Flowers In The Great Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the roaring twenties are explored through an outsider’s perspective on how status consumes people. It is shown through the division of class within New York between West Egg and East Egg where new money and old money view society differently when it comes to wealth and societal norms. Though, the one thing both areas had in common, was the people’s desire to climb social hierarchies and how it consumed them which is represented through flowers. In reality and in the novel as well, flowers are used to symbolize innocence, beauty, and fragility but Fitzgerald alters the motif into focusing on the falsity of New York City and how the truth hides behind the beauty of a flower. Flowers are an illustration

It branches into the insincerity and superficial aspects of West and East Egg where what characters truly feel are always masked. Later on in the novel as Nick dives into Daisy’s past life he says, “For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes” (Fitzgerald 155). The world that Daisy lives in is built up by status and her aura of wealth and privilege though through the term “artificial” it is shown to be nothing more than a facade. Throughout the novel, flowers are also used as a reminder for the illusion of happiness and the reality of discontentment. This is shown through Daisy’s character and the experiences that Nick describes regarding her where he says, “At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with the low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor” (Fitzgerald 155). Daisy’s comparison to flower petals is her external appearance of purity and innocence, the phrase “rose petals blown by the sad horns around

For many years, roses have been known as a symbol for beauty, though the meaning changes in the novel as Nick says, “He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon scarcely created grass” (Fitzgerald 165). For Nick to say that Gatsby could have seen what a “grotesque thing a rose is” signifies that people only view things from a certain angle because either they choose to do so or they are deceived. Where roses are not always beautiful, society just formulated it into a symbol of beauty. It is a glance at Gatsby’s first taste of reality after having lived in this fantasy of his for many years. The use of the term grotesque separates Gatsby’s reality from his fantasy as it is seen as the, “actual intermixing of different realms of being, for instance, usually the human and the animal; or the suspension of what we ordinarily take to be reality and its laws; or a pervasive air” (Babb 336). For the rose specifically to be described in this way emphasizes the separation between what Gatsby thought he and Daisy were and what it truly was. It is an emphasis on his realization that his fantasy was the exact opposite of his reality proving how through reality the truth slowly unveils itself as it is focused on more intently