This paper applies three major critical frameworks — Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic — to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Beginning with a plot overview, the paper examines how class conflict and capitalist ideology shape characters such as Gatsby, Tom, and Myrtle through a Marxist lens. It then applies feminist criticism to explore how women are objectified and constrained within the novel's patriarchal social order. Finally, drawing on Freudian theory, the paper analyzes the fear of intimacy and ego-driven behavior that governs the romantic relationships throughout the novel, concluding that the story as a whole represents the moral and social decay of the American Dream under capitalism.
The Great Gatsby is one of the most celebrated novels in the history of American literature. The novel sheds light on the failure of the American Dream — the idea that anyone born into poverty can attain whatever he desires — and emphasizes the hardships imposed by powerful forces of social segregation. In order to understand the novel fully, several critical theories prove helpful, each illuminating a different angle of the same story. Three of the most instructive are Freud's psychoanalytical theory, Marxist theory, and feminist theory. Each presents a different lens through which to view the narrative, and each reveals an ideology governed by social forces and individual desires.
In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway is the narrator and central character. He is a young man from Minnesota who moves to New York in 1922 to learn about bond trading. He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island — a residential area associated with the newly wealthy, or nouveau riche, who have recently made large fortunes but lack the established social connections of the old elite. The most compelling figure in Nick's new life is his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby, who lives in a vast mansion with a gothic exterior and is known for throwing extravagant parties every weekend.
Unlike the other residents of West Egg, Nick is an educated young man who studied at Yale and has social connections in East Egg — the more fashionable part of Long Island and the established enclave of old money. One evening, Nick visits East Egg for dinner with his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, a former Yale classmate. During dinner, they introduce Nick to a sharp, cynical young woman named Jordan Baker. A romantic relationship develops between Nick and Jordan, and she informs him about the state of Daisy and Tom's marriage. Through Jordan, Nick learns that Tom has a mistress who lives in the valley of ashes — a gray industrial wasteland between West Egg and New York City. Shortly afterward, Nick visits New York with Tom and his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, and stays in an apartment Tom keeps for the affair. During a vulgar party there, Tom breaks Myrtle's nose when she taunts him by repeatedly mentioning Daisy's name.
As summer progresses, Nick receives an invitation to one of Gatsby's famous parties. There he encounters Jordan Baker again, and through her meets Gatsby himself — a surprisingly young man with an English accent, a charming smile, and a habit of addressing everyone as "old sport." Jordan privately tells Nick that Gatsby has been in love with Daisy since 1917, when he knew her in Louisville. He has spent countless nights staring at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion. His legendary parties, it turns out, were simply an attempt to attract Daisy's attention. Gatsby asks Nick to help him reunite with her.
Gatsby confides his fear of rejection to Nick, who nevertheless arranges a tea at his own house without telling Daisy that Gatsby will be present. After an awkward initial meeting, the romance between Gatsby and Daisy rekindles and they resume their former affair. Tom soon grows suspicious. At an uncomfortable lunch, he notices Gatsby gazing at Daisy with unmistakable feeling and immediately grasps the situation. Although Tom himself has been unfaithful, the thought of his wife's infidelity enrages him. He arranges a confrontation in which he forces Gatsby to confess his feelings, asserts that he and Daisy share a bond Gatsby can never understand, and exposes Gatsby as a criminal who made his fortune through bootlegging. During this scene, Daisy realizes her allegiance lies with her husband. Tom dismissively sends her back to East Egg with Gatsby, intending to prove he is not threatened.
On the drive back, Nick, Jordan, and Tom discover that Gatsby's car has struck and killed Myrtle. At his mansion, Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was actually driving and that he intends to take the blame. The next day, Tom tells Myrtle's husband George that it was Gatsby who killed his wife. Believing that Myrtle's lover was responsible for her death, George goes to Gatsby's mansion, shoots him, and then kills himself.
Nick arranges a small funeral for Gatsby, ends his relationship with Jordan, and returns to the Midwest, repelled by the moral emptiness he has witnessed among the wealthy. He reflects that just as Gatsby's desire for Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American Dream of happiness and individualism has decayed into a mere pursuit of wealth. Although Gatsby's capacity to transform his dreams into reality is what makes him "great," Nick concludes that the era of dreaming — both Gatsby's personal dream and the broader American Dream — is over.
To understand The Great Gatsby through a Marxist lens, it is necessary to first understand the philosophy of Karl Marx. Marx was a German philosopher and economist whose central argument was that those who control the means of production in a society also control its culture and social forces. This concept is known as dialectical materialism. Marx further argued that the social forces of history were driving society toward communism, in which the means of production would be governed by the working masses rather than by a class of owners. Marxism, in this sense, was understood as a crystallization of the collective thought of the oppressed.
Marxist literary criticism extends these economic theories to the study of literature. Rather than treating a literary work as the product of an individual consciousness, Marxist critics argue that any text must be examined in relation to the ideology and material conditions of the historical period that produced it. Such critics evaluate how a work reflects class struggle and how it is embedded in social institutions and collective actions (Beauvoir, 2006). The core claims of Marxist criticism include the following: that human institutions and modes of production evolve historically; that changes in production methods drive shifts in power relations and class struggle; and that human consciousness in any era is shaped by the prevailing beliefs, values, and norms that govern perception of reality. A Marxist critic therefore attempts to explain a literary text by examining its relationship to the economic and social realities of its time — particularly the question of who holds power and who does not, and what results from that conflict.
Reading The Great Gatsby from this perspective, one immediately notices Fitzgerald's ironic use of the word "great" in the novel's title. Gatsby became wealthy because of his early and absolute commitment to the power of money. Yet why he should be called "great" is a genuinely contested question. It is not his riches that elevate him — wealth is merely the benchmark that society uses to measure greatness (Bettina, 1963). Rather, it is his love for Daisy that raises him above conventional measures of success, because he devoted his life to that love even when his fortune could have provided him any luxury he desired. The word "great" also carries an ironic class dimension: Gatsby rose from a deprived background to enormous wealth, and his achievement demands a kind of respect on those terms.
Nick reflects on this in the novel: "His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end."
Another useful reference point is the observation made by Jonathan Wolff in his article on Karl Marx: "Capitalism's dirty secret is that it is not a realm of harmony and mutual benefit but a system in which one class systematically extracts profit from another." This dynamic is visible throughout the novel's relationships. Tom introduces Nick to his mistress, Myrtle, who is the wife of a working-class gas station owner. Within this social arrangement, Nick does not inform his cousin about Tom's affair and instead uses Tom's apartment for his own private purposes — despite having a girlfriend in New Jersey and a developing relationship with Jordan. The power of social status reshapes the very definition of morality for these characters. Meanwhile, Gatsby naively attempts to be accepted by the elite class after amassing his fortune through illegal means. His excessive use of the phrase "old sport" immediately marks him as newly rich — someone who has risen from poverty but cannot fully shed his origins. His admission that he attended Oxford for only five months and cannot "really call myself an Oxford man" confirms his exclusion from the genuine upper class.
Marxist critics also highlight how class difference redistributes power. The following exchange is revealing:
Myrtle: "That dog? That dog's a boy."
Tom: "It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it."
This dialogue exposes how class difference defines the status of a mistress and renders her an object available for the pleasure of a wealthy man. Tom holds all the power in this relationship; money, for him, is a tool to command rather than a means of exchange between equals. Myrtle is reduced to something that can be purchased and discarded. George Wilson is also implicated: rather than being honest with Myrtle about his financial circumstances, he conceals his poverty — symbolized, for instance, by the rented coat he wore at their wedding. Trapped in the lower class, George falls back on religion as the basis of his moral authority. His warning to Myrtle — "You may fool me, but you can't fool God" — underscores his powerlessness within a capitalist system that has denied him material agency.
In the light of Marxism, the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby is similarly shaped by class dynamics. When she reunites with Gatsby, her desire for real emotional experience rekindles, yet she herself acknowledges the constrained possibilities available to women in her social world, remarking that "the best thing a girl can be in this world, [is to be] a beautiful little fool." Underlying this view is the Marxist-feminist insight that women are rendered powerless within capitalist social hierarchies.
"Women as objects in a patriarchal social order"
"Fear of intimacy and ego defense in characters"
The Great Gatsby is a reflection of a failed social model ruled by the forces of wealth and fortune. Since the value of a person is determined by what he owns, he is unable to find a place in society on the basis of his own potential. This is why the feeling of self-worth in the novel comes from social status rather than from relationships. The characters are slaves to their desires and victims of social dogma that compels them to seek a happiness rooted in material acquisition rather than in love and genuine intimacy. This is the very reason why every character appears discontent with what he or she has and perpetually wishes for something else. Ultimately, The Great Gatsby forces us to confront the destruction that American society has undergone at the hands of capitalism — a destruction visible through the Marxist lens in its class hierarchies, through the feminist lens in its treatment of women as objects, and through the psychoanalytic lens in the ego-driven, intimacy-avoidant behavior of every major character.
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