Color In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Wilting Daisy
The Great Gatsby is known as one of America’s greatest classics of twentieth-century literature. A historical fiction novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s. The novel uses colors in different, ironic depictions throughout the story. While white is normally used to describe purity, red to describe love, yellow to describe nature, and green to describe hope; however, Fitzgerald uses these colors in ironic ways to carry out the story. In the novel, The Great Gatsby uses white to describe Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan ironically and uses yellow to establish the corruption of the characters.
In chapter four, Jordan first describes her younger days with Daisy and

She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night. ‘Anyways, for an hour!’” (Fitzgerald 74). Throughout the novel, Jordan seems to think highly of Daisy Buchanan. In the flashback where she remembers her early memories with Daisy, she describes her as the most popular girl in all of Louisville. She also recalls she “was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older girls, I admired her most” (Fitzgerald 75). According to Daniel J. Schneider's article, “Color-Symbolism in the Great Gatsby,” Daisy and Jordan “seem to float off into the air, a bit unreal, like fairies” (146) -- as Daisy’s maiden name is Fay. Here, white symbolism appears to be a mask for all the ugly, just displaying the magical side to the readers. Typically, white is

He associates it with green, red, blue, but mostly yellow. Daisy Buchanan can be seen as a “pure” person with a stained center. The center, is Gatsby; as he, and his belongings, are widely portrayed in the story as yellow and all varieties of. According to “Color Symbolism in Literature: What do Colors Mean in Literature and Poetry?” by Jacob Olesen, yellow is normally “associated with joy, happiness, intellect and energy. It is a stimulating color that represents honor, loyalty, and stimulates mental activity.” Fitzgerald takes the color in a complete opposite direction. In the novel, Fitzgerald uses yellow to display corruption. He shows how Daisy’s name comes to what it truly means, white with the corrupting yellow center. Daisy, herself, has the yellow, golden hair. As much as Daisy Buchanan tries to hide her facade over society, the clouds clear as the novel moves on. At the end of the novel, Nick has had enough of the ‘white Daisy with the golden center’. “I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made…” (Fitzgerald 179). Once the facade slowly disappears,