Failed Masculinity: Performative Legitimacy and Gendered Exclusion in Hamlet and The Great Gatsby

Masculine authority in literary narratives often appears stable and self-evident, yet moments of its breakdown reveal the conditions under which legitimacy is granted or withheld. This article examines masculine failure in Hamlet and The Great Gatsby by asking how historically distinct regimes of legitimacy shape the intelligibility of masculine performance. Focusing on honor in the Renaissance and capital in modern capitalism, the analysis shows that masculine failure takes different forms across these contexts. In Hamlet, ethical hesitation and temporal delay disrupt an honor-based expectation of decisive action, such that reflective masculinity becomes socially unintelligible. In The Great Gatsby, visible striving and performative excess expose the limits of capital as a source of masculine legitimacy, particularly in the absence of inherited status. Read comparatively, the two texts suggest that masculine failure is not a singular condition, but a historically variable outcome shaped by institutional norms and regimes of recognition. Rather than an achieved identity, masculinity emerges here as a precarious status that depends on social authorization and remains vulnerable to withdrawal.