Hi there, my name is Matt Jackson, creator of Quote Companion, and today I'm going to be talking to you about Daisy Buchanan and The Great Gatsby. I'll go over all the major points about her character and give you some quotes to back them up with. We're going to cover her innocence, or lack of it, her charm and how she uses it to manipulate men, how she represents women, her voice, her version of the American Dream, her relationship with Tom, and of course, her relationship with Gatsby.
So we have ten topics, each of them have two quotes to back them up, and if you can remember all these, you should be in great shape to write an essay on Daisy or pass any exam involving her. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is Daisy's innocence. She's seen as a very innocent character. She's always dressed in white, which represents her purity. As you can see in the quote there, dressed in white and has a white roadster.
She also talks about her white girlhood. Her house is red and white. so she's seen as a very pure very angelic character and that color symbolism is how Fitzgerald puts that across um also she doesn't the way she presents herself is very lacking in sexual desire and lust as you can see when she meets Gatsby here she says I'd like to just put you in one of those pink clouds and push you around in it now that's a very childlike image it's not something that's lustful it doesn't have it's not explicit in any way Even when she's in love with the person, still the imagery she uses, very childlike, very naive, very innocent.
Of course, it's always good to show the other side of the argument, so there's a lot of things in the book that would suggest that Daisy isn't as innocent as she portrays. In fact, that's a big theme of the book, is that people aren't always what they seem. So, as she left the room, she went over and kissed Gatsby, pulling him down, kissing him on the mouth.
In this sentence, Daisy is the one doing all the action. Gatsby is quite passive here. She's pulling, she's kissing. So it's showing that she's instigating it, and this kind of counters the earlier quote about her being very childlike, very lacking in sexual desire.
And then later on there's the suggestion that Daisy ran Myrtle down on purpose. So she turned away from her, and then she turned back. Did she intentionally kill Myrtle? That's up for grabs. We're also going to talk about her charm.
So she's very winning. People seem to like her in the book. When she laughs, other people laugh with her. People are trying to impress her.
And Fitzgerald uses a technique called pathetic fallacy, which is where the weather is used to symbolise how the audience should feel. So you've probably seen this in a movie. If it's raining in a movie, it's because the director wants you to feel sad at that point. So here, the last of the sunshine fell upon her glowing face with romantic affection.
So Fitzgerald's saying, even the sunlight fancies her, you should as well. Now the counter side to that is, does she use her charm to manipulate people? So here we can say...
She murmurs, but only to make people lean towards her. So she's using her charm and she's using her voice, which is very charming and exotic, to affect people, to make them come towards her. Also, she tells Gatsby she never loved Tom. Now, that's exactly what Gatsby wants to hear, but it's not exactly true because later on she refutes that in front of Tom.
So she's telling him what he wants to hear. She's trying to please everybody. She seems to be manipulating Gatsby's heartstrings a bit there.
Now, gender is obviously a very big theme in the book as well, and she's one of the major female characters, so let's look at how she represents women in the book. She's very passive in her relationship with Tom. She married him because she wanted someone else to change her life for her.
She wanted her life shaped now. So it's unlike Gatsby, when Gatsby wanted his... his life changed, he went out, he did things, he took action. Daisy didn't like all the confusion, didn't like having to make decisions, she wanted someone to make them for her.
She's also very under pressure from society's views, so even though she loves Theatsby, she'll probably never leave Tom because it's just not the done thing and she has to follow society's expectations. So we've talked about her role as a woman in the book and a large part of women in that society was there. Women were seen as status symbols or trophy wives, and similar to the way Gatsby buys a big fast car to impress people and buys a big house to impress people, he also wants to get Daisy to love him to impress people, not to love her as an equal, not to treat her as a wife.
So, some quotes to prove that. He loves her because she has the biggest house, therefore she's the richest, and therefore she has the most status, she's the most valuable. She's also described as the king's daughter and the golden girl, that's a great quote for this. The king's daughter, she's defined by her relationship to a man, so she's not the princess, she's the daughter of the king. And the golden girl, gold is a commodity, so it's telling people that she's valuable, that she can be bought and sold, much like gold is.
Her voice is also a massive part of her characterisation. Fitzgerald uses a technique called... Snick Duke or synykdok, I don't know how you pronounce it, it's there. It's where you use a part of something to describe the whole. So when Gatsby will describe her voice a lot, and while describing her voice, he's describing the whole person.
So here you can see her manipulative nature. As soon as she stops talking, her spell is broken, and you can kind of see for what she really is. And then, of course, her voice is full of money, this again implying that she's a status symbol, or something that can be bought and sold.
So now we'll look at her version of the American dream. Now what does she want for her child? She wants her child to be a beautiful fool.
Because she is rich and she is married to Tom, she's high status, she's already living in a big house, she's already part of the old money society, she has everything she wants, but she's not happy. So she wants her child to be beautiful so she can marry a rich man and live the same life as she has because she's living the best life as is available for a woman. in this time, but she also wants her to be a fool, so she's ignorant of all the downsides of Tom's affair, of the boredom that comes with the lifestyle that she's living. And another quote to show the boredom and the purposelessness of her life at the moment is, what should we plan? She turns to me helplessly, helplessly, a good key word there.
What do people plan? She's got nothing to do with her life. She has all this money, she has all this time, but she doesn't really have anything to use it for. She has no... drive there's nothing for her to accomplish her relationship with tom so obviously he broke myrtle's nose he hasn't hit her yet but she fears it because she locked herself into a room in case of any brutalities the only thing that seems to unite them is their carelessness and their destructive nature they're just happy to both be rich and that seems that holds them together this this need to be better than other people And finally there's her relationship with Gatsby.
Now, does she love Gatsby, doesn't she? It seems at the beginning of the book she calls off the wedding, she makes this dramatic statement, tell them all Daisy's changed her mind. She's talked out of that quite quickly though, so we're not sure how deep those feelings are towards Gatsby.
Later on in the book she says she's sad when she meets up with Gatsby again, but importantly she's not sad because she's married the wrong man and she's not sad because she hasn't seen him in years. She's sad because she's never seen such beautiful shirts. This is the moment when she realizes she married Tom for his money, and now she realizes Gatsby's richer than Tom. So she's not sad from an emotional standpoint, she's sad from a financial standpoint. So does she love Gatsby?
It seems like she does, but she probably loves money more. If you're writing an essay about Daisy, then you might want to check out our example essays. What I've done is given you a full introduction, and then a paragraph-by-paragraph guide as to which points to make in each paragraph, what quotes to use to back that up, and then what to mention in your analysis. So you can get a well-researched, well-structured essay in a fraction of the time, and of course, since it's just a guide, it's 100% your own work.
Here you can see the first paragraph and the introduction that I've given you for Daisy. I'm talking a lot about how she's perceived in the book. and what maybe lies beneath that perception.
That's a big theme in the book. And also how this appearance in reality affects themes like gender equality and the American dream. Here you can see in the first paragraph, I'm just telling you to assess your character and how that's achieved through colour symbolism and other techniques.
So if you're on Quote Companion now, click the link below, complete an offer, and you're exempt. and get your example essay completely free. If you're watching this from YouTube, click the link in the description to go to our homepage.
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