Examples Of Daisy In The Great Gatsby

“‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool’” (Fitzgerald 17). Daisy in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a woman caught between two men vying for her love. Neither wants it just for the fact of her love but for the achievement of their life goals and the unraveling of this story reveals the truth about the realization of the American dream which relies entirely on the complacency of women. Tom has a perfect life until Daisy is revealed to be cheating. Gatsby builds his own life entirely around Daisy. Daisy reveals her emotions about her life to Nick which leads to him engaging in The Buchanan’s craziness and leads to the derailment

His life is perfect. And yet he cheats because his wife is not enough. Tom struggles with seeing anything of himself outside of the American Dream and physically cannot think of an existence in which he is not married to Daisy even if the relationship is not satisfactory to either of them. He has attached himself and his masculinity to this meretricious world view so finding out that Daisy is cheating on him is not so much a betrayal of their relationship as it is a betrayal of his lifestyle. The maintenance of his lifestyle relies wholly on a Daisy who does not question or feel but loves him and the permanence of child-rearing, but obviously, Daisy is not this because she knows Tom is cheating and instead of doing nothing, she retaliates and lets him go. “‘Go ahead,’ answered Daisy genially, ‘and if you want to take down any addresses here’s my little gold pencil’” (Fitzgerald 105) Daisy is never unclear about her opinion on Tom sleeping around. Loyalty in a relationship is a double standard often placed on women who are told to be loving and nurturing to the point that men have been taught that it’s okay for them to be childish because a woman will “fix” them. This supercilious mindset paired with the nuclear family aspect of the American Dream allows men to go into the world unprepared to live in it getting married to a woman who is supposed to be perfect and do all of the

His house happens to be close enough to Daisy and Tom’s house in East Egg to visit them, and so he does. Nick as a character is introduced as so unassuming that people just tell him things and so it’s no surprise when both Daisy and Tom confide in him about their respective deviations from their relationship. Nick is stated to be well-off in the stock industry when Gatsby tries to get him illegal business as thanks for setting him up with Daisy but this rapidly declines afterward as evidenced in the second to last chapter when he reveals that he’s forgotten his 30th birthday. This represents the loss of time that could be focused on the American dream at the expense of Gatsby and the Buchanans which all starts with Daisy expressing her frustration with American society’s treatment of women which is highlighted by the symbolism in Daisy’s name. A daisy is a white flower with a yellow center which Fitzgerald has made to symbolize false purity and death, and in the story, this is what Daisy is. She is the perfect woman and wife but with fractious tendencies from the point of view of the men around