The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald has been a pillar of American literature for decades. Told through the perspective of Nick Carraway, the novel expounds on love, death, and loyalty as it follows the temporarily revived relationship between Gatsby and Daisy. As Nick explores the relationship between the two lovers, Fitzgerald draws attention to the possessive and toxic nature of Gatsby’s attachment to Daisy.
Fitzgerald emphasises how Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship was destined to end through the usage of multiple flowers alongside their birth and death, calling to Gatsby’s proprietorial power over Daisy due to the fact that he views her as a possession. He ultimately argues that if one’s love is corrupted due to their need to climb the social ladder, such love cannot form long lasting relationships.
Daisy’s rebirth as a flower becomes a motif as she grows and moves on from Gatsby, revealing how she would acquire and discard men, like objects, throughout her life for she could not depend on any of them to stay. Daisy was initially unwilling to marry Tom since she believed that her relationship with Gatsby could survive despite their class difference and the war. Her naivety is mirrored in her namesake: daisies represent innocence and rebirth, and she truly believed that Gatsby could provide for her to the point where Gatsby “took” her, “ravenously and unscrupulously”.
However, he contaminated her because he knew that “he had no real right to touch her hand” (Fitzgerald 159), displaying how Gatsby was aware that his love for her was impure and that his influence was parasitic, further signifying how she could not depend on the men in her life. Conversely, this also shows how Daisy was unaware that she was being led on and taken advantage of as she waited for Gatsby until she was forced to move on. This led to her rebirth as daisies tend to bloom often and are resilient flowers with an almost weedlike resistance.
After realising that Gatsby would not come back for her: “Daisy began to move again with the season: suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with… dying orchids on the floor beside her bed” (Fitzgerald 161). Her resurrection is implied through her blossoming with the “season”. Flowers begin to bloom during the spring “season”, just as Daisy does when she chooses to entertain “half a dozen men” throughout the spring solely for the reason that she can.
Despite this, none of the men in her life meet her needs for they all eventually leave her in the end, signified by her “dying orchids”. Orchids are flowers which need great care but with said care, they can come alive again and again. However, the fact that her orchids died “at dawn” indicates how none of the men in Daisy’s life manage to keep and take care of her, for they would all wilt before the day’s end. This also explains why Daisy decides to stay with Tom at the end of the novel because despite all his flaws, he is the only stable man she had in her life. Gatsby’s inadequacy becomes especially evident in these narratives as Tom was equally toxic to Daisy yet she still chooses him anyway, signifying Gatsby’s inability to properly care for Daisy due to the risk of his love.
Furthermore, Daisy is posed as a mirror to an unnamed woman at Gatsby’s party, whose ethereal form indicates how Gatsby merely viewed Daisy as a glamorous possession to heighten his status. When Daisy is first introduced to Gatsby’s parties, there are two main figures who capture her attention: “a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree” as well as “her director” (Fitzgerald 112). By describing the woman to be ‘scarcely human’ and then comparing her to an ‘orchid’, Fitzgerald first emphasises how “gorgeous” she is, then proceeds to dehumanize her, and lastly compares her to a flower, echoing descriptions of Daisy throughout the novel.
Moreover, the woman is never given a name other than “his Star” (Fitzgerald 87), stressing how she is ‘his’ possession. This objectification carries forward to Gatsby and Daisy, most highlighted by how the director is described to leave a kiss on the woman’s cheek – then echoed in the last page of the chapter where Gatsby divulges his first kiss with Daisy to Nick, telling him how “at his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete” (Fitzgerald 119).
The callback to the flower further emphasises how the director and Gatsby both see the women they are in love with to be beautifully other, and therefore something to be coveted. This definition has been prevalent all throughout Daisy’s life for she has always been a sought after woman: “not only is Daisy Buchanan named after a flower but her whole history has been spelled out in orchids and roses” (Westbrook 81). She is exoticised heavily, and this is mainly displayed through the fact that the main flowers that she is described with are orchids and roses, flowers that indicate status.
In the 1920’s, orchids were extremely rare flowers and terribly sought after, with many wealthy people spending thousands of dollars on their orchid collections. This became such a phenomenon that it was nicknamed “Orchidelirium”, similarly exemplifying how Gatsby desperately needed Daisy. He believed himself to be just like the director; Daisy was the star of his show and he puppeteered her strings. She was a possession that he wished to have in his collection because she would improve it, thus showing how his ambition and need to move up within the class system consumed any love that he might have had for her.
The foreshadowing of the impermanence of the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy is highlighted through the flowers that are introduced throughout Daisy’s first tour of Gatsby’s house. As Gatsby transports Daisy through his home in a bid to impress her, there is a “ripe mystery about it”, evidently showcasing how Gatsby himself is unaware of how to go about rekindling his relationship with Daisy.
Although their relationship was once pure and blooming, even Gatsby is aware that he cannot reinvigorate what has been lost, as his feelings are conveyed by the tone in which he describes his manor: “a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered” (Fitzgerald 158).
He is aware that what he had with Daisy at one point cannot be replicated again because their “romance” has become “musty” and he is teased by the “hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms” as he tries to reach that high once again, to no avail. He specifically refers to “lavender” that is “fresh and breathing” and goes on to lament about “flowers” that are “scarcely withered”, clearly conveying how their relationship is already withering as Fitzgerald uses the life cycle of a lavender to show that what they once had cannot come to life once again. Lavender only blooms throughout the summer and this already foreshadows how by the end of August, their relationship will be no more.
Moreover, the corruption of life in a flower is often mentioned during moments of loss as a symbol of the inevitable brevity of Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship. Gatsby begins to feel as if he is losing Daisy when he tries to impress her by bringing her to one of his parties and she leaves quite disappointed with the whole night.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that their relationship will likely not work, Gatsby is willing to discard everything in order to ensure that it will. His “love for Daisy is an intense and worked-out variety of that which lovers of all ages have felt; its expression is distinctively that of a society that consumes” (Lewis 4). His need to conform to society’s rules leads to him corrupting the nature of his relationship with Daisy. Thus, his need to secure his relationship with Daisy inadvertently results in him sabotaging it, as he “began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favours and crushed flowers” (Fitzgerald 118).
Destruction surrounds Gatsby; without realising it, his need to achieve exactly what he has envisioned is so great that it overtakes reality. Flowers are delicate objects and the fact that they are “crushed” signals how fragile Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship was from the beginning, implying that they were never meant to last. The ephemeralness of the flowers foreshadow how temporary the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy was meant to be. Furthermore, the descriptions of the flowers at Gatsby’s scene of death heighten this sentiment.
What was once beautifully foreign with Daisy quickly became something twisted at the scene of Gatsby’s death with the leaves being described as “frightening”, and the roses “grotesque” (Fitzgerald 172). The corruption of nature stresses how Gatsby’s demise was indirectly a result of his corrupted love for Daisy since his need to achieve the status and recognition that he had been yearning for his whole life warped their relationship.
Ultimately, the evolution of the usage of flowers by Fitzgerald across the entire novel, from the first instance to the last, instil a sense of inevitability when it comes to the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy. The first time the reader sees a flower being mentioned in the novel: “‘But we heard it,’ insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way” (Fitzgerald 23) is when Daisy speaks out for her own belief in a rumour that she heard about Nick getting married. It is the first instance in which the reader sees her as a figure of her own with her own beliefs, without being shadowed by the men in her life.
However, despite her being vocal, Nick sees her flowering as a surprise due to the fact that he did not expect her to have such youthfulness and innocence even so late in life. Through his language, Nick is mirroring the way Gatsby sees Daisy, and through doing so, he is setting up the underlying message that although Daisy is youthful and innocent now, that will soon be lost with time as she moves on from both the life that she has and Gatsby. Flowers are delicate objects that do not have a long lifespan and by characterising Daisy as such, Fitzgerald provokes a sense of impermanence around Daisy. He further fuels this through the last paragraph in the novel, where Nick reminisces on how “as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes” (Fitzgerald 192).
Nick uses this paragraph to mourn and remember the relationship that Gatsby and Daisy once had, but also reinforces the idea that Gatsby owned Daisy in some way, especially because she “flowered” for his “sailors’ eyes”. Through establishing a characteristic of hers to be intrinsically linked with Gatsby – especially one that was so vital to her being – Fitzgerald elucidates how toxic their relationship truly was, evidently symbolising how despite the fact that they were destined to meet, they were also destined to leave one another.
Ultimately, through the usage of multiple different flowers and employing its destructive nature, Fitzgerald communicates how one cannot form a healthy, long-lasting relationship with their loved one since societal obsession with class will result in them corrupting, and therefore ending it. The way in which relationships are formed and maintained is specially scrutinised through this lens as Fitzgerald makes a clear distinction between true love and false love. Nobody should destroy themselves for their loved ones.
