THE ARTISTIC PORTRAYAL OF FEMALE IMAGES IN AMERICAN “LOST GENERATION” LITERATURE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF F. S. FITZGERALD’S “THE GREAT GATSBY” AND E. HEMINGWAY’S “A FAREWELL TO ARMS”
Abstract
This article investigates the artistic and psychological representation of female characters in two seminal works of the “Lost Generation”: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (1925) and Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” (1929). Through a comparative framework integrating gender analysis and cultural-historical contextualization, the study examines how the aftermath of the First World War conditioned the construction of feminine identity, agency, and moral contradiction in American literary contexts. While both novels belong to the same national tradition, they reveal strikingly divergent models of femininity: Fitzgerald deploys his female characters as instruments of social critique, exposing the moral vacuity of post-war American prosperity, while Hemingway constructs Catherine Barkley as an idealized yet deeply problematic figure of devotion, sacrifice, and tragic beauty set against the chaos of the Italian front.
Keywords
Lost Generation, female image, The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, gender transformation, interwar literature, artistic portrayal, psychoanalytic criticism, comparative literature, war and gender.How to Cite
References
Brooks, P. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. — New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. — 246 p.
Reynolds, M. Hemingway: The Paris Years. — Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. — 402 p.
Butler J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. — New York: Routledge, 1990. — P. 3–17.
Comley, N. R., Scholes, R. Hemingway's Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text. — New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. — 215 p.
Caruth, C. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. — Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. — 154 p.
de Beauvoir, S. The Second Sex / Translated by C. Borde, S. Malovany-Chevallier. — New York: Vintage, 1949/2010. — 800 p.
Fetterley, J. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. — Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. — 190 p.
Fitzgerald, F. S. The Great Gatsby. — New York: Scribner, 1925/2004. — 180 p.
Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle // Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud / Ed. J. Strachey. — Vol. 18. — London: Hogarth Press, 1955. — P. 64.
Gilbert, S. M., Gubar, S. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. — New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. — 719 p.
Hemingway, E. The Sun Also Rises. — New York: Scribner, 1926. — Epigraph: "You are all a lost generation" — Gertrude Stein.
Hemingway, E. A Farewell to Arms. — New York: Scribner, 1929/2012. — 332 p.
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Muhabbat Qodirova
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
