Sorceresses in the Wasteland? : Female Characters in The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In his bood Heiress of All the Ages William Wasserstrom makes a very interesting, and I think quite valid, observation that in literature it is women, not men, who are best suited to preach the morality of an age. Especially in America literature, he argues, " the girls are designed to represent the whole range of attitudes, ideals, achievements and failures, that define the American civilization. They embody its aspiration." Wasserstrom was convincing enough to make the critic Eakin declare that the purpose of his book The New England Girl is to prove Wasserstrom's assumption and explore the "literary implications of the connection between young women in fiction and their moral role in American culture.
The present study is also based on the premise that writers employ a woman more aptly than a man as a mirror to reflect the morality of their society. This is quite notably in keeping with F.Scott Fizgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, two masterpieces produced in the 1920s, the remarkable decade in American literary and social history. The pattern of social and economic upheavals formed the backdrop for numerous themes and figures of literature of the period, and Daisy Buchanan and Brett Ashley, the heroines of the novels mentioned above, weem to most characteristically represent the mores of the society their creators belonged to.