Paper Summary:

The characters of F. Scott Fitzgerald?s "The Great Gatsby" are largely members of a falsely created American aristocracy. But some of the higher aspirations of this decadent elite for truth, beauty, and, more importantly, a secure sense of home and identity, mirror the far less decadent, but equally passionate desires of the members of the all-female book reading society found in "Reading Lolita in Tehran". This paper shows that Jay Gatsby desired to improve himself by "making himself up" to be worthy of the love of the faithless Daisy Buchanan. He did this through bootlegging, purchasing fine shirts, and securing a home in Great Neck, Long Island. The paper shows that, similarly, through a shift in attire and place, the women of Azar Nafisi's book wished to reinvent themselves by casting off their chadors and the external social and moral strictures that restricted them in their theocratic, Islamic educational framework.

From the Paper:

"The girls revealed the hidden colors of concealed banned clothing, from under chadors, colorful as Gatsby's fine shirts that he showed to Daisy, concealed in his drawers. "Recovering himself in a minute, he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high". (Fitzgerald 91) Yet like these Iranian women, Jay Gatsby too has a hidden past and life, of his mundane Midwestern beginnings, as well as his criminal past. Gatsby keeps this boring past hidden life, filled with the shame of wealth he has not inherited, concealed under the colors of his shirts, while the women of Tehran keep their colorful plumage and reading a secret under cloaks of blackness that hide their faces and light. But like Gatsby, too, "it was not until I had reached home that I realized the true meaning of exile", writes Nafisi. (Nafisi 145)"

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