Daisy Buchanan is the central love interest of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, published in 1925 and set among the wealthy of Long Island in the early 1920s. Beautiful, charming and married to the unfaithful, brutish Tom Buchanan, Daisy had an earlier romance with Jay Gatsby before his departure for the First World War, and the novel's plot is largely driven by Gatsby's years-long effort, after amassing a fortune through bootlegging, to win her back and recreate a past that can no longer exist as he remembers it. Daisy is portrayed as charming yet fundamentally careless, drawn to wealth and status and unwilling to leave the security of her marriage even after resuming her affair with Gatsby, and her panicked driving of Gatsby's car in a fatal accident, for which Gatsby takes the blame, sets the novel's tragic climax in motion. Daisy Buchanan has become a widely cited symbol in American literature of the corrosive allure and emptiness of wealth and the unattainability of the idealized past Gatsby pursues.
Facts
Narrative RoleSourced to the subject's own accountWealthy socialite in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby whose choice between her husband Tom Buchanan and her former lover Jay Gatsby becomes the novel's central conflict. 1 Defining TraitSourced to the subject's own accountScholars identify her as personifying the flapper archetype of the 1920s, ultimately reduced by the contest between Tom and Gatsby to a trophy whose existence augments her possessor's status. 1 Connections
Sources
1. Daisy Buchanan (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationLead section, paragraph 1
Her choice between Gatsby and Tom becomes the novel's central conflict.
Lead section, paragraph 3
Scholars identify Daisy as personifying the cultural archetype of the flapper, young women who bobbed their hair, wore short skirts, drank alcohol and engaged in premarital sex.
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