Daisy Buchanan In The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. However, if it were called “duckweed” or “skunk cabbage,” would its aroma be enough to establish it as a universal symbol of romantic love? What about that which we call a daisy- or she whom we call Daisy Buchanan? Duckweed Buchanan does not suggest simplicity, innocence, and beauty, as Daisy does. Shakespeare, father of symbolism and creator of half the words in the English language, knew the power of meticulously chosen vocabulary, as did literary mastermind F. Scott Fitzgerald. In The Great Gatsby, there is no Sneezewart or Turkey Corn Buchanan. The character is Daisy, and though her name implies a host of sweet attributes, she does not necessarily live

up to them. Daisy’s name and overall impression of sweetness gives her a unique superpower- other people project their hopes and dreams onto her. Her husband, Tom Buchanan, sees in Daisy the innocence and traditional family values he strives for but constantly undermines with his own actions. Her cousin Nick Carraway imagines she is simple beauty and extravagance. James Gatz sees his own dreams of wealth and power in her, and when he grows up James Gatsby envisions her as the innocence and magic of his own past. Daisy is never perceived as a person- no, she is the not-so-secret desires of the resident men. Daisy Buchanan derives her power from men’s objectification of her, and loses it when she deviates from their misplaced expectations.

Given Tom Buchanan’s bigoted nature, it is no surprise that he does not see Daisy as a person, but as a quiet symbol of nuclear family and marital bliss. What is surprising is the power this symbol gives Daisy over him, and how quickly she loses it when her affair with Gatsby is revealed. Tom tries desperately to keep his wife and mistress apart, to the point where he hits poor Myrtle Wilson for daring to say, “Daisy, Daisy, Daisy!” (37) His traditional family dream and his erotic power play, his darling wife and his audacious mistress, symbolize two very different sides of him, and their sudden instability makes Tom feel “the hot whips of panic” (125). Before he discovers Daisy is not as conventional as she seems, Tom, however begrudgingly, does what she wants. “‘I don’t see the idea of going to town,’ broke out Tom savagely. ‘Women get these notions in their heads-’” Tom says just before going into town on Daisy’s terms as Daisy wishes (120). Unfortunately, when Daisy reveals her love for Gatsby, the image of marital bliss shatters; “[Tom’s] 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” (119). Suddenly, his little wife is not just a wife but a person- one who has feelings and her own life and who is not nearly as high on the food chain as Tom Buchanan is. In time, he realizes he has no need to do what this tiny woman tells him to because she no longer incites his moral obligation to be faithful to traditional family values. Tom yells at her, ignores her, and displays his disregard by sending her home in Gatsby’s car. Once Daisy shatters the illusion that she is merely a symbol of her husband’s misplaced values, she loses any leverage over the regal, respectable, contemptible Tom Buchanan.

Though of less significance to Daisy than her husband’s, Nick Carraway’s perspective is the most influential to the reader.

Despite his attempts to be an unbiased writer, Nick falls into the trap of projecting his own ideas onto Daisy’s life. Daisy, to her cousin, is shallow sweetness and sheltered innocence and rich beauty- and when she reveals her imperfect nature, Nick can no longer think kindly of her. His feelings towards Daisy are blatantly obvious. He goes on about her “exhilarating,” “thrilling,” “murmurous” voice, a perfect expression of her beauty, but hardly ever takes to heart what she is saying (86, 9, 105). When she confesses to her sophistication and cynicism, Nick cannot take her seriously and interprets her feelings as foolish idealism, “as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged” (18). When Gatsby asserts that “Her voice is filled with money,” Nick has a revelation that all Daisy embodies is the wealth oozing from her pores (120). After this and her forced confession to being neither sweet nor innocent because of her affair with Gatsby, Daisy’s voice is changed in Nick’s mind. It is no longer beautiful, but “cold” and full of “thrilling scorn” (133, 132). Though he had respected her before, Nick now thinks she and her husband are both “careless people, ... they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept

them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...” (180-181) When Daisy is only beauty, Nick is entranced by her and spends paragraphs describing her hypnotic voice. However, he does not see her as a person, and cannot take her feelings of hopelessness and loss seriously. Once he decides that she is only money, Nick loses all respect and care for his formerly lovely cousin. Her mystic power over him has dissipated. Nick still does not see her as a person, but instead as a new symbol depicting the carelessness of wealth. Daisy’s power over him is lost all the same.

While Nick’s perception of Daisy is based on observation and condescension, young, pre-war James Gatz’ ambition is what robs Daisy of autonomy in his mind. Gatz sees in Daisy everything he wanted to have for himself- vast affluence and blissful happiness. Moreover, Gatz is deployed before his dreams are dashed, evolving himself before she can disillusion him. When James Gatz meets Daisy for the first time, he falls in love with her mansion: “It amazed him- he had never been in such a beautiful house before” (148). What amazes him more is the way Daisy hardly notices how extravagant her home is- “it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him” (148). When they kiss, Gatz feels the “youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves” and Daisy is “gleaming like silver”- dehumanizing her into an aura of affluence and a shining trophy (150). When they talk, Gatz lets on that all his ambitions have come to fruition and he is in the same “stratum” as Daisy herself, irreversibly tying his acquisition of her to the realization of his dreams (149). Furthermore, it shows his lack of respect for Daisy as a person, because a person who truly loves and respects another would not deliberately manipulate her into believing in his false persona. Though Gatz is already calling himself Gatsby, his millions have not been made, and he is not his dream man but a semi-convincing apparition of him. Crucial to Jay Gatsby’s formation is Daisy, who represents everything he needs: great wealth and casual carelessness that is so different from the world James Gatz grew up in. Instead of a person, Daisy is a large house, a phantom of his careless future self, and a gleaming trophy that marks him as successful. Gatz is desperately in love with everything Daisy represents, giving her sovereignty over his small, violently ambitious heart. But Daisy’s power is never lost on him, for he departs for five years and the ocean between them only makes him worship her more. By the time she is able to disappoint him, James Gatz no longer exists.

In his five years away from Daisy, James Gatz evolves into his alter ego, Jay Gatsby.

He has it all- a beautiful mansion, enough money that he could blow it on weekly extravaganzas, and the aura of a millionaire. But he is missing something, something within himself he had lost in those five years. He thinks- he knows- he will find it with Daisy. While Gatz wanted Daisy to finalize his illusion of Gatsby, Gatsby wants Daisy to turn him back into a person. Even Nick notices it, observing that, “he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place to go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...” (111-112) Floundering in the amoral, semi-legal underworld of the rich in the Roaring Twenties, Gatsby needs Daisy because she can return him to a better time when he was simply James Gatz from the Middle West. It is integral to his plans that Daisy approves of everything he had done, and “he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from [Daisy’s] well-loved eyes” (92). Gatsby has a plan: he must take everything and return to Louisville, where everything is right in the world, marry Daisy from her house “just as if it were five years ago,” and find the missing pieces of himself (111). When Daisy dashes his plans by rescinding her claim that she never loved Tom, Gatsby cannot accept

it; “‘I don’t think she ever loved him,’ Gatsby turned around from a window and looked at me challengingly” despite Daisy’s insistence that she, in fact, had loved Tom (152). To Jay Gatsby, Daisy is a symbol of the elusive “something” that he lost while discarding his former identity. Furthermore, she is more than a symbol- Daisy is the central cog in the clockwork of his plans, the essential ingredient in the elusive elixir of his dreams, the keystone needed to rebuild his treasured past self. And though the keystone is an indispensable, powerful part of an arch, it has no more agency than any other rock. In a similar fashion, Daisy is an object of power, and Gatsby is only concerned with her thoughts insomuch that they validate his desperate power plays. It is important to him that Daisy loves him, but he cannot accept that she has actual free will and could have the audacity to love another man while they were an ocean apart. Precious Daisy’s power over Gatsby is apparent in his obsessing over her, buying a house specifically to see her across the harbor, throwing parties in hopes that she might come, wanting to leave everything he had built in West Egg and return to Louisville with her. Moreover, her power is never lost because Gatsby is a stubborn git and refuses to see her as anything but a vessel on which he will travel to his past. Like his alter ego, Jay Gatsby dies before he revokes her power over him.

Tom Buchanan thinks his wife is a white rose- charming and classical- until he pricks his finger on her thorns and mars her pale petals with his vengeful blood. Nick Carraway thinks his cousin is a peony, full of sumptuous sweetness until he discovers her insides are home to a colony of ants. James Gatz sees an orchid, an elegant symbol of careless affluence- and as Jay Gatsby he discovers she is a snapdragon, delicate but poisonous. Contrary to their beliefs, Daisy Buchanan is none of these flowers, for she is no flower at all. She is a person of her own, though no one else acknowledges it. Daisy Buchanan is shallow and senseless and careless because that is all she can be, being treated as a picture of a woman rather than a real one. The life of a daisy among men is a lonely life indeed. Daisy Buchanan is suffocating in the objectification she calls sophistication, but finally breaks away in her dramatic revelation that she has loved Gatsby and Tom, defying all expectation. Daisy’s power as a symbol is in jeopardy, but she is free! Gatsby dies, Nick leaves, Tom recognizes her as a person worth negotiating with, and Daisy is emancipated from her unseen chains. The oceans and the stars resonate with a single truth: Daisy Buchanan is not a flower.