1. Jordan Baker: Cold Hearted Femme Fatale or Feminist Icon?
Getting beyond Nick’s Narrative Frame?

2. Read the essay on ‘The Balancing Girl: Jordan Baker’.

3. Questions Consider the following questions:
Why do you think that Tredell choose the idea of ‘balancing girl’? Is it effective?
How far do you think Fitzgerald wants us to question or even condemn Nick’s assessment of Jordan?
Is it fair to see Nick as a misogynist?
Is there much to admire in Jordan? How does she compare to Daisy for example?
Would you consider Jordan Baker to be a feminist icon?

4. The Balancing Girl
When Nick first meets Jordan, he notices that her chin is ‘raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall’.

5. Celebrity Culture and the ‘It” Girl
By making Jordan a celebrity, Fitzgerald enlarges his novel’s mapping of modern times and enriches his characterisation of her.

6. Independence
But husband-hunting is not Jordan’s main concern in The Great Gatsby. If it were, she could easily have caught one – Nick acknowledges that ‘she could have married [several men] at a nod of her head’.
Jordan’s other flapper-like feature is her independent behaviour; though she goes around with Nick she does not seem to need a man and moves easily through the world on her own.

7. Ann External View (FORM)
Fitzgerald’s external portrayal of her, through appearance, action and dialogue, rather than through evoking her inner thoughts and feelings. But, by drawing on Fitzgerald’s textual hints and applying relevant contextual material, we can challenge Nick’s hostile view of Jordan.

8. Moving Beyond Nick as Narrator
But on the three occasions she makes herself vulnerable to Nick, he rebuffs her.
Jordan suffers her third rebuff in Chapter 8. On the day Gatsby will die, Jordan phones Nick at work and reproaches him: ‘You weren’t so nice to me last night’. Nick retorts ‘How could it have mattered then?’ and a silence follows. One way to interpret this silence would be to suggest that Jordan is shocked by Nick’s insensitivity to her feelings. She says she still wants to see him, but they cannot agree on a rendezvous and the conversation ends – like their earlier one outside Tom’s house – ‘abruptly’.

9. Off Balance
At Jordan and Nick’s last meeting, Jordan makes it clear that she feels Nick rejected her, not vice versa: ‘you did throw me over [...] it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while’. The adjective ‘dizzy’ links with the early image of Jordan as ‘the balancing girl’ and shows that Nick, for a time, had the power to throw her off balance; that she is more vulnerable than Nick wants to believe.

10. Connections to the Poems
The hostile depiction of women
The male gaze as objectifying
Women as heart-hearted
The independent woman as dangerous
The male hero as self-pitying
The female as disposable
Failed love
Bitterness

11. Key Poems: Can you connect the poems below to the depiction of Jordan in The Great Gatsby?
Whoso list to Hunt
Sir Thomas Wyatt
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell
The Scrutiny
Richard Lovelace
The Garden of Love
William Blake
Ae Fond Kiss
Robert Burns
She Walks in Beauty
Lord Byron
The Ruined Maid
Thomas Hardy
At an Inn
La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad
John Keats
Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae
Ernest Dowson