Green Light? More Like Red Flag: My Take on Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan

As I enter the final year of my English Literature degree, and almost four years on from when I first encountered The Great Gatsby as part of my A level curriculum, my verdict on Daisy Buchanan has not softened: she is the most calculated villain in the entire novel.

Now I appreciate that this may sound like a particularly bold claim in a book containing the notorious Tom Buchanan and Meyer Wolfsheim… but hear me out.

When we first meet the likes of Tom and Wolfsheim, Fitzgerald immediately asserts their status as villains. From Tom’s very first introduction, he is described as possessing a ‘cruel body’, and at no point are readers led to believe that his actions will be anything short of nefarious. At the very least he is unapologetic about his behaviour, behaving in exactly the way the novel leads us to expect. My issue with Daisy? She is allowed to be a victim, a romantic figure, a heartthrob, all while doing the most damage out of any character in the novel.

What makes Daisy so dangerous then, is not simply her capacity for wrongdoing, but the fact that Fitzgerald’s sugarcoats it in charm. She maintains an almost dreamlike image of femininity throughout the novel, portraying an embodiment of beauty and privilege that allows her to evade any consequence. She is desirable, mysterious, and easy to romanticise, with any ulterior motive concealed beneath an illusion of innocence.

This illusion is accentuated further by the way in which Daisy is perpetually reduced to the object of Gatsby’s desire. While I recognise that this is a pretty fundamental part of the plot, it is somewhat frustrating that for much of the text we only really see Daisy through his rose-tinted glasses: the green light, the end goal, the perfect woman. Her idealised status as seen by Gatsby paints Daisy as an innocuous heroine caught under difficult circumstances. Yet in this reading we overlook the uncomfortable reality of her total agency in making decisions that culminate in devastating consequence.

Daisy’s decision to drive Gatsby’s car and strike Myrtle, for me, is the turning point that makes her difficult to defend. While, granted, the incident was not necessarily intentional, Daisy’s decision to retreat into the plush protection of her status and marriage renders her utterly reprehensible. Her ability to evade consequence and behave recklessly is made more insidious by the sympathy that her character often attracts, and the fact that her actions lay concealed by an inviting illusion of beauty and charm.

Of course, we can argue that there is a wider social critique at play here. Fitzgerald is not simply portraying Daisy as a complete moral failure, instead exposing a society in which wealth can offer protection from accountability: Myrtle dies, Gatsby dies, while Daisy returns to the safety of her opulence. But still, at least Tom can be up front about his depravity in a way that Daisy never is.

So, I rest my case. While not overtly vicious, Daisy’s ability to evade accountability under a deceptive guise of morality renders her the most frustrating character in the entire novel. And perhaps this is what makes Fitzgerald’s characterisation so compelling: his unique ability to construct a complex figure whose actions invite such contrasting perceptions amongst readers.

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