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Frontiers in Art Research, 2022, 4(12); doi: 10.25236/FAR.2022.041202.

A Comparative Study of Sister Carrie and the Great Gatsby —— from the Perspective of Ecofeminism

Author(s)

Yirong Gao

Corresponding Author:
Yirong Gao
Affiliation(s)

Central South University, Changsha, China

Abstract

Sister Carrie and The Great Gatsby are both classic novels in America, which have huge impact on American literature. Sister Carrie is the first novel written by Dreiser reveals the social situation in the early 20th century and has become one of a representatives of naturalism. The Great Gatsby, written by Fitzgerald in the 1920s, reveals the life in Roaring Twenties and exposes the broken American dream, and it is one of the representatives of Modernism. These two novels have great literary value and have been studied by lots of scholars. There are many previous studies about Sister Carrie and The Great Gatsby from the perspective of feminism. Since ecofeminism was noticed and popularized in literature study, some ecofeminist scholars have analyzed these two classics separately. Few studies, however, have done research into them together from the perspective of ecofeminism. This study focuses on making a comparison between the two American novels from the perspective of ecofeminism and aims at exploring the same ecofeminist implication implied in the two works from the comparative study of the two female protagonists and the ecological environments. From the analysis of the two female characters’ sufferings and the worsening environment caused by men, it proved that the tragedies of women and the ecological environment are caused by the traditional patriarchal system and the dualism fixed in civilization. It is expected that more people would change their traditional dualistic ideas of the opposition between men and women, culture, and nature and pay attention to their equality. 

Keywords

Ecofeminism, Ecologism, Patriarchal society, Equality

Cite This Paper

Yirong Gao. A Comparative Study of Sister Carrie and the Great Gatsby —— from the Perspective of Ecofeminism. Frontiers in Art Research (2022) Vol. 4, Issue 12: 8-12. https://doi.org/10.25236/FAR.2022.041202.

References

[1] Fisher, Phillip. The Life of Objects: The Naturalist Novel in the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

[2] Ruether, Rosemary Radford. New woman, New Earth. New York: The Seabury Press, 1975.

[3] Merchant C. Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990.