “Poems 48-96”), Ezra Pound (A Draft of XVI Cantos), T. S. Eliot (“The Hollow Men”), Laura Riding (“Summary for Alastor”), and John Erskine (The Private Life of Helen of Troy). The Realists are Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), Edith Wharton (The Mother’s Recompense), Upton Sinclair (Mammonart), Ellen Glasgow (Barren Ground), Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith), James Boyd (Drums), and Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time). The Independents are Archibald MacLeish (The Pot of Earth) and Robert Penn Warren (“To a Face in a Crowd”). Although these twenty-two texts may in some cases represent literary fragmentations, each in its own way also represents a coherent response to the spirit of the times that is in one way or another cognate to The Great Gatsby. The fact that all these works appeared the same year is special because the authors, if not already famous, would become famous, and their works were or would come to represent classic American literature around the world. The twenty-two authors either knew each other personally or knew each other’s works. Naturally, they were also influenced by writings of international authors and philosophers. The greatest common elements among the poets and fiction writers are their uninhibited interest in sex, an absorbing cynicism about life, and the frequent portrayal of disintegration of the family, a trope for what had happened to the countries and to the “family of nations” that experienced the Great War. In 1925, it would seem, Fitzgerald and many of his writing peers—some even considered his betters—channeled a major spirit of the times, and Fitzgerald did it more successfully than almost anyone.

America has adopted as its own the Eden myth, which has provided the mythology of the American dream. This New Garden of America, consequently, has been a masculine garden because of its dependence on the myth of the Fall. Implied in the American dream is the idea of a garden without Eve, or at least without Eve's sin, traditionally associated with sexuality. Our canonical literature has reflected these attitudes of devaluing feminine power or making it a negative force: The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury. To recreate the Garden myth, Americans have had to reimagine Eve as the idealized virgin, earth mother and life-giver, or as Adam's loyal helpmeet, the silent figurehead. But Eve resists her new roles: Hester Prynne embellishes her scarlet letter and does not leave Boston; the feminine forces in Moby-Dick defeat the monomaniacal masculinity of Ahab; Miss Watson, the Widow Douglas, and Aunt Sally's threat of civilization chase Huck off to the territory despite the beckoning of the feminine river; Daisy retreats unscathed into her "white palace" after Gatsby's death; and Caddy tours Europe on the arm of a Nazi officer long after Quentin's suicide, Benjy's betrayal, and Jason's condemnation. Each of these male writers--Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner--deals with the American dream differently; however, in each case the dream fails because Eve will not go away, refusing to be the Other, the scapegoat, or the muse to man's dreams. These works all deal in some way with the notion of the masculine American dream of perfection in the Garden at the expense of a fully realized feminine presence. This failure of the American dream accounts for the decidedly tragic tone of these culturally significant American novels.