White In The Great Gatsby

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]. [In her] beautiful white” (Fitzgerald 22) girlhood, “she dressed in white, and had a little white roadster” (Fitzgerald 80). This describes Daisy when she was eighteen years old, when she was in the prime time of her youth. White is used to convey her innocent childhood years. It also describes how she is

At Gatsby’s house, “the grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light” (Fitzgerald 101). The grey windows are being overlooked here because the house is illuminated with yellow light. This represents that the flashy, bright people outshine the boring and poor people in the society of The Great Gatsby. Another grey symbol is the Valley of The Ashes, an empty “grey [waste]land [filled with] spasms of bleak dust” (Fitzgerald 26). When “the ash-grey men swarm up [to go to work]... a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track” (Fitzgerald 26). It is a very bland and lifeless place filled with darkness and misery. It symbolizes bareness and the people of the lower class. Wilson is also a gloomy character; he goes to his office, “mingling immediately with the cement colour of the walls. a white ashen dust veiled his dark suit” (Fitzgerald 29). He is surrounded by many grey symbols because he is living a dull life. He works in a garage, his wife is cheating on him, and he’s in proximity to the Valley of the Ashes. He is a prime example of a miserable