WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE VIEW THAT THERE ARE NO WOMEN IN THE GREAT GATSBY WITH WHOM THE READER CAN SYMPATHISE WITH.
In this Novella there are only three women who hold any significance within the story, and effects events in different ways, to make us either sympathise or resent them as characters. These three characters are: Daisy, Mertyl and Jordan.
Daisy is the main woman in The Great Gatsby; she is the ‘dream’ in which Gatsby wishes to achieve and he goes all out to achieve it, however Daisy is a married woman with a child and so this helps complications to occur within the plot. This highlights the illusion and reality of Gatsby’s dream; he wants to be with Daisy – there’re moral complications, yet he doesn‘t care and continues pursuing the dream. In this sense we sympathise with Daisy because she has obviously attempted to build up a life without Gatsby, and be a ‘good wife’ for typical 1920’s women. In chapter 1 by looking at Tom with his status and personality then looking at Daisy’s status and personality in comparison we can clearly see a massive divide between the two, they do not get along and have obviously been paired together because of their money and social class, an example is the fact that Tom was absent from the birth of his daughter. This is also very obvious because Tom always interrupts Daisy as if he is never interested in what she has to say ‘“that’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking, physical specimen of a-“ “I hate..”‘ She demonstrates her thoughts of Tom and it’s obvious her marriage is not happy. When she is described for the first time she’s described as angelic and innocent “both in white” (including Jordan but, she is far from innocent). For the first few chapters we sympathize with Daisy because Tom is having an affair, with Mertyl, and Daisy no doubt knows about it. But also Daisy’s marriage is very weak and Tom is described as “a brute” and so we know immediately that he is a really horrible and dislikeable person, which is then emphasized in the second chapter, where we then see the affair first hand and see Tom’s violence towards Mertyl (the punch in the face) this therefore really makes us sympathise with Daisy. However as the novella progresses Daisy becomes rather manipulative and egotistical, we realise how much of an attention seeker she is. This becomes very apparent during the affair between her and Gatsby. By hugging his shirts (chapter 5) it is like she is hugging Gatsby “beautiful shirts” – lost opportunity. The number of shirts shows opulence/wealth, she regrets that she didn’t wait. It’s almost as if the shirts are a turning point in their relationship, reveals money and opulence which now match Daisy’s, she doesn’t care about having an affair. At this point we want Gatsby and Daisy to be together because we don’t like Tom, we want them to be happy together, and so we sympathise with Daisy and hope that she will have a happy ending. By chapter 7 we really start to dislike Daisy, she is restless, because of this she doesn’t think and she refrains from taking sides and doesn’t seem to care about the tension she is causing in the men. She outwardly flirts with Gatsby in front of Tom “you always look so cool” to which through Nick’s observations Tom reacts and realises the extent of Daisy and Gatsby’s affair “she had told him that she had loved him and Tom saw”. We get the feeling that she just plays both men along purely to get attention, and so we start to label her as an annoying attention seeker and sympathise less with her. Daisy wants two men to fight for her. Seemingly at the beginning she has everything but still misses the attention of others. As a result Nick, in chapter 7, shows Daisy as a careless and insensitive woman that just wants others to decide for her “had never, all along, intended doing anything” ” Daisy cannot and will not make up her mind, so at this moment we decide that Daisy and Gatsby’s love story was destined to fail