The Great Gatsby’s “Secret Society” and “Membership”: Nick Carraway vs. Daisy Buchanan

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper readdresses The Great Gatsby (1946) with a focus on Nick Carraway and Daisy Buchanan as both developing characters often neglected in literary criticism, which focuses largely on the figure of Jay Gatsby. Both Nick and Daisy, I argue, struggle―for different reasons―to reverse the paradigm between ‘protagonist’ and ‘conduit’ that Gayle Rubin illuminates in “The Traffic in Women” essay, but with a focus on “membership” within the “distinguished secret society” of East Egg and its values. Using the paradigm structure of ‘conduit’ in which the actual exchange of socioeconomic power exists, I analyze more than the political economy of sex that functions as the basis of Rubin’s theory. Using the exclusive society depicted in the novel, my paper outlines the destructively powerful aspect of class and privilege, which Daisy embraces and Nick refutes completely. Gatsby, therefore, is significant not as a tragic lover but as a hero who is never granted membership into his lover’s “secret society” and also for the change his death brings about in the narrator and reader.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• I. Introduction II. Mrs. Myrtle Wilson’s Failure to Convert from Conduit to Protagonist III. Mrs. Daisy Buchanan’s Conversion from Conduit to Protagonist IV. Conclusion