Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Myrtle Wilson each occupy a different position of constrained power in The Great Gatsby, yet student essays frequently flatten all three into a single category, either sympathetic victims of the men around them or, less generously, morally weak characters defined mainly by their relationships. A stronger essay assignment pushes students to examine the specific and different ways gender shapes each woman's limited agency in the novel.

Daisy's constraint is largely economic and social, tied to the expectations of her class and her marriage to Tom. Jordan's constraint operates differently, through public scrutiny and reputation as a professional golfer navigating a world that expects women to be decorative rather than competitive. Myrtle's constraint is the most physically dangerous, shaped by class aspiration and, ultimately, by the violence that ends her life.

Essays that treat these three characters as interchangeable examples of "how women are treated in the novel" miss the specificity that actually makes for strong literary analysis, since each woman's situation reveals a distinct facet of the novel's broader commentary on class and gender.

Prompts that require students to compare at least two of the three characters directly tend to surface this specificity more reliably than prompts asking about "women in Gatsby" in general terms.

Prompts That Require Specificity

A prompt like "Compare how Daisy's and Myrtle's different class positions shape the consequences each faces for pursuing desire outside her marriage" forces students to engage with class and gender together, rather than treating gender as an isolated theme.

• Compare how Daisy's and Myrtle's class positions shape the consequences they each face
• Examine how Jordan Baker's public visibility as an athlete complicates her portrayal in the novel
• Consider whether Daisy has any genuine agency, or whether every choice she makes is constrained
• Analyze how Tom's treatment of Myrtle reveals his broader attitude toward class and ownership
• Argue whether the novel critiques or reinforces the limited roles available to its female characters

Grading for Nuance, Not Just Position

A rubric for this topic should explicitly reward students who avoid a simple victim-or-villain binary and instead account for genuine ambiguity in the text. Daisy in particular resists easy categorization, and essays that acknowledge her complicity alongside her constraint tend to demonstrate more sophisticated reading than essays that pick one label and apply it uniformly.

This is a case where sophistication genuinely means comfort with contradiction, and a rubric that only rewards a single clean position may inadvertently penalize the strongest essays in the stack.

Handling Sensitive Classroom Discussion

Discussion of gender and power in Gatsby can surface genuine disagreement among students, and teachers often find it useful to establish discussion norms explicitly before the topic comes up, separate from the norms used for less charged material. Written essays give students who are less comfortable speaking on this topic in class a fuller opportunity to develop their thinking.

Because of this, some teachers deliberately pair a written response with, rather than in place of, open discussion on this particular theme, giving students multiple ways to engage with material that can feel more personal than other parts of the novel.

Connecting to Broader Course Themes

Gender and power analysis in Gatsby often connects naturally to similar themes students will encounter in other texts across the year, making it a useful early anchor point for a recurring analytical lens. Referencing this essay later when the theme resurfaces reinforces the skill without requiring an entirely new introduction each time.

Building that connective thread across the curriculum, rather than treating each text's gender analysis in isolation, tends to deepen student understanding significantly by the end of the year.