Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: Becoming Tom’s Animated Woman

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom live in the opulent East Egg of Long Island Sound. While Tom can’t get over his soccer days in New Haven, full of machismo and bravery and as Nick describes it, always looking for “the dramatic turbulence of some unrecoverable soccer game,” Daisy languishes in the sweltering New York summer heat. with little to occupy. your time or your thoughts. It is in this scenario that her second cousin Nick Caraway re-enters her life, assuming a position as a bond seller in New York, and with him, also returning to her life, is her neighbor, Daisy’s impoverished ex-lover, Jay. Gatsby, now. an illicit businessman for wealthy purposes. Daisy had previously married Tom because, as she tells Gatsby, “rich girls don’t marry poor boys.” Early in their marriage, Tom began to openly entertain a number of lovers, even taking Nick on a field trip to visit his current diver, Myrtle Wilson. Daisy is unhappy but relatively calm about it, playing “the little fool”, a role to which anima women feel resigned. Tom recognizes Daisy’s need to keep her life quiet and pleasant surrounded by wealth and position, making it easier for him to control her. He cuts her off abruptly when he is no longer interested in listening to her; criticize their choice of words; responds to their wishes with contempt. Tom is conspicuously absent during the birth of their child, and Daisy, disappointed, confesses to Nick: “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’s a fool, that’s the best a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. ” Tom’s fatherly attitude to the childish Daisy justifies his habit of “going out on the town”, but to regain her confidence, he says that he always comes back and that he loves her in his heart.

Kill the lover again

Gatsby becomes part of Daisy and Tom’s social circle, but when Tom accuses him of trying to rob his wife, a cruel argument ensues and, in a moment of rage and despair, Daisy leaves with Gatsby, driving his car. They pass Wilson’s garage, Tom’s lover, Myrtle, runs towards them and Daisy swerves towards her, killing her instantly. Afterward, Nick watches Daisy and Tom through the window of their grand mansion in East Egg as they sit at the kitchen table facing each other. Nick says: “There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy in the image and anyone would have said they were conspiring together.” In Daisy’s artificial but protective world, Tom convinces Myrtle’s husband that it is Gatsby who was the lover and Gatsby who was driving the death car. George, distraught, shoots Gatsby before shooting himself. Daisy and Tom leave for an extended vacation, with only Nick and Gatsby’s father attending the funeral. Tom proclaims his grief to Nick over the loss of his lover Myrtle when he looks at the box of dog biscuits, but it is short-lived. Myrtle is expendable and her death, as well as Gatsby’s, is soon treated as just a remnant of her neglected past that, as Nick observes, they leave behind for other people to clean up.

Tom’s Cheer Wife

Daisy manipulates his actions with Gatsby so that she is the woman he imagines, the one he has imagined for five years. However, when he must face the risk of losing Tom and the lifestyle he represents, and even more so the risk of paying for the trampled death of Tom’s lover, he returns to assume the role that reflects Tom’s soul. Your compliance is the price you agree to pay for security. She is not willing to give up the advantages she has with Tom, even if it means losing the romantic illusion of Gatsby. She cannot do otherwise. She must be Tom’s childish Daisy who needs him, regardless of his dismissive treatment of her, and thus Gatsby must die to restore their relationship, emotionally unhealthy as it is. This anima woman cannot find her own intrinsic value when she has built a life so utterly dependent on materialism, the subject of much of Fitzgerald’s writing in the jazz age.