In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom live in fashionable and prosperous East Egg on Long Island Sound. While Tom can’t put his New Haven football days behind him, full of machismo and bravado and, as Nick describes it, always looking for “the dramatic turbulence of some irretrievable football game,” Daisy languishes in the sweltering summer heat of New Haven. New York with little to occupy. her time or her thoughts. It is in this setting that her second cousin Nick Caraway re-enters her life, taking up a position as a bond salesman in New York, and with him, also returning into her life, is her neighbor, Daisy’s impoverished ex-lover Jay. Gatsby, now a wealthy but illicit businessman. Daisy had previously married Tom because, as she tells Gatsby, “rich girls don’t marry poor boys.” Early in their marriage, Tom began openly entertaining a number of lovers, even taking Nick on an outing to visit his current diversion, Myrtle Wilson. Daisy is unhappy but relatively calm about it, playing “the little twat”, a role to which the female cheerleaders feel resigned. Tom recognizes Daisy’s need to keep her life of comfort and pleasure surrounded by wealth and position, which makes it easier for him to control her. He abruptly cuts her off when he is no longer interested in listening to her; he criticizes her choice of words; he responds to her wishes with contempt for her. Tom is conspicuously absent from the birth of their son, and a disappointed Daisy admits 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 stance towards the childish Daisy justifies his habit of “going out on the town”, but to win back his trust, he says that he always comes back and that in her heart he loves her.

Kill the lover again

Gatsby becomes part of Daisy and Tom’s social circle, but when Tom accuses him of trying to steal his wife, a vicious argument ensues, and in a moment of rage and despair, Daisy drives off with Gatsby, driving his car. They pass Wilson’s garage, Tom’s mistress Myrtle runs out towards them and Daisy swerves into her, killing her instantly. Nick then watches Daisy and Tom through the window of his big mansion in East Egg as they sit across from each other at the kitchen table. Says Nick, “There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy in the picture 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 her lover and Gatsby who was driving the death chariot. A distraught George shoots Gatsby before shooting himself. Daisy and Tom go on an extended vacation and only Nick and Gatsby’s father attends the funeral. Tom proclaims his grievance to Nick for the loss of his mistress 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, are soon treated as merely a remnant of their neglected past which, as Nick observes, they leave behind for other people to clean up.

Tom’s Anima Wife

Daisy manipulates her actions with Gatsby to be the woman he imagines, the one he has imagined for five years. However, when she must face the risk of losing Tom and the lifestyle he represents, and even more the risk of paying for the death of Tom’s lover, she once again settles into the role that reflects Tom’s soul. . Her compliance is the price she agrees to pay for security. She is not willing to give up the advantages she has with Tom, even if it means losing Gatsby’s romantic illusion. She can’t do anything else. She must be Tom’s childish Daisy in need, regardless of her disparaging treatment of her, and therefore Gatsby must die to restore her relationship, emotionally unhealthy as it is. This anima woman cannot find her own intrinsic worth when she has built a life entirely dependent on materialism, the theme of much of Fitzgerald’s jazz-age writing.