A Streetcar Named Desire Dr. Jekyll and Mr. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. How does Nick Carraway first meet Jay Gatsby? Why did Daisy marry Tom? Why does Gatsby arrange for Nick to have lunch with Jordan Baker? How does Tom find out about the affair between Gatsby and Daisy? How does Gatsby make his money?
Tom even cheated on her soon after their honeymoon, according to Jordan: "It was touching to see them together—it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and ripped a front wheel off his car.
The girl who was with him got into the papers too because her arm was broken—she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel" 1. So what makes the Buchanans tick?
Why has their marriage survived multiple affairs and even a hit-and-run? Find out through our analysis of key quotes from the novel. Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
Nick introduces Tom and Daisy as restless, rich, and as a singular unit: they. Despite all of the revelations about the affairs and other unhappiness in their marriage, and the events of the novel, it's important to note our first and last descriptions of Tom and Daisy describe them as a close, if bored, couple.
In fact, Nick only doubles down on this observation later in Chapter 1. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl.
She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. 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 distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
In this passage, Daisy pulls Nick aside in Chapter 1 and claims, despite her outward happiness and luxurious lifestyle, she's quite depressed by her current situation.
At first, it seems Daisy is revealing the cracks in her marriage —Tom was "God knows where" at the birth of their daughter, Pammy—as well as a general malaise about society in general "everything's terrible anyhow". However, right after this confession, Nick doubts her sincerity. And indeed, she follows up her apparently serious complaint with "an absolute smirk. Well, Nick goes on to observe that the smirk "asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
Over the course of the novel, both Tom and Daisy enter or continue affairs, pulling away from each other instead of confronting the problems in their marriage.
However, Gatsby forces them to confront their feelings in the Plaza Hotel when he demands Daisy say she never loved Tom. Although she gets the words out, she immediately rescinds them—"I did love [Tom] once but I loved you too! Here, Tom—usually presented as a swaggering, brutish, and unkind—breaks down, speaking with "husky tenderness" and recalling some of the few happy moments in his and Daisy's marriage. This is a key moment because it shows despite the dysfunction of their marriage, Tom and Daisy seem to both seek solace in happy early memories.
Between those few happy memories and the fact that they both come from the same social class, their marriage ends up weathering multiple affairs. Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of ale.
He was talking intently across the table at her and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement. They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren't unhappy either.
There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—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.
By the end of the novel, after Daisy's murder of Myrtle as well as Gatsby's death, she and Tom are firmly back together, "conspiring" and "careless" once again, despite the deaths of their lovers. As Nick notes, they "weren't happy…and yet they weren't unhappy either. So the novel ends with them once again described as a unit, a "they," perhaps even more strongly bonded since they've survived not only another round of affairs but murder, as well. Neither Myrtle's infatuation with Tom or Gatsby's deep longing for Daisy can drive a wedge between the couple.
Despite the lying, cheating, and murdering that occurs during the summer, Tom and Daisy end the novel just like they began it: careless, restless, and yet, firmly united.
The stubborn closeness of Tom and Daisy's marriage, despite Daisy's exaggerated unhappiness and Tom's philandering, reinforces the dominance of the old money class over the world of Gatsby.
Despite so many troubles, for Tom and Daisy, their marriage guarantees their continued membership in the exclusive world of the old money rich. In other words, class is a much stronger bond than love in the novel.
Tom and Daisy somehow end the novel with a stronger marriage! One of the single most important parts of your college application is what classes you choose take in high school in conjunction with how well you do in those classes.
Our team of PrepScholar admissions experts have compiled their knowledge into this single guide to planning out your high school course schedule. In contrast to Tom and Daisy, Myrtle and George were married 12 years before the start of the novel. You might think that since they've been married for four times as long, their marriage is more stable. In fact, in contrast from Tom and Daisy's unified front, Myrtle and George's marriage appears fractured from the beginning.
Although Myrtle was taken with George at first, she overestimated his money and "breeding" and found herself married to a mechanic and living over a garage in Queens, a situation she's apparently unhappy with 2.
However, divorce was uncommon in the s, and furthermore, the working-class Myrtle doesn't have access to wealthy family members or any other real options, so she stays married—perhaps because George is quite devoted and even in some ways subservient to her. A few months before the beginning of the novel in , she begins an affair with Tom Buchanan, her first affair 2. She sees the affair as a way out of her marriage, but Tom sees her as just another disposable mistress, leaving her desperate and vulnerable once George finds out about the affair.
I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.
She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:.
A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. As we discuss in our article on the symbolic valley of ashes , George is coated by the dust of despair and thus seems mired in the hopelessness and depression of that bleak place, while Myrtle is alluring and full of vitality. Her first action is to order her husband to get chairs, and the second is to move away from him, closer to Tom.
In contrast to Tom and Daisy, who are initially presented as a unit, our first introduction to George and Myrtle shows them fractured, with vastly different personalities and motivations. We get the sense right away that their marriage is in trouble, and conflict between the two is imminent. I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there. Here we get a bit of back-story about George and Myrtle's marriage: like Daisy, Myrtle was crazy about her husband at first but the marriage has since soured.
But while Daisy doesn't have any real desire to leave Tom, here we see Myrtle eager to leave, and very dismissive of her husband. Myrtle seems to suggest that even having her husband wait on her is unacceptable—it's clear she thinks she is finally headed for bigger and better things. Generally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn't working he sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road.
When any one spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable, colorless way. He was his wife's man and not his own. Again, in contrast to the strangely unshakeable partnership of Tom and Daisy, the co-conspirators, Michaelis briefly taking over narrator duties observes that George "was his wife's man," "worn out.
Rather than face the world as a unified front, the Wilsons each struggle for dominance within the marriage. A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting; before he could move from his door the business was over.
We don't know what happened in the fight before this crucial moment, but we do know George locked Myrtle in a room once he figured out she was having an affair. So despite the outward appearance of being ruled by his wife, he does, in fact, have the ability to physically control her. However, he apparently doesn't hit her, the way Tom does, and Myrtle taunts him for it—perhaps insinuating he's less a man than Tom. This outbreak of both physical violence George locking up Myrtle and emotional abuse probably on both sides fulfills the earlier sense of the marriage being headed for conflict.
Still, it's disturbing to witness the last few minutes of this fractured, unstable partnership. While Tom and Daisy's marriage ends up being oddly stable thanks to their money, despite multiple affairs, Myrtle and George's marriage goes from strained to violent after just one.
In other words, Tom and Daisy can patch things up over and over by retreating into their status and money, while Myrtle and George don't have that luxury. While George wants to retreat out west, he doesn't have the money, leaving him and Myrtle in Queens and vulnerable to the dangerous antics of the other characters.
The instability of their marriage thus seems to come from the instability of their financial situation, as well as the fact that Myrtle is more ambitious than George. Fitzgerald seems to be arguing that anyone who is not wealthy is much more vulnerable to tragedy and strife. As a song sung in Chapter 5 goes, "The rich get richer and the poor get—children"—the rich get richer and the poor can't escape their poverty, or tragedy 5. The contrasting marriages of the Buchanans and the Wilsons help illustrate the novel's critique of the wealthy, old-money class.
Myrtle and George are a very slow burn that eventually explodes. The relationship at the very heart of The Great Gatsby is, of course, Gatsby and Daisy , or more specifically, Gatsby's tragic love of or obsession with Daisy, a love that drives the novel's plot.
So how did this ill-fated love story begin? Five years before the start of the novel, Jay Gatsby who had learned from Dan Cody how to act like one of the wealthy was stationed in Louisville before going to fight in WWI. In Louisville, he met Daisy Fay, a beautiful young heiress 10 years his junior , who took him for someone of her social class. Gatsby maintained the lie, which allowed their relationship to progress.
Gatsby fell in love with Daisy and the wealth she represents, and she with him though apparently not to the same excessive extent , but he had to leave for the war and by the time he returned to the US in , Daisy has married Tom Buchanan.
Determined to get her back, Gatsby falls in with Meyer Wolfshiem, a gangster, and gets into bootlegging and other criminal enterprises to make enough money to finally be able to provide for her. By the beginning of the novel, he is ready to try and win her back over, ignoring the fact she has been married to Tom for three years and has a child.
So does this genius plan turn out the way Gatsby hopes? Can he repeat the past? Not exactly. In the first chapter, we get a few mentions and glimpses of Gatsby, but one of the most interesting is Daisy immediately perking up at his name.
She obviously still remembers him and perhaps even thinks about him, but her surprise suggests that she thinks he's long gone, buried deep in her past. This is in sharp contrast to the image we get of Gatsby himself at the end of the Chapter, reaching actively across the bay to Daisy's house 1. While Daisy views Gatsby as a memory, Daisy is Gatsby's past, present, and future. It's clear even in Chapter 1 that Gatsby's love for Daisy is much more intense than her love for him.
Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.
In Chapter 4, we learn Daisy and Gatsby's story from Jordan: specifically, how they dated in Louisville but it ended when Gatsby went to the front. She also explains how Daisy threatened to call off her marriage to Tom after receiving a letter from Gatsby, but of course ended up marrying him anyway 4. Here we also learn that Gatsby's primary motivation is to get Daisy back, while Daisy is of course in the dark about all of this.
This sets the stage for their affair being on unequal footing: while each has love and affection for the other, Gatsby has thought of little else but Daisy for five years while Daisy has created a whole other life for herself. Daisy and Gatsby finally reunite in Chapter 5, the book's mid-point. But this initial dialogue is fascinating, because we see that Daisy's memories of Gatsby are more abstract and clouded, while Gatsby has been so obsessed with her he knows the exact month they parted and has clearly been counting down the days until their reunion.
They were sitting at either end of the couch looking at each other as if some question had been asked or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding.
He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.
After the initially awkward re-introduction, Nick leaves Daisy and Gatsby alone and comes back to find them talking candidly and emotionally. Gatsby has transformed—he is radiant and glowing. In contrast, we don't see Daisy as radically transformed except for her tears.
Although our narrator, Nick, pays much closer attention to Gatsby than Daisy, these different reactions suggest Gatsby is much more intensely invested in the relationship. Gatsby gets the chance to show off his mansion and enormous wealthy to Daisy, and she breaks down after a very conspicuous display of Gatsby's wealth, through his many-colored shirts.
In Daisy's tears, you might sense a bit of guilt—that Gatsby attained so much just for her—or perhaps regret, that she might have been able to be with him had she had the strength to walk away from her marriage with Tom. Still, unlike Gatsby, whose motivations are laid bare, it's hard to know what Daisy is thinking and how invested she is in their relationship, despite how openly emotional she is during this reunion.
Perhaps she's just overcome with emotion due to reliving the emotions of their first encounters. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.
So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
In flashback, we hear about Daisy and Gatsby's first kiss, through Gatsby's point of view. By the time Tom clues in, Daisy and Gatsby are trying to hold back on the public affection. They discuss going into town and Tom notices the passionate gaze Gatsby gives towards his wife.
Daisy is the embodiment of what Gatsby has been longing for all his life, but he might have better that her voice was full of OLD money- something he can never have.
Gatsby even dismisses his servants to prevent gossip regarding his affair with Daisy from spreading to East Egg. Tom eventually exposes Gatsby, and Daisy refuses to leave her husband even though Tom is an unfaithful, despicable man. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is obsessed with Daisy Buchanan, he is clinging to the past, desperately trying to relive the romance of his youth. His obsession is demonstrated on multiple occasions throughout the novel. Essentially Gatsby wants to give Daisy the life she deserves.
Daisy is responsible for driving a car that hit Myrtle Wilson on the side of the road. Why does Daisy have a tough time saying, as Gatsby wishes, that she never loved Tom? Because at one point she did love Tom, and Gatsby. She stares terrified between Gatsby and her husband and she starts to withdraw into herself.
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