My Choice of Topic:

3. Discuss the representation of men in two of the following texts: The Great Gatsby,

Convenience Store Woman, A Single Man with reference to the excerpt of Hook’s The Will

to Change.

The Scope of the Texts:

1. The Great Gatsby

Chapter 2: P28; P31; P41

Chapter 6: P105; P113

Chapter 7: P154; P156-157

Chapter 8: P158; P159

Chapter 9: P190-191

2. Convenience Store Woman

Scene 1: The first time Keiko met Shiraha in the convenience store (P36)

Scene 2: The first time that Manager 8 and Mrs. Izumi complained about Shiraha together

(P51)

Scene 3: The first meeting between Keiko and Shiraha in a restaurant after Shiraha being fired

from the convenience store (P67-68; P69; P73)

Scene 4: Shiraha’s sister-in law visited Keiko’s house after Shiraha moved into Keiko’s house

(P103; P105)

Scene 5: Keiko’s sister visited Keiko’s house after she heard that Keiko found a boyfriend

(P101)

Scene 6: Shiraha moved into Keiko’s house (P82; P88)

Scene 7: Shiraha accompanied Keiko to attend an interview (P122)

Scene 8: Shiraha’s sister-in law called Shiraha to pay the debt (P115)
 The Men Who Never Grew up

HU Yuan

Outline

Part 1 Introduction

Part 2 The Great Gatsby: Blind Obedience to the Patriarchal Society

Part 3 Convenience Store Woman: Ineffective Resistance Against the Patriarchal Society

Part 4 Conclusion
 Part 1 Introduction

The Great Gatsby, first published in 1925, is the masterpiece of American novelist

Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Roaring Twenties, it tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby

and his pursuit of the American Dream. Convenience Store Woman, a novel coming off the

press in 2016, is written by Japanese writer Sayaka Murata. The narrative revolves around

Keiko Furukura and her work in a branch of the Smile Mart, which is a convenience store in

Tokyo. Although these two novels are created by writers coming from distinct cultural

backgrounds and living in different times, each has its setting in the patriarchal society with

almost opposite requirements for women and men. To be more specific, in the early 20 th

century, American women, who were still strongly influenced by Victorian values, were

expected to be weak and submissive, “to caretake and nurture” (Hooks 18), to be “domestic

goddesses”, while American men were demanded to be strong and dominative, to earn and

provide, to be active players in public space. Similarly, the contemporary Japanese society

primarily treats women as products at the marriage market, yet defines men mainly by their

work.

This paper is a study of the images of men depicted in The Great Gatsby and

Convenience Store Woman, with Bell Hook’s opinions about patriarchy and its great harm to

1
men in the book The Will to Change being used as the general thematic framework. Based on

the textual analysis of these two novels, I am aimed at proving that assaulted by patriarchal

beliefs and values about their gender physically and spiritually, male characters did not show

any trace of growing up at the end of the stories and have no possibility to grow up in the

future. The stagnation of their life is a strong accusation against the patriarchal system

working upon them.

Part 2 The Great Gatsby: Blind Obedience to the Patriarchal Society

In The Great Gatsby, nearly every male character was obedient to the patriarchal system

blindly and concentrated efforts on pursuing various goals that were predetermined by the

patriarchal gendered script of their time. However, no matter what happened to them during

the process, almost every one maintained the same feature that they began with at the end of

the novel, rather than learning anything useful from their previous experience. In the

following paragraphs, I will prove this opinion of mine through the textual analysis of two

main male characters depicted in this fiction—Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby.

Tom firmly insisted that males were “inherently dominating, superior to everything and

everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule

2
over the weak…” (Hooks 18). Throughout the whole novel, he sought for this kind of

dominance restlessly. Firstly, he was fond of seducing working-class women. As these

women were not only weaker than him in sex, but also lower than him in social class, he

could exercise his domination at the greatest advantage. For example, he was involved with a

chambermaid just three months after his marriage with Daisy. Besides, he picked up a

“common but pretty” (113) girl at a party held in Gatsby’s house. His latest extramarital love

was with another lower-class woman Myrtle Wilson, which clearly demonstrated his

insistence on his supremacy and power as well. For instance, he firmly believed that Myrtle

had no right to mention his wife Daisy’s name. When Myrtle challenged his authority and

said, “Daisy! Daisy! Daisy! I’ll say it whenever I want to” (41), he made “a short deft

movement” (41) and “broke her nose with his open hand” (41) mercilessly. Here the violent

action was an effective method for Tom to make Myrtle become submissive, just as Hooks

stated, “the point of such violence is usually to reinforce a dominator model, in which the

authority figure is deemed ruler over those without power and given the right to maintain that

rule through practices of subjugation, subordination, and submission” (24). Secondly, he

enjoyed dominating men of the lower class. In the second chapter of the novel, Fitzgerald

selected the adjective “decisively” (31) to describe Tom’s way of speaking to an old dog-

3
seller, which manifested Tom’s habit to play a much more powerful role in this kind of

relationship. George Wilson, an owner of a shabby garage, was Tom’s another target. By

making Wilson cuckold by keeping Myrtle as his mistress, he exercised his domination over

Wilson in domestic sense. In addition, he viciously toyed with Wilson in work concerning the

latter’s wish to buy one of his cars. There is a dialogue centering on this issue in chapter two:

“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder.

‘How’s business?”

“I can’t complain.” answered Wilson unconvincingly, “When are you going to

sell me that car?”

“Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.”

“Works pretty slow, don’t he?”

“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “And if you feel that way about it, maybe

I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.” (28)

Obviously, Tom was a man who must feel himself in control all the time. When Wilson

slightly queried the validity of his words, he immediately changed his attitude to ensure his

authority. He also tried to establish domination over Gatsby, whose money was still “new”

and thus not worth mentioning in his opinion. For example, in chapter six, he kept insulting

4
Gatsby in front of a group of people viciously, in order to show that he, as an old rich with his

wealth inherited from a well-established family in Chicago, was in an advantageous position.

Tom was a static character, as he did not (and had no intention to) change his major

attribute—the instinct to dominate the weaker—a bit throughout the novel. At the end of the

story, “in order to eliminate his rival for Daisy’s affection, he sacrificed Gatsby to Wilson,

whom he deliberately sent, armed and crazy, to Gatsby’s house without even telephoning

Gatsby to warn him” (Tyson 71). The following is Nick’s dialogue with him centering on this

event in the last chapter of the fiction:

“Tom,” I inquired, “what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?”

He stared at me without a word and I knew I had guessed right about those

missing hours. I started to turn away but he took a step after me and grabbed my

arm.

“I told him the truth,” he said. “He came to the door while we were getting

ready to leave and when I sent down word that we weren’t in he tried to force his

way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn’t told him who owned the

car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was in the house—”

He broke off defiantly. “What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him.

5
 He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s but he was a tough one. He

ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car. (190-191)

There is no doubt that he wilfully misled and manipulated Wilson for his own purpose, but he

shamelessly claimed that he told Wilson the “truth”. Besides, even though he caused the death

of Gatsby intentionally, he insisted that Gatsby himself should take the chief responsibility for

his own death. Such an attitude at the end of the story explicitly reveals Tom’s intrinsic and

unchanged mindset: he was the unchallengeable authority figure and had the right to rule over

those with no power. His self-defense in front of Nick also demonstrated his feeling of

supremacy over Myrtle—a poor woman (a “dog”) whose death did not deserve a real truth at

all.

Gatsby, the hero of this fiction, fully accepted the patriarchal thinking that a successful

life for men was equal to his ability to improve his social class and achieve great wealth.

Since he was a young man, he tried every means to get rid of his “shiftless and unsuccessful

farm people” (105). Superficially, his pursuit of Daisy was typical of “the romantic quest to

obtain a bride” (Tyson 240). Essentially, “possession of Daisy would give Gatsby what he

really wants: a permanent sign that he belongs to her socioeconomic class” (74). In this novel,

when he first met Daisy, instead of treating her as a human being, he regraded her as a

6
valuable commodity and evaluated her value based on the grand house that she lived in and

the numerous pursuers that she had:

It amazed him—he had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave

it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there—it was as casual a thing

to her as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint

of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and

radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not

musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this

year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It

excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in

his eyes. (158)

Later, he commodified Daisy once again and expressed his wish to marry her because of her

charm endowed by her richness: “he knew that Daisy was extraordinary but he didn’t realize

just how extraordinary a ‘nice’ girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich,

full life, leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt married to her, that was all” (159). Therefore, it is

reasonable to say that Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy is more an endeavour to enter the world of

7
great wealth that Daisy represented than a devotion to pure love. He is a man that succumbed

to the patriarchal beliefs about men and success in essence.

Similar to Tom, Gatsby’s life was also stagnant in this patriarchal society. First of all, he

died at the end of the story, which indicated that there was no possibility for him to change

and progress any more. More than that, he was never aware that Daisy had abandoned him

even until he died. On the contrary, he still loved her wholeheartedly and believed that he

himself was wholeheartedly loved by her when she hit Myrtle to death and selfishly let him be

the scapegoat. A typical example for this argument is that rather than worrying about himself

after the car accident, he was anxious that Daisy would be maltreated by Tom: “I’m just going

to wait here and see if he tries to bother her about that unpleasantness this afternoon. She’s

locked herself into her room and if he tries any brutality she’s going to turn the light out and

on again” (154). The following dialogue between him and Nick also fully demonstrated his

naivety:

“Is it all quiet up there?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes, it’s all quiet.” I hesitated. “You’d better come home and get some sleep.”

He shook his head.

“I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport.” (156-157)

8
As I have analysed before, due to Gatsby’s commodification of Daisy, Daisy was no more a

real person to him than merely a sign of the higher socioeconomic class that he was eager to

join. Therefore, Gatsby’s unchanged loyalty to Daisy actually symbolised that he never gave

up his dream of improving his social status.

Part 3 Convenience Store Woman: Ineffective Resistance Against the

Patriarchal Society

In Convenience Store Woman, Murata portrayed a male character called Shiraha, who is a

rebel against the patriarchal society. First of all, Shiraha’s physical appearance is a silent

protest against what he, as a man, should look like. When Keiko met Shiraha for the first time

in the convenience store, her attention was immediately drawn to his skinny figure:

The door opened quietly, and a tall man, almost six feet and lanky like a wire

coat hanger, came in, his head drooping.

He looked as though he were made of wire, and his glasses were like silver

twined around his face. He was wear a white shirt and black trousers as dictated by

the store rules, but he was too skinny and the shirt didn’t fit him, so that while his

wrists were exposed, the fabric was naturally puckered around his stomach.

9
 I covered my shock at his skin-and-bone appearance by quickly lowering my

head in greeting. (36)

Later, Keiko emphasised the skinniness of Shiraha was once again, “he was all skin and bones

and probably needed the suspenders visible through his white shirt to hold his trousers up.

The skin on his arms looked as though it was stuck straight onto his bones, and I wondered

how all his internal organs could fit into such a skinny body” (51). Through the repetition of

the words, which are the synonyms of “skinny”, and the reiteration of her astonishment in the

aforementioned two quotations, we can clearly sense Keiko’s considerable shock at Shiraha’s

“abnormally” thin body. Shiraha, by utterly astonishing other people and showing no slight

intention to change1, clearly delivered one message—he was not interested in being a

“normal” (or physically strong in this case) man.

Secondly, Shiraha’s refusal to work is his another resistance against the patriarchal

gender roles. Undoubtedly, he was fully aware that men were defined by work, as he once

talked about this issue with Keiko lucidly:

Don’t make it sound so easy! We men have it much harder than women, you

know. If you’re not yet a fully fledged member of society, then it’s get a job, and if

1
In the whole story, Shiraha never exhibited any shame of his body. There was even a time
when he stood in front of Keiko with only a towel wound round his lower body and didn’t
feel embarrassed at all.
10
 you’ve got a job, it’s earn more money, and if you earn more money, it’s get

married and have offspring. Society is continually judging us. Don’t lump me

together with women. You lot have a cushy time of it” (69).

However, as a man in his mid-thirties, he never tried to find a “proper” job. There is two

piece of evidence for this statement. The first is that in the past, he always ran home and

asked money from his parents when he was in financial straits: “in the past, whenever he had

to weather a situation he would go back to his parents’ house in Hokkaido…. Previous he’d

always managed to wheedle money out of them…” (73). The second is his sister-in-law’s

complaint about his joblessness, such as “he has absolutely no intention of working for a

living” (102-103) and “so go out and get a real job. You’re an adult, after all” (103). Although

he worked in the Smile Mart for a short period of time, he always found an excuse to slack

off. As for his online business, it was nothing but an illusion.

In addition, Shiraha’s self-judgment of doing nothing wrong underneath his refusal to

work is able to strengthen his willpower to resist such a rigid sexist role about men. When he

openly said to Keiko, “if you ask me, this is a dysfunctional society. And since it’s defective,

I’m treated unfairly” (67-68), he actually denied all the negative opinions imposed on him and

made a manifesto about the rightfulness of his action. Therefore, it is reasonable for us readers

11
to predict that he is not likely to devote himself to looking for a “proper” job according to the

rules of the patriarchal society in the near future.

Though Shiraha refused to play the stereotyped gender role in some areas, he was far

from extricating himself from his current difficulties. According to Hooks, “patriarchy

demands of men that become and remain emotional cripples…it is a system that denies men

full access to their freedom of will” (27). Therefore, in order to challenge this system

successfully, men must “regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness

that is the foundation of well-being” (33). There is no denial that Shiraha was able to express

his dissatisfaction with the patriarchal society and “depart from the authority figure’s way of

thinking” (23) from time to time. However, as a man of timid nature and weak will, he could

not completely devote himself to protesting against the deprival of his “full emotional well-

being” (31). On the contrary, he even repressed his personal emotions consciously or

unconsciously in most cases, thus becoming an accomplice of the patriarchal system that he

intended to resist. In Convenience Store Woman, when Keiko’s sister accused him of being

abnormal, he concocted an excuse to make himself seem normal, “the fact is that I’d

connected with my ex-girlfriend on Facebook and we went out drinking together. Keiko was

furious when she found out. She refused to let me sleep with her and shut me in the

12
bathroom” (101), and promised Keiko’s sister, “I am looking for work, although it’s going

slowly, and of course we’re thinking in terms of getting married soon” (101). Later, when he

faced a similar censure from his own sister-in-law, he surrendered and lied once again,

“we’ve discussed all this. Until we have children, I will take care of the home and concentrate

on setting up an online business. Once we have a child, I’ll go out to work and be the

breadwinner of the family” (105). It is clear that by constantly fabricating such a deceptive

self-image of being able to develop “normal” interpersonal relationships and willing to pursue

“normal” goals, Shiraha severely suppressed a large proportion of his free will and finally

colluded in the pain of himself wounded by the patriarchal society.

In Convenience Store Woman, Shiraha’s decision to move into Keiko’s house and its

devastating consequence expose the destructive influence of the denial of “full emotional

well-being” to the utmost. After cohabiting with Keiko, Shiraha began to get rid of people

who were always eager to judge and criticise him, just like he said, “If I go out, my life will

be violated again” (82). In this sense, Keiko’s house was a utopia for Shiraha, which could

shelter him from endless external interruption. However, moving into this utopia also meant

that Shiraha’s suppression of his inner emotions reached a climax. When he said, “I want you

to hide me from everyone who knows me. I haven’t caused any trouble for anyone, but they

13
all think nothing of poking their noses into my life. I just want to exist, quietly breathing”

(88), he actually reduced himself from an individual who possessed free will to an animal

whose only wish was to survive. The collapse of his utopia and the recurrence of

maltreatment in the near future, which were implied at the end of the fiction, demonstrated

that the repression and eradication of his emotions, rather than bringing him any good, would

greatly undermine his previous efforts.

Therefore, it is not surprising at all when we find that Shiraha’s resistance brought no

change for his situation. At the end of the story, he was still regarded as a foreign object and

demanded to be “normal”. For instance, his sister-in-law called him “good-for-nothing” as

before (115), as he had no job and no ability to pay his debt. However, worse still, he even did

not learn anything useful from his failure. When Keiko finally decided to resume her role as a

convenience store worker, he became furious and spat, “you’re out of your mind. The village

mentality of society will never permit such a creature to exist. It goes against the rules! You’ll

just be persecuted by everyone and live a lonely life. You’d be far better off working to

support me. That way everyone’ll breathe easier. They’ll be satisfied. They’ll even be happy

for you” (122). Such a speech, which is merely a repetition of his “village theory” announced

at the very beginning of the story, clearly demonstrates that he is still the old Shiraha, a man

14
who is sensitive enough to realise the harm of the patriarchal society to both sexes, but

incapable of finding the fundamental cause of his dilemma, not to mention having any idea

about how to get rid of it effectively. Thus, there is no exaggeration to say that his unchanged

situation has no possibility to be changed in the future. He is a pathetic man with a stagnant

life permanently.

Part 4 Conclusion

Based on the previous textual analysis, we can reach a conclusion that both The Great

Gatsby and Convenience Store Woman vividly portrayed some male characters whose life

was stagnant and have no hope to be changed due to the harmful influence of the patriarchal

system.

Moreover, as excellent literary texts, The Great Gatsby and Convenience Store Woman

also have practical significance. Firstly, they help us to get rid of a narrow view about

“patriarchy”. In The Will to Change, Hooks clarified stereotyped opinions about “patriarchy”

held by males and females. She stated, “most men never think about patriarchy—what it

means, how it is created and sustained…. The word ‘patriarchy’ just is not a part of their

normal everyday thought or speech. Men…associate it with women’s liberation, with

15
feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences” (17), while feminist

advocates “represent men as always and only powerful, as always and only gaining privileges

from their blind obedience to patriarchy” (26-27) and “believe men are the enemy” (33). She

pointed out that men cannot liberate themselves if they cannot “name the problem” (33) and

“acknowledge that the problem is patriarchy” (33). In addition, if women “place the sole

blame for perpetuating patriarchy and male domination onto men” (26), they actually “collude

in the pain of men wounded by patriarchy” (26). Therefore, through foregrounding the

predicament of men in the patriarchal society as well as challenging feminists’ view that men

are always in control, The Great Gatsby and Convenience Store Woman provide both sexes

with an opportunity to be set free from the narrow-minded prejudices and have a more

comprehensive understanding of the word “patriarchy”.

Secondly, these two texts make a contribution to solving men’s dilemma in the

patriarchal society. Hooks put forward, “to truly address male pain and male crisis we must as

a nation be willing to expose the harsh reality that patriarchy has damaged men in the past and

continues to damage them in the present” (31). Therefore, it is reasonable for us to say that by

revealing the great harm of the patriarchal system to men, The Great Gatsby and Convenience

Store Woman make a meaningful step towards literation for men.

16
 Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Yilin Press, 2013.

Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change. Washington Square Press, 2004. Print.

Murata, Sayaka. Convenience Store Woman. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori,

Portobello Books, 2018.

Tyson, Louis. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. 1999. Routledge, 2006.

17