The Great Gatsby
Daisy Buchanan
Nick’s cousin and Gatsby’s love
Nick’s charming, soft-spoken cousin, married to Tom Buchanan and once the girl Gatsby loved in Louisville.
Daisy lives in a white house in East Egg with her husband Tom and their small daughter. She is light, musical and quick to laugh, and people lean in to hear her low voice. Nick describes her voice as full of money. She is also guarded: she tells Nick that she thinks everything is terrible and hopes her daughter will grow up to be a beautiful little fool.
As a girl in Louisville she was the most popular young woman in town, and young officers crowded her porch. Daisy wants to feel safe and admired more than she wants to choose. People around her tend to protect her or push her, and she tends to let them.
“I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
In the story
Contains spoilers.
Daisy first appears at dinner while Tom takes a call from his mistress. When Nick invites her to tea she meets Gatsby again, cries over his shirts and begins an affair with him. At Gatsby’s party, though, she is uneasy among the new-money guests, and at the Plaza Hotel she cannot say she never loved Tom.
Daisy drives Gatsby’s car home and Myrtle is killed. Gatsby plans to take the blame, but Nick sees Daisy and Tom quietly talking in their kitchen. They leave town without a word, and Daisy does not come to Gatsby’s funeral.
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