In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom live in the fashionably affluent East Egg off Long Island Sound. While Tom cannot move past his football days in New Haven, full of machismo and bravado and as Nick describes him, forever seeking “the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game,” Daisy languishes in the sultry summer heat of New York with little to occupy her time or her thoughts. It is into this setting that her second cousin Nick Caraway re-enters her life, taking a position as a bond salesman in New York, and with him, also returning to her life, is his neighbor, Daisy’s former impoverished lover Jay Gatsby, now a wealthy but illicit entrepreneur. Earlier Daisy had married Tom because, as she tells Gatsby, “Rich girls don’t marry poor boys.” At the outset of their marriage, Tom began openly entertaining a series of mistresses, even taking Nick on an excursion to visit his current diversion Myrtle Wilson. Daisy is unhappy but relatively quiet about it, playing “the little fool,” a role to which anima women feel resigned. Tom recognizes Daisy’s need to maintain her life of ease and pleasure surrounded by wealth and position, which makes it easier for him to control her. He cuts her off abruptly when he’s no longer interested in listening to her; he criticizes her choice of words; he responds to her desires with contempt. Tom is conspicuously absent for the birth of their child, and the disillusioned Daisy admits to Nick, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool–that’s the best a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Tom’s paternal stance with the childlike Daisy justifies his habit of going “off on a spree,” but in order to regain her trust, he says he always comes back and in his heart he loves her.
Killing the Mistress Again
Gatsby becomes part of Daisy and Tom’s social circle, but when Tom accuses him of trying to steal his wife away, a vicious argument ensues, and in a moment of rage and desperation, Daisy goes off with Gatsby, driving his car. They pass Wilson’s garage, Tom’s mistress Myrtle comes running out to them, and Daisy swerves toward her, killing her instantly. Afterward Nick looks at Daisy and Tom through the window of their great mansion on East Egg as they sit across the kitchen table from each other. Nick says, “There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody 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 the one driving the death car. A distraught George shoots Gatsby before turning the gun on himself. Daisy and Tom leave for an extended holiday, and only Nick and Gatsby’s father attend the funeral. Tom proclaims his grief 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 is soon treated as just a remnant of their careless past that, as Nick observes, they leave behind for other people to clean up.
Tom’s Anima Woman
Daisy manipulates her actions with Gatsby to be the woman he imagines, the one he has imagined for five years. Yet when she must confront the risk of losing Tom and the lifestyle he represents, and even more so the risk of paying for the hit-and-run death of Tom’s mistress, she once again settles into the role that reflects Tom’s anima. Her compliance is the price she agrees to pay for security. She is not prepared 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 childlike Daisy who needs him, regardless of his scornful treatment of her, and therefore 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 upon materialism, the theme of much of Fitzgerald’s jazz age writing.
