i

Beyond Woman, Mystery, and Myth: A Study of Daisy Fay Buchanan in

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

A Thesis

Presented to the

Graduate Faculty of the

University of Louisiana at Lafayette

In Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Heather Elizabeth Degeyter

Summer 2015
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   ii  

© Heather Elizabeth Degeyter

2015

All Rights Reserved

   iii  

Beyond Woman, Mystery, and Myth: A Study of Daisy Fay Buchanan in

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Heather Elizabeth Degeyter

APPROVED:

______________________________ ______________________________
Mary Ann Wilson, Chair Yung-Hsing Wu
Professor of English Associate Professor of English

______________________________ ______________________________
Jerry McGuire Mary Farmer-Kaiser
Professor of English Dean of the Graduate School
   iv  

EPIGRAPH

“…you don’t know all I have to suffer and bear in silence.” — Becky Sharp, Vanity Fair
   5  

Table of Contents
EPIGRAPH .............................................................................................................................iv
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1
A Look Back at The 1920s New Woman ................................................................... 6
Simone de Beauvoir’s Eternal Feminine & Daisy Fay Buchanan .......................... 8
Chapter 1: “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in
his ghostly heart”: Daisy as Idol and Illusion ......................................................... 10
Daisy as Illusion ......................................................................................................... 14
Chapter 2: “High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl”: Daisy as
Commodity and Slave ............................................................................................... 24
Daisy as Slave ............................................................................................................. 27
Concluding Thoughts ................................................................................................ 30
Chapter 3: Film Coda and Audience Reception: “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud” . 32
The Great Gatsby (1926): Mother Daisy Buchanan ................................................ 34
The Great Gatsby (1949): A Repentant Daisy Buchanan ....................................... 35
The Great Gatsby (1974): Domesticating Daisy Buchanan ..................................... 37
The Great Gatsby (2013): Infantilized Daisy Buchanan ......................................... 39
Concluding Thoughts ................................................................................................ 41
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 43
Works Cited ........................................................................................................................... 44
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................ 48
Biographical Sketch............................................................................................................... 49
 1

Introduction

“Exegit monumentum aere perennius”

“He completed a monument more durable than bronze.” – Horace

American novels that appeared for the first time nearly one hundred years ago

continue to prompt audiences today to explore constructed cultural meanings about America

as a nation and our interconnected cultural identity in relation to specific historical moments.

Canonical literary texts like The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Mark Twain’s The

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby all play

important roles in forming the American literary canon, and each perpetuates what we think

of as “American” qualities of independence, practicality, and, like Jay Gatsby, the “capacity

to commit… to… aspirations” (Fitzgerald 10). The myth of America – that is to say, the

collective stories that impact our national psyche – encompass what we think of ourselves

and our history, our values and our beliefs, and, often, our most basic principles.

In the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 The Great Gatsby (TGG), the subject of

capitalistic forces at work was timely, though it was not until after Fitzgerald died that the

book gained any popular traction. According to Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, TGG

has become “the most widely read, translated, admired, imitated, and studied twentieth-

century work of American fiction” (Bruccoli xv). And Bruccoli was on to something: as of

mid-2013 TGG had sold 25 million copies worldwide, boasting 500,000 copies sold a year,

has been translated into 42 different languages, and sold 185,000 e-book copies in early 2013

(Donahue).
 2

Georgetown Professor and National Public Radio (NPR) Book Critic Maureen

Corrigan corroborates Bruccoli’s research in her 2014 book So We Read On: How The Great

Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures with her opening lines: “Forget great. The Great

Gatsby is the greatest – even if you didn’t think so when you had to read it in high school”

(3). Alongside citations of Gatsby’s long history of failed sales; facts from Fitzgerald’s

biography; connections to the noir “hard-boiled” genre; her National Endowment of the Arts

Great Books/Big Read Gatsby debut; and one of the book’s earliest revivals with the Armed

Service Editions (ASE), Corrigan works hard to explain exactly why it is that she, and others,

believe Gatsby to be our Great American Novel. After 334 pages of Corrigan’s defense, how

the book was being marketed, both during WWII and today, indicates how it functions with

regard to class, race, and gender. During her research in the Rare Book and Special

Collections reading room of the Library of Congress, Corrigan stumbled on the only

complete set of ASEs in the world. The ASEs on display were the same “funny paperbacks”

her father mentioned were distributed to the Navy and Army during World War II. Corrigan

explains:

The ASE program is often referred to as ‘the biggest book giveaway in world

history.’ Between the time it was launched, in 1943, to its end, in 1947, nearly

123 million books were distributed to U.S. troops overseas, everything from

Hopalong Cassidy’s Protégé to Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa;

Homer’s Odyssey…to Melville’s Moby-Dick. The program was the brainchild

of the Council on Books in Wartime, a group of publishers, librarians, and

booksellers whose aim was to do their part for the war effort. Because

boredom was an ever-present problem for America’s men in uniform when

 3

they weren’t fighting, the military brass was always looking for ways to keep

up morale. The council hit on the idea of distributing inexpensive paperbacks

to servicemen overseas, in military hospitals, and even in POW camps in

Germany and Japan through an arrangement with the International YMCA.

(230)

Boredom. Morale. Cost. One can assume the same factors and motivations would

initiate some sort of distribution to troops today. Interestingly enough though, the council’s

motto was “Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas” (230), a motto that is relevant to both

my research and Corrigan, because it suggests that reading served larger societal purposes.

Aside from the aforementioned titles, The Grapes of Wrath, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Short Stories of Stephen Vincent Benét, A Tree

Grows in Brooklyn, and others, The Great Gatsby was also distributed during the five-year

period (233). But, before we assume that these types of reading slogans are something of the

past, Corrigan explains that during her lecture on The Great Gatsby for the NEA in 2013, a

set of bulleted talking points was given to her that read, “Good readers make good citizens”

and “Good readers generally have more financially rewarding jobs” (138, emphasis

original). Flash forward another year and Gatsby is marketed through popular wedding-

planning sites labeled MyGatsby.com, stationary printing companies that specialize in the

“Gatsby Theme,” “Gatsby-Enthusiast” jewelry and headdress replica businesses, and prints

of all kinds sporting phrases like “The Hangover Only Lasts A Day But the Memories Last a

Lifetime,” “I Party With Jay Gatsby” and the infamous last lines of the novel itself: “So we

beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (212). Tiffany and

Co. and Brooks Brothers, large sponsors for the most recent Baz Luhrmann adaptation of the
 4

book, produced ads featuring no platitudes but rather lush-looking suits, $200,000 diamond-

incrusted head pieces, and engraved onyx and gold coated cufflinks all under “The Great

Gatsby Collection” (Jazz Age Glamour: The Gatsby Collection). Each item pays homage to

the past we are all “borne ceaselessly back into,” or at the very least, to the imagined past of

The Great Gatsby. This media presence indicates that audiences and purchasers desperately

want to be a part of this fictional “Gatsby” world, perhaps not explicitly part of the world of

limited rights for individuals or post-Victorian manners, but to a place that has seduced the

American imagination with promises of excitement, prosperity, and glamour.

Jay Gatsby himself is shrouded in these qualities but remains mythologized in

scholarship, teaching guides, and films. But what about Gatsby makes him so great in the

American imagination? Is it his position as the American romantic hero, sacrificing the life

he had and the life he created for the woman he loved? Is it his inexhaustible dedication to a

singular dream? His Benjamin Franklin-esque need for self-improvement? As a gangster and

conman, Gatsby is not the traditional hero found in most narratives, yet he invigorates a kind

of rooted nationalism in American audiences from the novel’s conception in the 1920s to its

most recent adaptation in 2013. Though scholars have argued the question of Gatsby’s

greatness for nearly 100 years, there is one consistent thread to the Gatsby discussion.

Daisy Buchanan remains one of the most polarized and negatively portrayed female

characters in American literature. It is her connection to Gatsby that is often mythologized

and subsequently blamed for our tragic American hero’s downfall. Marius Bewley in his

essay “Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America” characterizes Daisy as full of “vicious

emptiness … and monstrous moral indifference” (239). Leslie Fiedler in his book An End to

Innocence tells readers that Daisy is a “dark destroyer” who purveys death and corruption.
 5

Fiedler goes on to say that Daisy is the “first notable anti-virgin of our fiction, the prototype

of the blasphemous portraits of the Fair Goddess as bitch in which our twentieth century

fiction abounds” (Fiedler). Alfred Kazin calls her “vulgar and inhuman,” while Robert

Ornstein considers her “criminally amoral.” Though today’s critics, like Maureen Corrigan,

have softened and often state that Daisy’s personality and character are not as important as

the function she serves within the narrative, the reinvigorated Gatsby readers of 2013 (most

marketers attribute this revival to anticipation of the movie’s release) again refer to her as “at

best infantile and impressionable, and at worst, possibly selfish to the point of pathology”

(Baker). Just as Gatsby has inevitably been rooted in the cultural fabric of America, so too

has Daisy, but not as something to aspire to, but rather as a dangerous object one should

avoid.

Understanding Gatsby as an iconic figure of the American cultural imagination, or his

story as perhaps the stuff of The Great American Novel, allows audiences from high school

dropouts to war-time soldiers to award-winning, NPR-speaking literary scholars to contend

with the ever-changing meaning inscribed on the Great American Novel’s body. And this is

precisely why the NEA statements, alongside the ASEs, show how important “Classic

Literature” is to our societal fabric, even if this literature has long been put to rest. If

academics and teachers, soldiers and housewives, children and their friends, are exposed to

these works, and told that it is imperative for them to identify with the nationalistic qualities

of perseverance, dedication, and sacrifice in an effort to feel “American,” worthy, or

educated enough for a financially-stable (and rewarding!) job, what happens when what they

are being asked to identify with is… unidentifiable and elusive as the figure of Daisy

Buchanan, the object of Gatsby’s much-mythologized quest?

 6

A Look Back at The 1920s New Woman

The Jazz Age, a term coined by Fitzgerald, marks one of the most socially pivotal

times in America. With shorter skirts, bobbed haircuts, and universal suffrage, women were

freer to move about society, smoking and drinking without chaperones and corseted social

restrictions; the age of the “New Woman” had arrived. According to the History Channel’s

segment on “The Roaring Twenties,” the most familiar symbol of this change for women

could be seen as the iconic flapper, or the woman that did “unladylike” things and boasted a

sexually “free” existence (“The Roaring Twenties”). Just as Tom Buchanan exclaims in the

Plaza Hotel, “Nowadays, people begin sneering at family life and family institutions and next

they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white”

(Fitzgerald 137), conservative members of society experienced an anxiety about the

emerging New Woman, as this movement would change women’s relationship to politics, the

home, the workplace, and education. Fear of the disintegration of family life and the moral

decay of society was on the horizon.

Influenced by the ideological structures of his time, Fitzgerald embedded these

anxieties in his novel through minor characters such as Myrtle’s sister Catherine and the girls

at Gatsby’s parties, and our three main female characters Daisy Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson,

and Jordan Baker. When looking to the minor characters in Gatsby a stereotype appears:

these women are all single, unashamed, insincere, and egotistical. Perhaps most aptly

represented is the scene in which Benny McClenahan arrives at Gatsby’s party with four

girls, as Nick remarks:

They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so

identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there
 7

before. I have forgotten their names— Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or

Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names

of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists

whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be. (70)

Other minor characters like the “shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible” (34) Mrs. McKee

and Myrtle’s “slender, worldy girl” (34) of a sister Catherine are examples of this vague,

though consistently negative, view of the New Woman this novel boasts. These loud, vulgar

young women as a whole elicit the novel’s condemnation precisely because of their violation

of patriarchal gender roles.

Daisy, Myrtle, and Jordan each embody an attribute of the New Woman as well. Each

behaves immodestly, none seem primarily concerned with hearth or home, and each engages

in pre- or extra-marital sex. Jordan Baker is a cheater and liar. Myrtle Wilson is overtly

sexual and aggressive. Daisy Buchanan could be characterized as a merciless killer and

petulant child. But it is the implications of these attributes that are interesting: Jordan the

Woman cannot succeed on sheer talent in a man’s field; Myrtle’s sexuality is rivaled only by

the likes of Tom Buchanan, a known philanderer, and Daisy venturing outside of the home

sphere only promises disastrous tragedies - tragedies she could have avoided had she stayed

in her “right” place. These women’s actions have consequences: Jordan is “thrown over” by

Nick, Myrtle is mutilated by one of America’s most promising inventions, and Daisy retreats

into a loveless marriage. Their real crime appears to be subverting their society’s traditional

patriarchal roles.

The strict patriarchal roles that the New Woman found herself rebelling against are

the prime subject matter of feminist thinker, Simone de Beauvoir, whose main text, The
 8

Second Sex (1949) discusses at length the kinds of myths and expectations our society

imposes upon the female sex in a kind of exercise of Othering, however unconscious and

interpellated these practices may be. By understanding Daisy Buchanan through the lens of

Beauvoir’s main work, we can extract and examine the compulsory contradictive nature of

woman. As the New Woman continued to push the proverbial envelope, the flouting of

patriarchal roles was inevitably met with resistance, manifesting itself in many areas,

including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Simone de Beauvoir’s Eternal Feminine & Daisy Fay Buchanan

The myth of the “Eternal Feminine” as Simone de Beauvoir developed it in her 1949

text The Second Sex, is not a myth in the simplest of senses. It is a complicated array of

stories, beliefs, images, personal experiences, assumptions, and perceptions connected to an

equally complicated array of social practices and performances, institutions and ideologies.

Feminists have been deconstructing the ideas and beliefs about femininity with the term

“myth” for decades because of its intrinsic function as “a symbolic text that presents a story

which, in turn, transmits values, norms and patterns, norms and patterns essential and

fundamental for a given culture” (Mach 58). Just as this myth stands in as an archetype

favorable for literary analysis, it offers a singular, though complicated, definition of

“woman,” often far beyond literary pursuits. The innumerable definitions of woman lead

readers to no one clear definition, but rather a laundry list of extremes and contradictions.

From one of the term’s literary conceptions in Goethe’s Faust, where women represent

Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Passivity, to the deeply set roots of Christianity (particularly in

Catholic traditions), where women represent the Eve/Mary dichotomy as both seducer and

temptress but also virginal mother, this myth constructs Woman into consistently
 9

unattainable and contradictory roles. For Simone de Beauvoir, the myth of the Eternal

Feminine presented itself as a series of dichotomies and ideas:

[Woman] is an idol, a servant, source of life, power of darkness, she is the

elementary silence of truth, she is artifice, gossip, and lies; she is the medicine

woman and witch; she is man’s prey; she is his downfall, she is everything he

is not and wants to have, his negation and his raison d’etre… woman

embodies nature as Mother, Spouse, and Idea; these figures are sometimes

confounded and sometimes in opposition, and each has a double face.

(Beauvoir 162-163)

For the text of The Great Gatsby, these myths apply to each of the novel’s female characters

but perhaps none quite so well as Daisy Buchanan. Through the scenes in which she is

featured, remembered, or idealized, these dichotomies constrain her character into strict

confinement with the patriarchal idea of woman. It is through her roles as Idol, Illusion,

Commodity, and Slave that Daisy is drained of actual self-awareness and personhood.

Perhaps more important is the place she holds in the canonical American novel; if Daisy

Buchanan is confined to a strict set of misshapen stereotypes, and we as Americans celebrate

this novel as one of our Greats, how do we time and time again read women in the Great

American Narrative? I argue that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, our proclaimed

Great American Novel, uses the character of Daisy Buchanan and her various “Eternal

Feminine” myths to perpetuate a distorted reflection of femininity. I also seek to prove that

Daisy as part and parcel of America’s New Woman, as well as in her subsequent adaptations

in film, further distorts America’s identification with woman.

 10

Chapter 1: “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his
ghostly heart”: Daisy as Idol and Illusion

Perhaps the most obvious myth supported by the character of Daisy Buchanan is her

image as Idol, specifically for Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s ascension to wealth, found through his

business “gonnegtions,” colossal mansion, and piles of imported shirts, are a means to the

end, and that end is a return to the fantasy of his seventeen-year-old self, regardless of Daisy

Fay Buchanan the Person. By making Daisy an Idol, one that is his reason for existence and

source of life, Gatsby is using her to reinforce his own self-serving mythology. The fantasy

of Daisy to Gatsby, carefully cultivated over five years, dehumanizes and reinforces the part

she plays in his life, and in his myth, and thus contributes to his demi-god status.

From the novel’s beginning to its end, Gatsby is shrouded in mystery. Though Jordan

first casually mentions Gatsby during the Buchanan dinner party, Nick recites a laundry list

of rumored identities for Gatsby: Gatsby is the cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm, the ruler of

Germany during World War I (Fitzgerald 42); is a murderer (50); a German spy during the

war (50); a bootlegger (63); and nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil

(why the distinction of proximity to the devil, no one is sure) (63). Gatsby himself propagates

his own myth by telling “God’s truth” (sneakily his own truth, harkening to his demi-god

status) to Nick, explaining that he was like a “young rajah” collecting jewels and traveling all

over Europe and then, suddenly, he is a war hero, single-handedly fighting German forces.

He even goes on to explain that he helped save the Montenegrin people and Nick concludes,

“[Gatsby’s] smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the

brave struggles of the Montenegrin people” (67). Though Nick, the mediator throughout the

novel, considers these rumors simple gossip for the partygoers, Gatsby displays his Medals

of Honor and Oxford photograph as proof. Later in the novel, Nick explains:
 11

Contemporary legends such as the ‘underground pipe-line to Canada’ attached

themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a

house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up

and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of

satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to say. (91)

These Gatsby myths, whether associated with the devil or an underground pipe-line,

directly reinforce Gatsby’s image of himself, a wealthy and worthy partner for Daisy Fay.

Though Nick’s narrative throughout the novel reinforces the mythologized, glamorous side

of Gatsby’s “eternal hope” he so much admires, these associated myths clearly reinforce both

the idea of Daisy, in relation to Gatsby, as well as the idea of Gatsby to himself. Taking it all

a step further, Nick differentiates between the James Gatz of North Dakota and Jay Gatsby of

West Egg, Long Island in these words:

…[he] sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God –

a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about

His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would

be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. (92)

With his hero’s journey and legend to support his newly imposed identity, Gatsby cannot

turn back and does not wish to. He has ascended to demi-God status, and though the

“incarnation was complete” (101) through a kiss with Daisy, he surrendered his “unutterable

visions to her perishable breath” knowing full well that his mind “would never romp again

like the mind of God” (101). While Tom essentially purchased Daisy for a $350,000 set of
 12

pearls, Gatsby has superimposed his identity, destiny, and visions onto Daisy’s perishable

body.

Though Gatsby’s mythology clearly plays out in the minds of his party-goers,

Fitzgerald aligns his presence with the presence of calm, god-like imperialism. As Nick

observes Gatsby surveying his party, just as “the Jazz History of the World was over” they

see “girls…putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way…swooning

backward playfully into men’s arms, even into groups, knowing that some one would arrest

their falls” (55). Here, Gatsby has created an Edenic retreat from reality, safe for the display

and actions of a Midsummer Night’s Dream heaven, where women are content falling upon

men, even groups of strange(r) men, the exact scene he wishes to play out with Daisy.

Marking Gatsby’s return to his business phone call, and subsequent exit from the party, a

singing woman quickly begins to weep (56) and Nick looks around as, “most of the

remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands” (56). It is as if

Gatsby’s exit triggers a sort of deflation in the room’s energy. Unless the demi-god Jay

Gatsby is present, pandemonium occurs. He is the essential ingredient for the otherworldly

utopic scene that he has constructed around himself. As Gatsby bids farewell to Nick at the

party’s end, people drive hazily off-scene, lush from their carnivalesque adventures. It is not

until Gatsby leaves for another phone call that the iconic automobile accident takes place,

allowing for a very literal crash to take place on his front steps. Whether foreshadowing of

Gatsby (and subsequently Daisy’s) fatal crash of an ending, or a reflection of the power

Gatsby’s identity and all of its trimmings hold over his environment, one thing is sure: it is

the idea of Daisy as Gatsby’s Idol that feeds his egoistic identity in the face of chaos. Here,

Daisy is used as the object of male-centered vision; it does not matter whether Daisy is real,
 13

alive, or present: the idea of Daisy is enough to hold Gatsby’s myth, identity, and destiny

together in his own mind. Daisy’s voice was “a deathless song” (90) to Gatsby, forever

beckoning him to “run faster, stretch out [his] arms further” until one fine morning he attains

his goal of transcending time and going back into the past through his death.

According to Simone de Beauvoir, “…therein lies the marvelous hope that man has

often placed in woman: he hopes to accomplish himself as being through carnally possessing

a being …no man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be women”

(Beauvoir 161). Marvelous hope is something Gatsby is not short in possessing. It is not until

Gatsby possesses Daisy’s docile being, mentioned briefly as a body simply waiting for his

kiss as he awaited, “listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck

upon a star” (101) that her incarnation as ideal being is complete for Gatsby alone. Even as

Daisy “tumbles short of his dreams” upon meeting Gatsby again, he blazes on. Nick recalls

the first afternoon spent with Gatsby and Daisy, finally reunited:

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short

of his dreams – not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality

of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown

himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out

with every bright feather that drifted his way. (90)

Saying that Gatsby never loved Daisy, not truly, seems too controversial to claim at

this point, perhaps because it hits too close to the home of our beloved myth of the American

identity often associated with Gatsby. Alas, Daisy’s identity is subsumed into James Gatz,

who is desperate to maintain and survive as the newly minted Jay Gatsby. His golden girl,
 14

“gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” (150), is nothing

more than a biblical golden calf, awaiting sacrifice at man’s hands.

Daisy as Illusion

As previously stated in the first section, the myth of woman as Idol and the myth of

woman as Illusion are somewhat intertwined. While Daisy-as-Idol helps Gatsby self-

propagate, he regards Daisy as his mirage, one he is desperate to reach. The Daisy Illusion is

as unreachable as it is vague, which further supports the idea that Daisy is a complete

mystery in essence, perhaps simply by virtue of being a woman. Rena Sanderson, in

“Women in Fitzgerald’s Fiction,” remarks about Daisy’s symbolic significance, that, “in a

deceptive, fraudulent world, Daisy still retains her value as a symbol. She represents illusion

itself, the illusion of everything admirable, authentic, desirable, and unattainable” (Sanderson

154).

Before exploring how Daisy embodies this myth of woman as Illusion and the

subsequent repercussions of that myth on the characters in the novel, one must look at

Fitzgerald’s language and character descriptions. Perhaps because of human inarticulacy or,

as Sarah Churchwell in her book Careless People would have readers believe, there is a

certain “romance of possibility” (186) that takes place in Fitzgerald’s writings. In a

wholeheartedly ambitious fervency, he writes words like “unheard,” (Fitzgerald 65)

“unintelligible,” (65) “unfathomable,” (87) “ineffable,” (112) “incalculable” (125)

“uncommunicable,” (128) and “unutterable” (210) to express the unquantifiable ideas that

surrounded the novel’s equally ambitious main character. Churchwell also points out that all

of the characters in Gatsby are “suggestions rather than declarations” (186) making

characters such as Tom Buchanan in all his bulk, the tired and emaciated George Wilson, and
 15

the enigmatic Great Gatsby – all of whom are strongly described yet featureless at the same

time – impressions unto themselves. Jordan, Nick’s “clean, hard, limited person” (Fitzgerald

90), is the only character described thoroughly, down to the most intricate of details, perhaps

because she is our narrator’s particular object of desire. The point, however, is the fact that

each of the other characters is “limited only by our imaginations” (Churchwell 186) and this

very vagueness of the language contributes to Daisy’s hazy delineation.

Over their first dinner together, Nick is the first to describe Daisy as a complicated set

of contradictions with, “her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a

bright passionate mouth…” (9). Like Gatsby’s enchanted objects, Daisy’s face as described

by Nick is one of sorrow but also, according to Sarah Fryer, it is “somehow fragmented –

turned into a set of beautiful objects, much as Tom and Gatsby turn her into an object to suit

their needs. And in her face, as in her life, vitality coexists with suffering” (158).

Understanding how Daisy is illusive, and thus an Illusion that is representative and muted,

prompts critics to analyze her voice and her features. Also, because both Tom and Gatsby

invest in Daisy’s illusory qualities, both find themselves disillusioned by the novel’s end.

Perhaps most distinctive to the novel’s trajectory are the mysterious quality of

Daisy’s voice and the complicated use of colors when it comes to Daisy’s description.

Starting first with her mysterious voice, Glenn Settle in his article “Fitzgerald’s Daisy: The

Siren Voice,” explains “in [Nick’s] attempt to explain the power of Daisy’ attraction, [he]

mentions that Daisy’s voice contains ‘excitement’ and ‘promise’” (Settle 119-120). It is

through this attempt that Nick tries to capture and explain away Daisy’s illusive and

mysterious qualities:
 16

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low,

thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if

each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again… there

was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult

to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had

done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting

things hovering in the next hour. (Fitzgerald 9-10)

Later in the novel, while Nick is not yet fully disenchanted with his cousin, he explains how

her voice and presence weave their power over Gatsby’s imagination:

What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside?

What would happen now in the dim incalculable hours? Perhaps some

unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marveled at,

some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby,

one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of

unwavering devotion. (Fitzgerald 99)

It is perhaps no coincidence then that when Gatsby becomes disillusioned with Daisy, Nick

begins to see her differently as well. It is not until before leaving for the hotel that Nick and

Gatsby think they have articulated what is so mysterious about Daisy: her voice is “full of

money” (Fitzgerald 138). In an effort to explain the power Daisy held over “the men who had

cared for her” (10) they conclude it must have been her wealth and everything it afforded her.

Aside from her voice, and reinforced by some of Fitzgerald’s language discrepancies,

his overt descriptions of Daisy also vary, adding to her illusive quality. In Louisville, Gatsby

sits with her in her roadster and kisses her “dark hair.” Before the hotel scene, Daisy brings
 17

out her daughter Pammy and frets over her “old yellowy hair” (133) that the child inherited

from her. Joan Korenman remarks on Daisy’s conflicting physical descriptions:

This contradiction can be partially explained by an examination of Daisy’s

dual origin [her association with Fitzgerald’s first love Ginevra King and his

wife Zelda Sayre]. In part, too, the discrepancy reflects a fundamental duality

in Daisy herself, her simultaneous embodiment of traits associated with the

fair and the dark women of romantic literature. (574)

Like her lighter-haired counterparts, Daisy is often characterized resembling something pure

and innocent just as her literary sisters Alice (from Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans) and Lucy

Tartan (in Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities). Notable dark-haired heroines of romantic

literature include women such as Cora Munro in Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, Hester

Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Isabel Banford in Melville’s Pierre: or, The

Ambiguities. Though Daisy does not assert herself in the ways these heroines have, her

alliance with the dark-haired tradition also aligns her with, as Korenman would, an “exposure

to life, including the sexual side of life... [as] dark woman exudes sexuality” (577). Also,

some scholars including Korenman would maintain that Daisy’s hair is a deliberate

representation of the dual qualities of woman, while others would argue Fitzgerald was

simply careless in his descriptions. Unsurprisingly, this is a matter of much debate and

further illustrates that the descriptive particulars of characters in The Great Gatsby are really

best left to the reader’s own imagination. Regardless of intent, both Daisy’s voice and her

physical appearance paint her as a shining, impressionistic, and thoroughly nebulous figure,

allowing or perhaps forcing audiences to imprint some of themselves onto her. In similar

fashion, she is a wonder to behold to her fellow characters.

 18

Before discussing exactly what the Daisy Illusion represents for the male characters

in the novel, I will discuss how Daisy, before the novel’s beginning, has safeguarded herself

against having any illusions. I would argue that she is never faulted with having any such

illusion, even in her reuniting with Gatsby mid-novel. As we have already established, Daisy

represents a variety of things in the novel as woman, but the reality is, as Beauvoir would

categorize her, she is Other to the men in her life. Beginning first with her “white girlhood”

as dictated by Jordan, Daisy is a popular Southern belle and debutante from a wealthy family.

In her past, she lived under the illusion that she was free, to see whom she wanted, be whom

she wanted, to drive her roadster where she wanted, etc. As Sarah Fryer points out, “she isn’t

free as she is dependent on her ‘good’ family and consequently protected and restricted by its

established code of behavior” (160). So it should come as no surprise that when she tries to

run away to New York to see Gatsby off to war, her family thwarts her efforts. Again in

Jordan’s recounting of Daisy’s girlhood, she describes the night before her wedding to Tom

Buchanan of Chicago, when Daisy receives a letter from Gatsby and she:

…began to cry— she cried and cried. I [Jordan] rushed out and found her

mother’s maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath [emphasis

mine]. She wouldn’t let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and

squeezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap-dish when

she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow [emphasis mine]. But she

didn’t say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her

forehead [emphasis mine] and hooked her back into her dress, and half an

hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck
 19

and the incident was over. Next day at five o’clock she married Tom

Buchanan. (Fitzgerald 86-87)

The cold imagery helps readers to see that Daisy, after the feeble attempt to escape to New

York and then her attempt to end her engagement to Tom, is almost frozen from emotional

attachment and sentimentality. Beauvoir explains, “this self-control imposed on the woman

becomes second nature for ‘the well-bred girl’ and kills spontaneity; lively exuberance is

crushed” (Beauvoir 347). And Daisy’s lively exuberance is crushed even as Jordan tells Nick

that she’d never “seen a girl so mad about her husband” (Fitzgerald 87). But the feeling is

short lived as Daisy realizes Tom, even on their honeymoon, is unfaithful, making her

disillusioned incarnation complete. These observations by Nick and Jordan suggest that

Daisy’s behavior is not stunted but rather she avoids feelings because she recognizes, before

the narrative begins, that her place within the patriarchy alongside the illusion of freedom

does not actually exist in the reality that is her life, even if her life is one of leisure. This is

important when considering the iconic “beautiful little fool” speech she gives to Nick

concerning her daughter:

It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about— things. Well, she was less than

an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with

an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or

a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘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 19)

It is at that point in the novel that we see Daisy Fay Buchanan keenly aware of the bitter and

pitiful existence that is promised to her daughter as well. Daisy’s life’s situation, one as a
 20

direct product of a social environment that does not appreciate intelligence in women,

prompts her to wish for her daughter to be a fool with hopes that it will save her from the

same painful awareness she possesses. More broadly, this disillusionment, perhaps not

perfectly articulated or recounted from Nick’s limited memory, reflects that Daisy, one of the

novel’s only survivors, is immune to illusion, whether they are illusions of freedom, marital

bliss, success, or a less limited world for the future.

The illusion that Daisy embodies promises possibility for the men in her life but

eventually leads to disillusionment and death. Roger Lewis in his essay “Money, Love, and

Aspiration in The Great Gatsby” perhaps says it best: “the love becomes more important than

the object of it” (Lewis 49). Attaining Daisy is not Gatsby’s goal. He has no interest in who

she really is. She is a mechanism by which Gatsby can retain the idea of the love that she

once inspired and the memory of her and of his idealized self, which is colored by his

idealization of her. To possess Daisy the Illusion is “to possess some idea of himself… that

had gone into loving her” (Fitzgerald 117). But Daisy is neither the recoverable memento of

the past nor a dreamy ideal, a realization for Gatsby as Daisy introduces her daughter,

Pammy, later in the novel. Even without this pivotal scene, Daisy must inevitably “tumble

short” (103) of what she represents. Dreams of success, wealth, status and youthful vigor

make up the “colossal vitality of [Gatsby’s] illusion” (110) and Nick comments “no amount

of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (110). And it

is before Gatsby’s death that Nick, as narrator, tells readers that:

…no telephone message arrived…I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t

believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must
 21

have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too

long with a single dream. (Fitzgerald 139)

The illusion of Daisy and everything attached is shattered by the harsh reality that she is not

coming, she will not leave her husband, and she does not love him the way he imagined.

Although even the shattered dreams of Gatsby continue long up to his murder, he must

confront the truth that hanging on to shreds of illusions leads only to disappointment. Once a

“colossal accident” (174), meeting Daisy, Gatsby attempts to make the accident he lived into

purpose and destiny. This is evident through Gatsby’s account of Daisy’s childhood home:

There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful

and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place

through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away

already in lavender, but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining

motor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. (Fitzgerald

174)

Interestingly enough, the language here balances the language of romance with the language

of commodification and material objects. Gatsby finds Daisy’s home bursting with lively

possibility, representative of the life James Gatz wishes to lead. Though disguised in

uniform, and thrust into her home, Gatsby imprints this experience in his mind and attempts,

for the remainder of his life, to make this dream-like memory a reality.

I have already discussed the power Gatsby imprints onto Daisy both in his mind and

as a part of his identity. To further examine the idea of Daisy as Illusion, I investigate the

power dynamics experienced between Daisy and Tom. She finds herself aligned with Tom

Buchanan, one of the most powerful ends to play football, whose physical and mental
 22

presence is the definition of oppression. Tom is paradoxically hypermasculine while also

being a deflated character. Nick explains that Tom is “a national figure in a way, one of those

men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards

savours of anti-climax” (22). This is but the first mention of Tom’s questionable virility.

According to Beauvoir, “no one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or more

disdainful, than a man anxious about his own virility” (Beauvoir 13). And, like Gatsby,

Tom’s power over Daisy, and his mistress Myrtle, is fundamental to the worldview he holds,

allowing for the black-and-blue fingers, broken noses, and/or racist comments. It is important

to remark that, however effeminate and emasculated Nick is in comparison to Tom, the

narrator is inevitably part of the same patriarchal structure and, perhaps unconsciously,

constructs his narrative accordingly.

Concerning Tom’s physical and mental state, Nick also feels “Tom would drift on

forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football

game” (23). With legs spread wide over the mansion’s steps and the unspoken “just because

I’m stronger and more of a man than you” (23) tease of Nick, Tom is consistently reinforced

as both oppressive and dominant. His restless eyes, consistent interruptions, and

“determination… [that] bordered on violence” (36) all point to Tom’s need for control over

his surroundings and perhaps questionable manhood. Though critical of the hyped-up,

testosterone-driven manliness of Tom, and his apparent need to compensate, Nick’s

observations are nonetheless refracted through the lens of his own patriarchal upbringing and

education. Like Gatsby, Tom’s presence in a room invokes an aura felt by those around him.

Nick recalls at his second Gatsby party that he felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading

harshness that hadn’t been there before” (96) precisely when Tom was in attendance. Tom,
 23

described as all-powerful, uses the illusion of Daisy as a sign of his virility and it is at his

realization of the affair and worse, perhaps love, between Gatsby and Daisy that Tom’s

identity as a virile signifier of manhood is shaken.

There are two specific instances in which Tom directly realizes that the Daisy he sees

is perhaps one he barely knows. The first is the time when Tom attends Gatsby’s party with

Nick and Daisy. Not surprisingly, the second party does not go as well as the first, car

accidents aside. Though not aware of her affair with Gatsby, Tom at this point in the novel

has grown upset with the idea of his wife going out alone. Tom and Daisy’s reaction to the

vulgarity of the party is evident. It is at this point in the novel that Tom decides to look into

who Gatsby really is. The second instance in which Tom, using Daisy as his illusion, comes

to realize his identity as a powerful, virile man is shaken is the scene before everyone leaves

for the hotel. Tom sees that Daisy, “had told [Gatsby] that she loved him…[Tom] was

astounded. His mouth opened a little and he looked at Gatsby and then back at Daisy as if he

had just recognized her as someone he knew a long time ago.” (107) Later, Tom panics when

he learns that Myrtle will be moving, showing audiences that he was under the impression

that control over his harem assured his vitality. It is through these man-made illusions that

Tom comes into contact with a harsh reality he has been sheltered from. In this way, Gatsby

and Tom both desire a kind of rebirth or fresh start and as America was seen as “the place

where a man could be the author of himself, reinventing himself”(Churchwell 103), they both

were capable of moving on. Still, Gatsby does not want to move on but to move backwards,

which is not possible. And it is Daisy who either represents or becomes the bearer of such

news for both men. It is precisely because Daisy represents these men’s illusions that she is

the source of their mutual destruction.

 24

Chapter 2: “High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl”:
Daisy as Commodity and Slave

Much of the previous sections have focused on what Daisy is to those who would

adore and revere her. The examination of her mysterious and illusory nature has been

primarily positively connoted and focused on Gatsby. The following two sections, however,

will focus on Daisy as a Commodity and a Slave, and will pertain almost exclusively to her

relationship with Tom Buchanan. While Gatsby has purchasing power, he does not have the

raw leisure class power that Tom boasts. In an effort to define this power, I use Thorstein

Veblen’s 1899 treatise The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions.

This treatise is essential to talking about Daisy as a Commodity because her status for Tom is

economically sound within the confines of their marital institution. To distinguish between

Gatsby and Tom, I use Veblen’s explanation of men’s ownership of women:

The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a leisure and a

working class arises is a division maintained between men’s and women’s

work in the lower stages of barbarism. Likewise the earliest form of

ownership is an ownership of the women by the able-bodied men of the

community. The facts may be expressed in more general terms…by saying

that it is an ownership of the woman by the man. (15)

Insistent that consumerism and conspicuous consumption were social institutions of the

feudal system made modern, Veblen shows that ownership of woman by man is the earliest

form of ownership, allowing for characters like Tom Buchanan to use Daisy as a commodity

in his scheme of life. Timely as well is the entrance of the phrase “mass market” into the

discourse of the period; the term was recorded first in 1922, three years before the

publication release of Gatsby. Though hardly a new concept, as shown by Veblen, mass
 25

marketing products leads to the designation of items as “goods” and, according to

Churchwell, this was for good reason as “purchasing was acquiring a moral valence” (100).

But whether in reference to the socioeconomic play of leisure class theory, or the laundry list

of items mentioned with price tag in the novel, the ownership of women, specifically Daisy,

reinforces the myth of woman as Commodity. Just as Gatsby replaces $265.00 party dresses,

Tom acquires Daisy with a string of $350,000 pearls. The purchasing power of Tom, such as

his giving pearls to multiple women, is stronger and more deeply rooted than that of Gatsby,

allowing for Tom’s eventual success by the novel’s end. It should come as no surprise that

Gatsby waited nearly five years, when he was wealthy and established enough, to attempt to

win back Daisy.

While Tom Buchanan is often vilified for his actions towards women, the idea of

Daisy as a Commodity was deeply rooted in her childhood, long before Tom Buchanan,

Gatsby, or the fiancé from New Orleans entered the picture. Daisy as a predestined

Commodity of eighteen years old was considered “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!’” (73, emphasis mine). As

Beauvoir states:

…everything convinces the adolescent girl that it is in her interest to be their

[men’s] vassal; her parents prod her on; the father is proud of his daughter’s

success, the mother sees the promise of a prosperous future, friends envy and

admire the one among them who gets the most masculine admiration… (341-

342)
 26

These instances show that Daisy is idolized for her white girlhood and the object of

masculine admiration. The words used in Fitzgerald’s novel are also very telling. These men

“demanded” her time and attempted to “monopolize” it in an effort to attain her as theirs.

One of these Camp Taylor soldiers was Gatsby himself, excited at the possibility that “many

men had already loved Daisy” as it “increased her value in his eyes” (130) and he went on to

“[take] what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously— [and] eventually he took Daisy

one still October night” (130). Herein lies a problem: other than the obvious commodification

of Daisy, she is being primed for objectification in her girlhood. By making herself prey to

these soldiers, ready for the taking, Daisy, as a means of securing a stable future, may be

slowly immunized against illusion but she loses her power in exchange. “In more or less

disguised way, her youth is consumed by waiting. She is waiting for Man” (341), Beauvoir

states, and Daisy with her pervading presence, is waiting and impatient for security.

As Daisy’s education towards her economic place among men is established, a

discussion of the purchasing power of Daisy’s two lovers is significant. While James Gatz

could not afford Daisy in 1917, Daisy Fay married Tom Buchanan with more “pomp and

circumstance than Louisville ever knew before” (74), in June of 1918. For the sum of

$350,000 string of pearls (equivalent to $4,750,531.00 today), Tom purchases Daisy both

from her family but also from her own free, single will precisely because of his familial name

and what it can afford him. Tom’s pearls represent Beauvoir’s idea that “the woman’s body

is an object to be purchased; for her it represents capital she has the right to exploit” (444)

and by being “deprived of her magic weapons by nuptial rites, economically and socially

dependent on her husband, the ‘good wife’ is man’s most precious treasure (193). Daisy at

this point of her marriage has sealed her fate as object and commodity, forever a victim to the
 27

cruel power of her “brutish” husband. This is most evident by his constant interruptions of

her speech in the novel’s beginnings, her bruised finger, her questions unanswered, and her

eventual loss of voice as they share cold fried chicken and ale post-murder at the novel’s end.

Gatsby, forever unable to purchase Daisy, as his means of working for his fortune is rooted in

imaginary drug stores or his unsavory business connections, remains a tragic hero in the

complicated (and much bigger) scheme of Daisy’s womanhood and commodification.

According to Corrigan “class is the invisible net that snags Gatsby, ultimately pulling him

down, down, down into the chilly depths of his leaf-strewn swimming pool” (16). If Gatsby

had been wealthy enough, from the right family, and persuasive enough, it still would not

have changed the sequence of events as Daisy and her white girlhood forever stands still and

voiceless in the face of powerful patriarchy.

Daisy as Slave

Incorporating one of Simone de Beauvoir’s biggest influences, the philosophy of

Hegel and his ideas of Lordship and Bondage (though more commonly known as the Master-

Slave Dialectic), Beauvoir’s theories of woman as Other become more focused, especially in

regard to my discussion of Daisy. Jill Fellows, a faculty member from the University of

British Columbia, explains in her lecture on Simone de Beauvoir that Hegel’s Master-Slave

dialectic is described as:

[The Master-Slave Dialectic] starts with two consciousnesses coming into

contact with one another. One becomes the Master and one becomes the

Slave. The Master has power over the Slave, that’s what makes the master the

master but the master also depends on the slave for the fulfillment of his

desires and for the knowledge of his own identity… his identity is secure as
 28

long as he has power over the Slave… the Master hasn’t recognized the Slave

as anything more than a tool. (34:10)

It comes as no surprise that when de Beauvoir discusses woman as Other, she follows the

same structure of aligning the Woman with the Slave. Daisy is subservient, but perhaps not

in the strictest of Victorian senses. She still personifies the Slave identity through her

assumption as a reflection of her master, in this case Tom, and appeasement as a means of

security and protection, even at the consequence of trading her voice for that security.

Beginning first with material consumption as a means of supporting and reflecting

back Tom’s wealth and status, Daisy, like Hegel’s Slave or Beauvoir’s Other, is self-aware,

evident by her reflections about her daughter’s future, her own past, and her choice to have

an affair with Gatsby. Tom as Master never genuinely sees whom his Slave, Daisy, is,

evident through his shock and surprise at Daisy’s affair. Veblen as well reiterates the

woman’s place as property among the leisure class saying, “the consumption of luxuries, in

the true sense, is a consumption directed to the comfort of the consumer himself, and is,

therefore, a mark of the master” (45). He goes on further to say that during the economic

stage pre- and post-1900:

…performance of conspicuous leisure and consumption came to be part of the

services required of [women]… The women being not their own masters,

obvious expenditure and leisure on their part would redound to the credit of

their master rather than to their own credit…the more expensive and the more

obviously unproductive the women of the household are, the more creditable

and more effective for the purpose of the reputability of the household or its

head will their life be. So much so that the women have been required not
 29

only to afford evidence of a life of leisure, but even to disable themselves for

useful activity. (Veblen 111)

Daisy’s charm, beauty, and intelligence were not her own throughout the novel, but rather a

simple reflection of her husband’s fortune, as discussed in the previous section on Daisy as a

Commodity. Each of her accomplishments, no matter how shallow, reflects back on Tom as

her master, keeping Daisy and other leisure class women tightly confined. This makes Nick’s

observation after the first dinner party especially curious. He explains that he was “confused

and a little disgusted” as he drove from the house for “it seemed to me [Nick] that the thing

for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms – but apparently there were no

such intentions in her head” (33). Refusing to be the dialectical Other for Tom would not just

be impulsive but detrimental to someone conditioned to believe her place is with a Master,

whether Tom, Gatsby or the fiancé from New Orleans. It, in fact, does not matter who the

Master is to Daisy, as long as he provides her with the identity she was conditioned to have,

and the security she expects from that constrained freedom. It should be noted then, that even

when an inkling of willingness to run away is revealed by Daisy at one of Gatsby’s parties,

her intention is only to run from one master to another. Beauvoir states it clearly:

Refusing to be the Other, refusing complicity with man, would mean

renouncing all the advantages an alliance with the superior caste confers on

them. Lord-man will materially protect liege-woman and will be in charge of

justifying her existence: along with the economic risk, she eludes the

metaphysical risk of a freedom that must invent its goals without help. (10)

It is the advantageous alliance and everything it promises that keeps Daisy from leaving

Tom, even if he betrays marriage vows and physically abuses her. His brute strength protects
 30

his property from the harsh reality that it may really be better to live as a “beautiful little

fool.”

Disillusioned, practical, and emotionally protective, Daisy, like Hegel’s Slave or

Beauvoir’s Other, is dependent on Man for security, obvious when before settling on a

particular husband a young Daisy was anxious for decisive commitment:

…all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her

life shaped now, immediately— and the decision must be made by some

force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at

hand. (132)

This particular scene, recalled from Jordan’s account to Nick, stresses Daisy’s need for

immediacy and security not for arbitrary impatience but because it would assure Daisy she

was “doing the right thing after all” (132). It is important to note that this additional filter of

Jordan’s voice through Nick’s voice has the potential to frame Daisy in a different light. Still,

like any negative representation of woman, Jordan is seen as not caring for Daisy in her

speech but gossiping about her with Nick entranced. She tells Nick that after being

submerged in a frozen bath, Daisy married Tom Buchanan “without a shiver,” and by the end

of the story, she is made voiceless, becoming forever a victim to a complex system of needs

and desires. Daisy as Slave is perhaps the most poignant of myths she fulfills as it seals her

fate as exposed, and thus in total conformity to patriarchal standards. Daisy remains a “lost

voice” destined to be “uncommunicable forever.” In Nick’s words “[Tom and Daisy] weren’t

happy…and yet they weren’t unhappy either (127).

Concluding Thoughts:

It is precisely because Daisy embodies these “feminine” myths that her life’s
 31

situation, and subsequent character, suffers in the novel. According to Beauvoir:

It is clear that woman’s whole ‘character’—her convictions, values, wisdom,

morality, tastes, and behavior—is explained by her situation. The fact that she

is denied transcendence usually prohibits her from having access to the loftiest

human attitudes—heroism, revolt, detachment, invention, and creation—but

they are not so common even in men. (Beauvoir 661)

So, though Gatsby is great, Daisy’s potential to be so is stunted and made unseemly. It is

through characters like Daisy Buchanan that Fitzgerald shows his anxieties about the

progressive women of his time, as well as the idea of free women – those free from

constraining and contradictory myths that propel them in an endless balancing act between

mutually exclusive ideals.

 32

Chapter 3: Film Coda and Audience Reception: “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud”

In May of 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to critic Edmund Wilson explaining, “If I

had anything to do with creating the manners of the contemporary American girl I certainly

made a botch of the job” (Life in Letters, 110). Fitzgerald may have been credited for

creating the iconic flapper that we recognize today, but it is perhaps the “botch” of a job that

haunted him upon the release of Gatsby in 1925. In the April 12, 1925 edition of the New

York World the headline read “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud” (Corrigan 33) and with

weakening sales and lackluster reviews, his spirits were not raised. In a letter to editor

Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald blamed the title of the novel and then moves forward concluding

“most important— the book contains no important woman character and women controll

[sic] the fiction market at present” (Perkins 45). He repeated this sentiment to publisher

Charles Scribner III. In May of 1925, Fitzgerald concludes perhaps the “fact that [the novel]

was ‘too masculine, too muscular’ to appeal to women readers” was the reason for sluggish

sales (Corrigan 167). For Edith Wharton, an idol of Fitzgerald’s, it was Gatsby’s mysterious

qualities that did not sit right with the narrative:

…my present quarrel with you [Fitzgerald] is only this: that to make Gatsby

really Great, you ought to have given us his early career… instead of a short

resume of it. That would have situated him, & made his final tragedy a

tragedy instead of a “fait divers” for the morning papers. But you’ll tell me

that’s the old way, & consequently not your way. (“T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton

& Gertrude Stein Tell F. Scott Fitzgerald That Gatsby is Great, While Critics

Called It a Dud” (1925)

Wharton’s critique, not Fitzgerald’s, would be revisited each time the idea of a Gatsby-
 33

inspired film or play was pitched; it is Gatsby audiences have come to see, but how can we

feature him?

Similar to Gatsby’s mythology discussed in this project’s introduction, his character

in successive film versions is featured by headlining movie stars, each with his own Gatsby-

style: perhaps he is a rugged gangster or sympathetic boy of North Dakota simply trying to

fulfill the Great American Dream. Like Gatsby, Daisy’s legacy in film has changed

depending on time period or director, but not as drastically and almost always to facilitate

either personal growth for Gatsby’s character or as a means of situating her character as

mother, wife, or lover and nothing more. Simone de Beauvoir observed such a phenomenon

concerning Hollywood and women in The Second Sex: “In spite of the edgy pride of

American women, Hollywood films have hundreds of times presented enfants terribles

tamed by the healthy brutality of a lover or husband” (Beauvoir 363). With the idea of Daisy

as a petulant child already in the reader’s literary imagination, it perhaps comes as no

surprise that she would be seen a terrible child when depicted in film. Marked by, resorting

to, or winning her domestic home and family back is the theme of Daisy Buchanan’s life in

film, and with The Great Gatsby major motion pictures from 1926, 1949, 1974, and 2013 we

see this same narrative play out time and time again. It is in visiting and observing this

pattern that we as Americans are able to (hopefully) reassess our most entrenched and

comfortable assumptions about women’s roles within our culture.

 34

The Great Gatsby (1926): Mother Daisy Buchanan

With no remaining film reels, director Herbert Brenon’s silent film adaptation is lost with the

exception of its 1-minute trailer (which is featured in the special features portion of Baz

Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby adaptation DVD). Actor Warner Baxter plays Jay Gatsby and

Lois Wilson appears as Gatsby’s only dark-haired Daisy Buchanan. The Internet Movie

Database (IMDb) describes this adaptation as: “Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner now

living on Long Island, finds himself fascinated by the mysterious past and lavish lifestyle of

his neighbour, the nouveau riche Jay Gatsby. He is drawn into Gatsby's circle, becoming a

witness to obsession and tragedy” ("The Great Gatsby (1926).”). Officially distributed by

Paramount Pictures on November 21, 1926, the movie met with lackluster reviews.

With no available screening prints accessible through the archives of Paramount

Pictures, the American Film Institute, the British Film Institute, George Eastman House, and

the National Archives of Washington D.C., commentary on this film relies on recovered

reviews and production notes. Credited for her adaptation, writer Elizabeth Meehan,

“…made a noticeable effort in her forty-nine-page treatment of the film, to emphasize the

sentimental and domestic elements surrounding Daisy” (Morgan 15). In Tom Morgan’s

article on the Gatsby adaptations, “Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen,” he explains that

in the 1926 version Daisy is seen:

…living in fear that Gatsby will return to break up her family… the ominous

portrayal of Gatsby’s effect on Daisy is combined with a tender

mother/daughter moment that never existed in Fitzgerald’s original. (15-16)

Though Tom still breaks Myrtle’s nose (and is a known womanizer), Meehan envisions

Myrtle as a hysteric, demanding Tom get a divorce, while also “[softening] the presentation
 35

of Tom” (16) in an effort to give him the persona of a gentler family man. This more loving

Tom “pleads with Daisy after the accident that they need to begin again” (16). The film ends,

not with Gatsby’s funeral or the now-stereotypical mention of the green light, but with “a

note of domestic triumph and the happy Buchanan family in their new home” (17). In this

version of the film, according to Corrigan, “Gatsby, Christ-like, dies so that others may live

more fully: his murder brings Tom and Daisy together again, and they resolve to become

better people” (210). The film disappeared from theaters just a few weeks later because of

poor sales.

The Great Gatsby (1949): A Repentant Daisy Buchanan

Directed by Elliot Nugent, IMDb describes the 1949 version thus: “In this ‘adaptation’ of the

F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, a Jazz Age bootlegger learns the hard way about the wages of sin”

(“The Great Gatsby (1949)”). Originally, the film was rejected by the Production Code

Administration (PCA) due to its “inclusion of ‘illicit sex and adultery,’ without sufficient

compensating moral values” ("The Great Gatsby (1949) Notes"). Morgan credits the Motion

Picture Production Code (or the Hays Code) for this new tone and morality, as bootlegging,

gangsters, and murder should follow the legal code of crime not paying. Like its adapted

predecessor, this adaptation was also released by Paramount Pictures and starred Alan Ladd

as Jay Gatsby and Betty Field as a now blonde Daisy Buchanan. Unlike its predecessor, a

new print of the 1949 film was produced in 2012 and was available on Netflix until the

summer of 2014.

According to Morgan:

Both Nick and Jordan greet us at the beginning… their presence is part of a

bookended narrative that brings this (now married) couple to Gatsby’s

 36

graveside twenty years later to reflect on his death and the profound influence

he had on their lives. (17)

With Proverbs 14:12 (“There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to

death”) inscribed on his gravestone, it is fair to say that this version of Gatsby promises to

balance corruption with morality. As a lengthy seduction scene between Gatsby and Daisy

would have violated the Motion Picture Production Code, Daisy:

…delivers a long and awkward speech to Nick… asserting that everyone she

knows (including herself) is corrupt… ‘I’m lost, Nick!’ she says and he

replies, ‘We all are.’ (Morgan 18)

Cocktail-drinking scenes are cut with new scenes added, one most notably of Daisy and Tom

both hugging their daughter Pammy. While the Plaza Hotel scene takes place, with Daisy and

Tom’s relationship fractured, Tom delivers a thrilling speech as Daisy tries to leave him:

“Wait a minute, I’m protecting my home here. If you go with him, there’s not a court in the

country that would award the child to you.” Though not as touching as the 1926 Tom-the-

Family-Man, the highlighting of legal repercussions was poignant enough to make Daisy

stay. After confessing her murderous sin to the main characters post-accident, Daisy offers

up Gatsby as the likely scapegoat. Gatsby, hearing all of the plans from the window, still

plans to martyr himself for his love, harkening to his earlier statement to Nick: “I’m through

four flushing, trying to be something I’m not, a gentleman… I was a sucker… I’m going to

pay up, Nick” (Corrigan 134). Daisy, as a means of redemption for herself, spurs Tom to a

change of heart concerning Gatsby’s immanent death near the film’s end. Soon Tom:

…tries to warn Gatsby that Wilson is on his way to shoot him, and Gatsby

delivers a remarkably incoherent speech before he is shot, saying that he’s

 37

going to turn himself in as a moral exemplum for lost young men: ‘What’s

going to happen to kids like Jimmy Gatz if guys like me don’t tell them we’re

wrong?’ (Churchwell 343)

Daisy is redeemed through her warning, Jordan through renouncing her cheating ways, and

Myrtle through murder as her sins (consistently depicted as sexually aggressive and thus

unforgiveable) are washed from the streets with her body.

The Great Gatsby (1974): Domesticating Daisy Buchanan

Directed by Jack Clayton, this 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby is perhaps one of the

most popular. Released by Paramount Pictures and featuring Robert Redford as Gatsby and

Mia Farrow as Daisy, the film boasted fidelity to Fitzgerald’s original work, leading to mixed

reviews. In a Variety review featured soon after the film’s release, a staff critic tells

audiences:

Paramount's third pass at The Great Gatsby is by far the most concerted

attempt to probe the peculiar ethos of the Beautiful People of the 1920s. The

fascinating physical beauty of the $6 million-plus film complements the utter

shallowness of most principal characters from the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

Robert Redford is excellent in the title role, the mysterious gentleman of

humble origins and bootlegging connections.... The Francis Ford Coppola

script and Jack Clayton's direction paint a savagely genteel portrait of an

upper class generation that deserved in spades what it received circa 1929 and

after. (“Review: The Great Gatsby”)

With the Hays Code no longer an issue, Truman Capote, the original screenplay

writer for the adaptation, was signed on. After being told his writing was “too loopy”
 38

(Corrigan 250), Francis Ford Coppola replaced him. As Coppola reread Fitzgerald’s novel he

was “shocked to find almost no dialogue between Gatsby and Daisy in the book” (250) and

improvised the adaptation’s dialogue from other Fitzgerald stories. Also notable to this

adaptation is the thrill that came with The Great Gatsby frenzy modern audiences are familiar

with today. Ralph Lauren designed the male costumes (which went on to win Best Costume

Design at the Academy Awards) and Scottie, the daughter of Fitzgerald and Zelda, as well as

the Bruccolis attended a screening and banquet, provided by Paramount, at the Waldorf-

Astoria on March 27, 1974. According to Corrigan’s research: “After the screening,

Paramount further whipped up Gatsby fever by hosting a banquet for two thousand guests in

the Waldorf’s ballroom, decorated with three thousand white roses and two hundred and fifty

potted plants” (250). Gatsby-themed parties were finally on the scene.

The film itself begins with a near-black and white scene, glazing over collected items,

all in association with Daisy. These “enchanted objects” are Gatsby’s and the audience takes

a sentimental tour over each of the letters, pendants, and photographs. While Gatsby is

“established as someone trapped in the past and obsessed” (Morgan 21), Daisy is seen living

lavishly, alongside her controlling husband Tom Buchanan as Nick visits. She cries as she

recalls her daughter’s birth and marvels at Gatsby’s totems to their past. While in Gatsby’s

kitchen, a frequently deemed “women’s sphere,” Daisy marvels at his pots and cake tins then

“asks Gatsby to put on his army uniform” (Morgan 22). While in her own kitchen, as many

of her most important character-development scenes in this film take place in kitchens, she

and Tom discuss their plans for the future. Gatsby, pathetic and scorned by the film’s end, is

reminded of a request he made to Daisy days before when Daisy asked him to be her lover:

he suggests “husband” in place of “lover” and she submits, again tearfully, to “lover AND
 39

husband.” Gatsby, seen as the most domestic in the film, is thrown over by a Daisy more

invested in the security of her husband and place with her family rather than starting a new

life with her long-lost lover.

The Great Gatsby (2013): Infantilized Daisy Buchanan

Advertised as an “American epic,” director Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great

Gatsby was released on May 10, 2013 by Warner Brothers, and would accommodate 3D

viewing. Critically the film received mixed reviews, just as its predecessors did, but

audiences responded mostly positively (Cunningham). Featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay

Gatsby and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, the film earned over $145 million

domestically and $206 million in foreign sales (“The Great Gatsby (2013)”). Known perhaps

most prominently for its filming style, use of leisure-branded marketing, and inclusion of

popular contemporary artists such as Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Florence and the Machine, this

particular adaptation spared no expense.

With perhaps the easiest access to resources and materials, this 2013 adaptation

provided a wide array of interviews concerning the character and development of Daisy on

screen. Baz Luhrmann recalled, after signing on Carey Mulligan to play Daisy that he was:

…privileged to explore the character with some of the world's most talented

actresses, each one bringing their own particular interpretation, all of which

were legitimate and exciting. However, specific to this particular production

of The Great Gatsby, I was thrilled to pick up the phone an hour ago to the

young Oscar-nominated British actress Carey Mulligan and say to her: 'Hello,

Daisy Buchanan.’ (Fleming)

Carey Mulligan herself spoke to Vogue about her research for the role as Daisy:
 40

She dives again into her biography of Zelda, who, along with [Ginerva] King,

went into what Mulligan calls ‘my Daisy cocktail’: ‘I seem always curiously

interested in myself, and it’s so much fun to stand off and look at me. . . .’

That’s a direct Zelda quote. It’s that kind of feeling: I’m-so-little-and-there’s-

nothing-to-me, watch-me-have-nothing-to-me. She feels like she’s living in a

movie of her own life. She’s constantly on show, performing all the time.

Nothing bad can happen in a dream. You can’t die in a dream. She’s in her

own TV show. She’s like a Kardashian. (Shone)

Like many an adaptation before, IMDb describes this film as about “A Midwestern war

veteran [who] finds himself drawn to the past and lifestyle of his millionaire neighbor.”

(“The Great Gatsby (2013)”). Maureen Corrigan recalls talking to several prep classes in

New York, explaining Fitzgerald, his background, and the importance of Daisy and the

Midwestern war veteran narrator, with the lecture falling flat until she showed the trailer for

the Luhrmann adaptation. She recalls:

The room erupts! Kids start dancing around in their seats to the heavy bass

sound track. They smile at the glitz, the 3-D visions of familiar places like the

Queensboro Bridge and what looks like the el train that runs over Thirty-First

Street in Astoria…The kids softly say “Yeah!” whenever Leonardo DiCaprio

appears on-screen— they think Leo is cool— and tell me they can’t wait to

see the movie. The preview clip gets the same electric reaction in every

classroom at the Prep— all five of them— that I visit the next day. (283-284)

Excited audiences and expensive advertising aside, Daisy’s character remains situated

somewhere between a temperamental child and unworthy love interest to our nation’s hero.
 41

With the complete removal of her daughter Pammy, few family responsibilities, and a

youthful thirst for fun, Daisy is “a young girl, unchanged, not a full mature woman”

(Morgan 27). With Gatsby’s dream more plausible, audiences are able to ignore the

repeatedly overt symbols of the green light and shooting stars that continue to promise

Gatsby a repeat of the past. Luhrmann sentimentalizes the young Gatsby’s list of

improvements “[helping] the father to remember his son as a heroic figure in the grand

American tradition of self-made man” (28) after Gatsby has been abandoned by everyone he

knows, with the exception of Nick. As for Daisy, her roles as a fatal disappointment to our

hero, murderer of Myrtle, and careless accomplice to Tom Buchanan are intact. It is only at

the film’s end that we see Daisy and Tom prepared to leave their home for greener pastures

that the audience finally meets their daughter Pammy, now protectively close to Daisy’s

quiet, fearful body. Her face is indistinguishable from her child’s face, making them one and

the same, overlooked by Tom Buchanan’s authority and might. The film, leaving its audience

with the hopeful last line of Fitzgerald’s novel, promises some hope for those who

considered Gatsby their hero, and, like Gatsby, everyone is disenchanted with the idea of

Daisy Buchanan.

Concluding Thoughts:

According to Morgan, “Some may consider these film adaptations to be

inconsequential, but whether we approve of individual adaptations of The Great Gatsby or

not, our cultural memory has been primed for them, and it becomes increasingly difficult to

view Fitzgerald’s work without considering the cumulative impact of all these adaptations”

(29-30). Morgan finds solace in the fact that these adaptations often bring us back to the

original text, allowing for new discussion and an opportunity for debate. It is precisely this
 42

discussion that concerns me as a reader and scholar; we have few if any real discussions

concerning Myrtle’s response to the social structures that consume her life and the price she

pays. Daisy is time and time again constructed at best into sentimental ideals, and at worst is

written off as unworthy of critical thought. Jordan, perhaps reformed in a film or two,

remains an example of the progressive and perhaps dangerous image of woman in the 1920s.

Perhaps we are having a discussion of what Gatsby means to our nation, but in reality we as

readers, scholars, audience members, and critics are vastly more entertained, consumed, and

invigorated by what Gatsby, not the women of Gatsby, means to us all.

 43

Conclusion

In their September 2014 post “7 Life Lessons From The Great Gatsby,” Huffington

Post outlines “seven life lessons we've taken away from the Great American Novel” ("7 Life

Lessons From The Great Gatsby”). The piece includes platitudes such as “Optimism is a

noble, if futile trait” and “It’s not easy to leave your past behind you” but perhaps most

notable for the purpose of this thesis is that four out of these seven “life lessons” concern

Daisy Buchanan, and those concerns are her legacy. Throughout Daisy Buchanan’s literary

and film history, she has been vilified. She represents the Eternal Feminine as an Idol,

Illusion, Commodity, and Slave just as Simone de Beauvoir predicted. She is represented as a

mother, a repentant sinner, and is eventually portrayed as a domesticated, irritable child.

These distorted stereotypes alter our reading of women in one of the most celebrated novels

in our national canon, leaving real women, whether like Daisy Buchanan or not, with the

cautionary tale that “bad women” (or New Women) are firmly disciplined and often erased

from our Great American Narrative. Now, whether The Great Gatsby is confirmed The Great

American Novel or not, makes no difference. It is part of a larger, more representative canon,

our canon. By reassessing our most entrenched assumptions about how patriarchal ideology

operates in our beloved characters, novels, and stories we are able to continue a larger

discussion, a real discussion about the place in which we see women not just in novels, but in

the fabric of our country’s narrative.

 44

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 48

Degeyter, Heather E. Bachelor of Arts, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Fall 2012;

Master of Arts, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Summer 2015
Major: English
Title of Thesis: Beyond Woman, Mystery, and Myth: A Study of Daisy Fay Buchanan in F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Thesis Director: Dr. Mary Ann Wilson
Pages in Thesis: 54; Words in Abstract: 229

ABSTRACT

Over the last one hundred years, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has become one of

the most popular American novels in the literary canon. Though thousands of critical articles

have circulated concerning one of American’s greatest tragic heroes, Jay Gatsby, it is the

object of his desire that is often neglected. By applying the theories of feminist thinker

Simone de Beauvoir, it can be shown that Daisy’s status as mutable anti-heroine is

representative of the patriarchal ideologies of the novel’s time. Equally ripe for analysis is

Daisy’s film legacy, as four major motion pictures have been adapted for the big screen. In

this project, I argue that Daisy represents the treacherous dichotomies often imposed on

women, whether through idolatry, illusion, commodification, or slavery. I also seek to prove

that Daisy is part and parcel of the American New Woman and how this further distorts

America’s identification with her. The ability to identify with characters is compulsory,

which is perhaps why the story of Jay Gatsby has been adopted as a telling of the American

Dream. As a contrast, however, the women in The Great Gatsby are difficult to identify with.

If Daisy Buchanan is confined to a strict set of misshapen stereotypes, and we as Americans

celebrate this novel as one of our Greats, how do we time and time again read women in the

Great American Narrative?

 49

Biographical Sketch

Heather Degeyter grew up in southwest Louisiana and attended the University of

Louisiana at Lafayette, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English. In 2015, Heather

completed her Masters of Arts in English. Her primary areas of research include American

Literature, Literary Theory, and Critical Theory.