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From the aspect of writing style and ideology, The Great Gatsby is considered a mature novel written by Fitzgerald. Nine years later, his last finished novel—Tender Is the Night was published, which raised some doubts at first. Luckily, it was then considered one of Fitzgerald’s best works and was cherished. In these two novels, there are some women who are different from those traditional women in other works. They are called flappers, which mean fashionable and open women. They try to free themselves from patriarchy and desire for freedom and independence. They want to live with abandon and enjoy life to the fullest just like men. With no values of becoming good wives and mothers, flappers doesn’t constrain themselves in their family.
There have been many researches on Fitzgerald’s life and works since he died. However, most of the researches focus on his life experience, artistic features of his works and age characteristics at that time at the beginning. It was until the 1960s that the researchers began to pay special attention to characters in his novels. With the development of new literary criticism, including psychoanalysis, culture and historical criticism, feminism and so on, Fitzgerald’ novels are studied more detailedly and deeply from multi-aspect, which resulted in another boom in Fitzgerald. In China, the formal researches on him started until 1980s, which mainly focused on the disillusionment in his novels and reasons for it. In recent years, themes, characters and creative arts have been main directions of studying. In the aspect of theme, researchers pay more attention to the accomplishment and failure of “American Dream” as well as its contents. Concerning characters, researchers try to reveal why protagonists lost, which is involved in their thoughts and values.
Taken together, although the study of Fitzgerald’s works has boomed, it still lacks systematization and comprehensiveness. Among numerous researches on women images, there are few researches focusing on a group of female images. This essay aims to study two groups of flappers in Fitzgerald’s two masterpieces—The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, which views from a feminist perspective. Flappers in Fitzgerald’s fictions are new women who gradually become mature, independent and self-reliant. They longed for undisciplined life, unearthly fashions and thrilling things. Just as Fitzgerald described in This Side of Paradise, flappers are:
eating three o’clock after-dance suppers in impossible cafes, talking of every side if life with an air half of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down. But he never realized how widespread it was until he saw the cities between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue (Fitzgerald, Paradise, 43).
The awakening of female consciousness is a gradual process, which can be pided into two stages. They will be analyzed in the following chapters. In chapter one, three flappers in The Great Gatsby are the representatives of initial awakening women. They recognize that they are constrained by men. Unfortunately, they can’t find the correct way to free from the patriarchal culture. In chapter two, Rosemary and Nicole are the representatives of complete awakening women. They find suitable ways to fight against the fate under the patriarchal culture. In chapter three, reasons for the appearance of these two different groups of flappers will be analyzed.