Preview

Analysis of the character Daisy in "The Great Gatsby"

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
341 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Analysis of the character Daisy in "The Great Gatsby"
The word that can sum up many of the themes in this book is position. The word encompasses themes like class, wealth, social standing and others.

Take Daisy, for example, while Nick and Jordan were their dinner she talked about her little girl. She was very upset after the birth because Tom was nowhere to be found. When the nurse told her she was a girl, Daisy 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." The social position a woman is criticized here. Daisy is witty and also terribly clever, far more than her brute husband. Yet she is the one treated as inferior, because she is a woman. This also why Tom can flaunt his affair, he doesn't have to worry about the consequence.

On the other hand, Daisy shows how people can use their position to look down. As Nick said about Daisy, " I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguish secret society to which she and Tom belonged." This is superior mind set. The sadness for Daisy is not that she's trapped in a marriage and at the mercy of her husband, but that she will not choose to be free or independent.

The word careless also describes Daisy well. Many of the things that Daisy did, the accident with Myrtle in particular, show a woman who is just careless. She has become very much wrapped up in herself. Part of this is due to the fact that she had been spoiled all her life. She was born into money and had an endless assortment of men who would continue to spoil her. So she has learned to think only of herself without regard for the people that it may hurt.

Fitzgerald uses this character Daisy to expose the sad women's life with their superior mind set and selfish

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    This demonstrates that even Gatsby’s mansion represents his internal emptiness because of Daisy. Even though he has achieved his goals, his longing dream has been just a lost hope in his empty heart. Similarly, to Tom he has wealth, power, and his wife’s love; however, he has a mistress thinking that would be sufficient to cover his emptiness.…

    • 58 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    towards the story because it reveals glimpses into Daisy's character. Daisy is not a fool herself, but due to the times and the extent of her exposure to the social environment, she has not valued intelligence in women. Because of her generation being very mature and old fashioned, she believes that the younger females just care about their wild life of simply partying in the day and partying in the night.…

    • 414 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    As the novel advances, some things about Daisy are revealed. Daisy is not all purified and innocent as she may seem. Daisy has some true and false feelings. In Chapter 1 , when she mentions her daughter to Nick she…

    • 183 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby establishes characterization through an intimate relationship between Daisy and Gatsby without ever explicitly discussing about it. When the two became lovers, Gatsby was surprised to discover that "it didn't turn out as he had imagined.” However, he did feel as though they were married after this encounter. This conveys an aspect of how Gatsby fell in love with Daisy’s allure rather than her personality and was blindly obsessed with being with her. Shortly later, the two are split apart for a length of time and end up reuniting after five years. It is suggested that they resume their sexual relationship and their affair is purely physical with no substance behind it. Once again, Gatsby fails to…

    • 184 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Daisy’s soon proves to not just be promiscuous, but also extremely careless. Gatsby even said, “She only married you because I was poor” (137). The fact that Daisy left Gatsby and married Tom just for his money shows that she is careless about Toms feelings and takes advantage of him for only his wealth. Even when Daisy and Gatsby get into a car accident and hit poor Myrtle. A couple days after this accident, Nick finds out that “she and tom had gone away early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them” (172). Daisy is obviously not concerned with the horrible thing she has done and takes off with her…

    • 665 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    person, a careless woman who uses her weak nature as an excuse for her immaturity. Daisy 's…

    • 1383 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Her husband, Tom Buchannan also believed that Daisy was a prize. To Tom, it seemed, that Daisy was a trophy wife, someone he could show off, not care about, come back, and she would still be there. What brought them together was money, the thing that they both loved and had in common. Nick summed up her love for money well, “She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force, of money…” (Fitzgerald, 151). Daisy didn’t care about who she loved more when she had to pick Tom or Gatsby; she cared about the money while she was making one of the biggest decisions of her life. To Tom, Daisy was a beautiful woman who he would love to have for his wife. Tom and Daisy were alike in that way, neither of them cared about personality or values; they cared about their reputation. It wasn’t Daisy’s disposition that made Tom marry her; it was her looks and reputation that he found attractive.…

    • 699 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    It is a commonly known story: A desperate man falling in love with a married woman. A man who is willing to go to any length to make this woman fall in love with him. However, this time the man actually had a chance. In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby falls in love with Daisy Buchanan, who is unhappily married to Tom Buchanan. This unhappy marriage leads Daisy feeling unsure who she should be with.…

    • 612 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The year 1925 was filled with entertainment, opulence, and change. In America, a pound of bread could be bought for nine cents, and riches were amassed by selling liquor illegally. Prohibition, the ban on the production and distribution of alcohol, was passed as part of the temperance movement in 1919. This made way for illegal sale of alcohol and speakeasies. People became increasingly more rebellious and were just looking for a good time. However, Germany was still reeling from the loss of WWI. This allowed many to attempt to gain support and rise to power. During 1925, two very different books were published. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald described the careless of Americans in the 1920s. While they had been concerned with enjoying themselves, Hitler spent time in jail writing his autobiography, Mein Kampf. Although Hitler's book…

    • 817 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    While Tom certainly causes much damage to others and their things, some of his stems from deliberate thought and action. Daisy, on the other hand, want so live in her protected, luxurious world without having to pay any consequences for her decisions or actions. In the end, she is the cause of the Wilsons' and Gatsby's deaths. She is careless with her daughter's well-being. In one considers her situation, he would see that Daisy brings a dangerous bootlegger into her daughter's life and exposes her to extremely selfish behavior on a regular basis. Finally, Daisy is responsible for Nick's disillusionment. When the novel opens, Nick possesses sympathy and a strange admiration for his cousin. But, as Gatsby progresses, Nick realizes that his cousin's careless behavior ruins things and lives, causing him to describe Tom and Daisy as he does in your quote. All of this seems not to bother Daisy because the novel ends with Tom and her using their money to build another house, travel away from their troubles, and maintain their place in society despite their destructive…

    • 778 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, emphasizes the ideas of purity throughout the novel. From realizing the actions of Daisy, the readers notice how she is portrayed as pure, but truly is not. On the surface, she maintains this illusion of innocence, however her actions are corrupt. She believes that money, power, reputation, and her position in society are more important than everything else; which also displays acts of selfishness. Daisy is often wearing white, the symbol of innocence. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the color white to ironically represent purity in order to illustrate one of the main character's true personality.…

    • 869 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Daisy is a great example of how greed can obstruct your judgement and morality. The fact that in the story, Daisy says "Rich girls don't marry poor guys" and "You don't have enough money for me to marry you", tells us that she is all about monetary gain, even if it's at the cost of true love. Even when Gatsby, the man she said those things to, shows back up in her life with a new-found wealth that he obtained solely so he could obtain Daisy's love, she turns him down and stays married to a man stuck in the ways of the "old…

    • 105 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The narrator of this text, Nick, reveres the methods Gatsby uses and assists him in pursuing his hopeless quest for Daisy’s requited love. Although Nick is judgmental of Tom, Nick is also a guilty bystander who witnesses most of Tom’s crimes against women. Nick is just as guilty as Tom in his mistreatment of women for supporting his patriarchal values by not standing up for the women being mistreated. All of the characters in this text are complex characters but the only voice we ever hear is Nick, a male narrator, who is drawn to feminine men. Women cannot even capture Nick’s attention and he is the source of all of our information. The narrator is already anti-feminist in his attraction to male characters with a few feminine qualities, how are the women in this text supposed to be justly represented if they are being scrutinized by a narrator who clearly sees no value in them? “It is Jordan’s hard, jaunty body that initially attracts Nick, along with her masculine personal qualities-her self-assurance and careful control over her emotions” (Kerr, 418). The only details we get about Jordan from Nick are the ones showing she is similar to men. Most of the women in this text, especially Daisy, have an enchanting power over men but they are being held captive by men like Daisy’s husband, dominant masculine figures, who once again offer them no justice. Kerr writes, “Fitzgerald was fond…

    • 1954 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    "I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-- they smashed up things and creatures and the retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was the kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made" (Fitzgerald 180-181). In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the characters Daisy and Tom demonstrate the theme of carelessness. Tom and Daisy show carelessness through being foolish thus lacking a lack of good sense or judgment. Furthermore, they both show the theme of carelessness by being inconsiderate of others. The theme of negligence is also demonstrated when Tom and Daisy are both self-centered by fulfilling only their own personal needs. Therefore, through their actions, both Tom and Daisy are careless, however it is Daisy who is ultimately the most careless because Daisy harmed many more people.…

    • 1440 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sexism In The Great Gatsby

    • 1290 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In the novel, female characters are depicted as shallow, selfish beings that are seen as possessions, instead of people, by the men in their lives. Fitzgerald’s sexist behavior can be observed through his portrayal of women, more specifically through his portrayal of Daisy, Myrtle and Jordan.…

    • 1290 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays