The role of women in The Great GatsbyThe profound conservative quietism that circumscribed Fitzgerald's temperament, despite all his vaunted brawls and showy public crimes, also takes another and more subtle form of nostalgia and withdrawal than those proclaimed in his nostrum: evident in his presentation of women. We have seen that Fitzgerald's metaphysics of defeat presupposes a high level of political sadness; and, despite some strong ambivalence towards the elite, we will see that its perspective on the underclass is marked by a frightening alienation. In these conditions of tension, Fitzgerald opts (one might say renounces) for the comfort of purely individualistic gratification. of [New York] at night, and the satisfaction that the constant darting of men, women and machines gives to the restless eye" [57]), the cumulative tension is significant. “It was time on borrowed time,” Fitzgerald later wrote, “the entire top tenth of a nation living with the carefreeness of grand dukes and the ease of ballerinas… A classmate killed himself and his wife in Long Island, another fell "accidentally" from a Philadelphia skyscraper, another intentionally from a New York skyscraper One was killed in a Chicago speakeasy; another was beaten to death in a New York speak-easy and crawled home to the Princeton Club to die. Cold shadows of violence flicker over the names of those attending the party on the blue meadows: "Civet, who drowned last summer[,]... Edgar Beaver, whose hair they say has become cooked... in the middle of the paper.. ....the condition of blissful inaction, loss of self in comfort and union. Ultimately, therefore, the woman haunts the novel as the lost and longed-for womb: refuge from economic injustice and political tension, comfort of quietistic individualism ascending from the seductive to the maternal, confers sublimity by renouncing Works Cited Fetterley, Judith The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction: Indiana UP, 1978. Raleigh, John Henry “F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby." Mizener 99-103. Sklar, Robert. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967. Spindler, Michael. American Literature and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983. Trilling, Lionel. Scott Fitzgerald." Critical essays on Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". Ed. Scott Donaldson. Boston: Hall, 1984. 13-20.