Careless Daisy, Incurable Jordan, and Dead Myrtle: Teaching <i>The Great Gatsby</i> in the Post‐#MeToo Era

ABSTRACT This article examines the pedagogical challenges and strategies of teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby within the intensified anti‐feminist climate of post‐#MeToo South Korea, where feminist perspectives face severe marginalization and active opposition. Korean college students typically admire Gatsby's self‐made success and romantic idealism while uncritically accepting the novel's portrayal of female characters as morally deficient. Drawing from experiences teaching the novel at Korean universities between 2023 and 2024, this study analyzes how targeted pedagogical interventions—critically examining Nick Carraway's unreliable narration and implementing mock trials inspired by Azar Nafisi—created safe spaces for gender critique without provoking the anti‐feminist backlash prevalent in Korean academic settings. By contextualizing the novel within both 1920s gender constraints and the contemporary Korean anti‐feminist climate, these strategies helped students recognize the lack of voice afforded to female characters and structural limitations on their agency, thereby developing more nuanced interpretations of characters commonly dismissed as unworthy. Post‐exercise reflections demonstrated students' emerging awareness of their previously unexamined gender biases when assessing literary characters. The findings demonstrate how literary pedagogy can foster critical consciousness about gender representation in environments where feminist discourse faces significant stigmatization, thereby offering insights for teaching canonical texts in similarly contested cultural contexts.