It is often said that frustrating characters make the most compelling characters. Daisy Buchanan from F. Scott Fitzgerald's, The Great Gatsby, is most certainly a frustrating character, but does this make her a compelling character? In my opinion as a reader, yes. Daisy is not only frustrating in her actions, but also her personality and the way she views life. Fitzgerald uses these attributes of Daisy to make her a compelling character. Daisy isn't a character that many readers can fully understand to accept her and her motives. However, Fitzgerald uses her story to cause readers to think more deeply about how women are (were) treated as a lesser class almost like a prize or an object in a male dominant society.
When we are …show more content…
“(Talking about the birth of her daughter) ...it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she will be a fool- that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’” This description may be shocking to a modern reader, but in Daisy’s world women are expected to be the foolish thing for men to save. Nick himself says, “Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply,” showing that women are seen as less than men. However Daisy’s statement implies that Daisy herself was not always a fool and that maybe the shallowness is a crafty shield to protect her from the harshness of the world around her. Looking at the story from a different perspective, she actually appears quite smart. When looking at how she deals with Gatsby, she is actually able to deceive the people around her and manipulate situations where both Gatsby and Tom are involved. In one of the closing chapters of the novel where everyone is in the hotel room together, she leads both Gatsby and Tom to believe that she will choose them in devotion fueling their infatuation, constantly giving them false hope. Tayler Salvator, from The Undergraduate Times, says that “Daisy Buchanan is one of the most hated characters in literary history.” So how can someone like that be