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Weeping that her baby is a girl, Daisy is dependent on men to make her key decisions for her (133, 151): secure in and yet remote from male ownership and ardor, "making only a polite, pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained" (12-13), she radiates a carefully girlish charm of irrationality and whimsy: "Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" (14). Woman, it appears, is presented only as romance, in the restless world of glamour where there are only the pursued and the pursuing. As the flip side to such narrow pedestalization, an implicit morosity appoints Daisy as the traitor to Gatsby's ideal and as the killer of Myrtle who won't even stop the car; but "dishonesty in a woman is something you never blame deeply"
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On the dustjacket on which Fitzgerald had insisted for Gatsby, a pair of sorrowing beautiful eyes, presiding above orgiastic neon, bears a foetus. And in this novel, high above the urgent, suave contestings, like an adult far removed from the fevers of sibling rivalry, a craved symbolic mother, strikingly absent in a world only of belles, haunts the upreachings of the narrative: sanctuary of security as the bestower of an unconditional love. Truest intimacy with Daisy is evoked not through orchids, ballroom, or kiss but through a "maternal" relation, a binding, protective gentleness: "she used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together — it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way" (78). Of Daisy and Gatsby, Nick writes, "They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder, or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep" (150). Gatsby, we …show more content…
But Daisy, traitor to the Dream, proves a negligent mother; and Myrtle, whose cheapness can only parody the Dream and motherhood, dies with her breast torn loose and "swinging . . . like a flap" (138). The feeding breast surfaces and fails, like "the fresh, green breast of the new world" revealed to the Dutch seamen, and like that where Gatsby "could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder"
On the dustjacket on which Fitzgerald had insisted for Gatsby, a pair of sorrowing beautiful eyes, presiding above orgiastic neon, bears a foetus. And in this novel, high above the urgent, suave contestings, like an adult far removed from the fevers of sibling rivalry, a craved symbolic mother, strikingly absent in a world only of belles, haunts the upreachings of the narrative: sanctuary of security as the bestower of an unconditional love. Truest intimacy with Daisy is evoked not through orchids, ballroom, or kiss but through a "maternal" relation, a binding, protective gentleness: "she used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together — it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way" (78). Of Daisy and Gatsby, Nick writes, "They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder, or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep" (150). Gatsby, we …show more content…
But Daisy, traitor to the Dream, proves a negligent mother; and Myrtle, whose cheapness can only parody the Dream and motherhood, dies with her breast torn loose and "swinging . . . like a flap" (138). The feeding breast surfaces and fails, like "the fresh, green breast of the new world" revealed to the Dutch seamen, and like that where Gatsby "could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder"