A Critique against Social Class in Jay Gatsby and Charles Smithson: An Oscillation between Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Abstract

A comparison between Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and John Robert Fowles’s The French lieutenant’s Woman under Marxist lenses exhibits the similarities in the class struggle that Jay Gatsby and Charles Smithson endure in their societies. Gatsby is a character of low birth who acquires a fortune, but still feels the need to purify his money with a title. Charles, on the other hand, is a character of high birth who loses his chance of inheritance and needs the money to remain a Victorian gentleman. Both of these protagonists go through forms of social consciousness in order to understand the social constructs and the Capitalist economy that control them. Yet, unlike Fitzgerald who condemns Gatsby for idolizing the Capitalist social order, Fowles conveys that Charles has the choice to free himself from the social constraints.