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II. Feminist Criticism and The Great Gatsby
2.1 Feminist and Feminist Literary Criticism
According to Encyclopedia the implication of “feminism” usually means “movements for recognition of the claims of women for rights (legal, political, familial, etc.) equal to those possessed by men.” Although, the feminist movement in the West did not take any visible shape until the 19th century, women have never ceased to fight for their right-political, economic and social. Throughout its long history, feminism has sought to disturb the complacent certainties of such a patriarchal culture, to assert a belief in sexual equality and to eradicate sexist domination in transforming society. The feminist literary criticism starting in the 1960s has long existed in the history of literature.
At that time, women had always faced social and economic obstacles to their literary ambitious, they have no independent annual income and have been treated as a tool for giving birth to babies, pleasing her husband and take care of the house and children, so they only few women writer are always marginalized in the field of literature creations. Man is the “One”, she is the “Other”, in every domain where patriarchy reigns, women are “the other”, they are marginalized, defined only by their differences from male norms and values, which means defined by what women lack that men have.
In the long history of feminist movements, some women writers are aware of that women were deeply defined by the ideology and norms of patriarchy and noticed the inequality between men and women. Their writing begins to explore female experience in its own right and not form a comparative assessment of women’s experience in relation to men’s. Its eventually self-conscious expression was the culmination of centurious of women’s writing, about women’s minds, bodies, art and ideas. Feminist literary critics try to explain how power imbalances due to gender in a given culture are reflected in or challenged by literary texts (Guerin 196). Feminist critics generally agree that their goals are to expose patriarchal premises and resulting prejudices to promote discovery and reevaluation of literature by women, and to examine social, culture, and psychosexual contexts of literature and literary criticism.