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Color White In The Great Gatsby Essay

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The Impact of the Color White in The Great Gatsby Upon seeing the color white, many people think about certain elements that correspond with the shade. The color white is commonly displayed in media to portray righteousness and simplicity but also discrepancy and luxury. People's wealthiness along with physical and mental cleanliness can often be illustrated through the color white. In the novel The Great Gatsby, these themes commonly occur with certain characters being associated with the color white. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, he displays the color white through his characters to mask superficiality with purity to convey the idea that a need for wealth comes with corruption. Fitzgerald illustrates Gatsby as extremely …show more content…

The character Myrtle is revealed to have a desire for money throughout her actions, moreover, Fitzgerald uses white ashes to resemble her false innocence. When Tom takes Nick to meet with Wilson and the woman he is having an affair with, the color white is characterized throughout this scene. Fitzgerald describes Wilson as having a “white ashen dust” covering his suit, although the dust does not cover “his wife” (Fitzgerald 26). This establishes the theme that distorted chastity is represented through the color white. When at a party, Myrtle reveals she only married Wilson because she thought he “knew something about breeding” meaning she only married him because she wanted him to make lots of money and become very wealthy (Fitzgerald 34). She thought he would be able to build himself up in life, but she guessed incorrectly and ended up having a below average life with him. Wilson's suit being covered in white ashes resembles how Myrtle only married him because she wanted money, which in turn made her corrupt to her

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Myrtle Wilson is looking for superiority. To begin, Myrtle is described as a “woman in the middle thirties and faintly stout,but she carried her flesh sensuously as some women can.” By reading this quote one can tell that Myrtle is an aggressively attractive woman. She 's the wife of George Wilson, who is a lower-middle class man. In order for Myrtle to achieve superiority, she needs to attract Tom as he’s the gateway to her superiority and gaining of socioeconomic status.

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The Great Gatsby introduces many color symbols that have their own meaning and relevance to the story. Fitzgerald used a lot of colors to give an insight to the lives of the characters. The color green represents the future. The color yellow represents money and death. Lastly, the color white represents innocence.

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In the novel “The Great Gatsby”, F. Scott Fitzgerald, uses the imagery of color throughout the book. Social classes, emotional states,and racial slurs, all reflect back on the many different colors that are used throughout the book. The colors are used repeatedly as symbols, and shades to develop the mood and tone In different scenes of the novel. The color white is a symbol of being clean and fresh, on the contrary it could also be very tainted like the color black. Green is the ruling color in the book which represent confidence and hope.

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Once Tom, his mistress and Nick reached the apartment, Myrtle “had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin” (Fitzgerald 31). Finally, “Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume [...] and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-coloured chiffon” (Fitzgerald 35). Notably, Daisy’s delicate demeanour reflects her quiet and calming nature. Daisy’s fluttering dress makes her seem as if she had been blown away in the wind; she is light, elegant and fragile. On the other hand, Myrtle wears a lot of colourful items, which is associated with her bold, forceful and strong personality.

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In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald the colors white, black, red, and gold are heavily used throughout the novel to show purity, impurity, love, death, and greed of Daisy’s character. At the beginning of the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays Daisy as pure and innocent through the use of the color white. The novel goes on to explain, “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house” (Fitzgerald 8). In this instance, white is used to represent purity, that’s why this quote in the novel gives the reader the emotion of purity by portraying a scene in which everything is elegant and tranquil. Towards the end of the story, black becomes Daisy’s main

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Myrtle Wilson, a vulgar, shallow, uneducated woman in her mid thirties, from the Valley of Ashes, is an individual who judges by appearance. Within the first two chapters of the novel, she portrays herself as a woman who finds pleasure through money and materialistic things. On her first meeting with Tom Buchannan during her trip to New York, Myrtle's eyes merely attract Tom's "dress suit," rather than the attires the other passengers in the train are wearing. Considering the look of Tom's clothing, Myrtle judges by appearance and makes the assumption of him being very rich, wealthy, and of high ranking position. Men typically attire in dress suits on formal occasions or when they care about their quality of dressing.

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White is associated with innocence and purity. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald describes Daisy with the word white to represent her innocence and girlhood many times. When we first meet Daisy, she is with Jordan and “they [are] both in white,” (Fitzgerald 10) in “a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion,” (Fitzgerald 9) surrounded in a pure, white room. Right from the beginning of the novel, Daisy is portrayed as a virtuous woman. She says her “white girlhood [with Jordan] was passed together [in Louisville].

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Determination is an important for Odysseus because of long desire to return home. He was held confined on an island all alone. He was tempted many times and fell into temptation in the long covenant of his wife Penelope. Determination is also showed in his thought process; his longing to live For instance, when Odysseus finally goes home, he wanted to hurt the men who had been taking advantage of his wife and he follows through with his plan to kill them. Penelope, Odysseus wife is another example of having complete determination.

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The symbolism of the color white appear several times in the book. But, there was one scene that stood out. The author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the color of white in the scene where Nick is visiting Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald described what happens when Nick was going on a trip with Gatsby in his car, “-only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the elevated I heard the familiar “jug-jug-spat!” of a motor cycle, and a frantic policeman rode alongside. “All right, old sport,” called Gatsby.

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In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, color symbolism is used to reveal important character traits and create a variety of moods throughout chapters 1-4. Fitzgerald incorporates the color white to demonstrate the virginal purity and initial innocence of some of the characters. He also uses this symbolism of the color white to differentiate between social classes. Fitzgerald then affiliates the colors gray and yellow with the dismal corruption that engulfs the novel. To tie everything together, he develops a pattern of the color green to portray how Gatsby’s world revolves around a greedy, yet romanticized dream, only attainable through money.

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