Their relationship is also a meditation on change —as much as Gatsby wants to repeat the past, he can't. Daisy has moved on and he can never return to that beautiful, perfect moment when he kissed her for the first time and wedded all her hopes and dreams to her.
Gatsby's problem is seeing time as circular rather than linear. In contrast to Gatsby and Daisy's long history, the novel's other affair began much more recently: Tom and Myrtle start their relationship a few months before the novel opens. Myrtle sees the affair as romantic and a ticket out of her marriage, while Tom sees it as just another affair, and Myrtle as one of a string of mistresses. The pair has undeniable physical chemistry and attraction to each other, perhaps more than any other pairing in the book.
Perhaps due to Myrtle's tragic and unexpected death, Tom does display some emotional attachment to her, which complicates a reading of him as a purely antagonistic figure—or of their relationship as purely physical. So what drives this affair?
What does it reveal about Tom and Myrtle? Let's find out. The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs.
Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. Go and buy ten more dogs with it. This passage is great because it neatly displays Tom and Myrtle's different attitudes toward the affair. Myrtle thinks that Tom is spoiling her specifically, and that he cares about her more than he really does—after all, he stops to buy her a dog just because she says it's cute and insists she wants one on a whim.
But to Tom, the money isn't a big deal. He casually throws away the 10 dollars, aware he's being scammed but not caring, since he has so much money at his disposal. He also insists that he knows more than the dog seller and Myrtle, showing how he looks down at people below his own class—but Myrtle misses this because she's infatuated with both the new puppy and Tom himself.
Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes and I couldn't keep my eyes off him but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm—and so I told him I'd have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied.
I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever, you can't live forever.
Myrtle, twelve years into a marriage she's unhappy in, sees her affair with Tom as a romantic escape. She tells the story of how she and Tom met like it's the beginning of a love story.
In reality, it's pretty creepy —Tom sees a woman he finds attractive on a train and immediately goes and presses up to her like and convinces her to go sleep with him immediately. Not exactly the stuff of classic romance! Combined with the fact Myrtle believes Daisy's Catholicism a lie is what keeps her and Tom apart, you see that despite Myrtle's pretensions of worldliness, she actually knows very little about Tom or the upper classes, and is a poor judge of character.
She is an easy person for Tom to take advantage of. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy's name. In case the reader was still wondering that perhaps Myrtle's take on the relationship had some basis in truth, this is a cold hard dose of reality.
Tom's vicious treatment of Myrtle reminds the reader of his brutality and the fact that, to him, Myrtle is just another affair, and he would never in a million years leave Daisy for her. Despite the violence of this scene, the affair continues. Myrtle is either so desperate to escape her marriage or so self-deluded about what Tom thinks of her or both that she stays with Tom after this ugly scene.
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control. Chapter 2 gives us lots of insight into Myrtle's character and how she sees her affair with Tom.
But other than Tom's physical attraction to Myrtle, we don't get as clear of a view of his motivations until later on. In Chapter 7, Tom panics once he finds out George knows about his wife's affair. We learn here that control is incredibly important to Tom—control of his wife, control of his mistress, and control of society more generally see his rant in Chapter 1 about the "Rise of the Colored Empires".
So just as he passionately rants and raves against the "colored races," he also gets panicked and angry when he sees that he is losing control both over Myrtle and Daisy. This speaks to Tom's entitlement —both as a wealthy person, as a man, and as a white person—and shows how his relationship with Myrtle is just another display of power. It has very little to do with his feelings for Myrtle herself. So as the relationship begins to slip from his fingers, he panics—not because he's scared of losing Myrtle, but because he's scared of losing a possession.
By God it was awful——" 9. Despite Tom's abhorrent behavior throughout the novel, at the very end, Nick leaves us with an image of Tom confessing to crying over Myrtle. This complicates the reader's desire to see Tom as a straightforward villain.
This confession of emotion certainly doesn't redeem Tom, but it does prevent you from seeing him as a complete monster. While Daisy and Gatsby have history, Tom and Myrtle got together recently.
And while their relationship seems to be driven by physical attraction, Gatsby is attracted to Daisy's wealth and status. The tragic end to this affair, as well as Daisy and Gatsby's, reinforces the idea that class is an enormous, insurmountable barrier , and that when people try to circumvent the barrier by dating across classes, they end up endangering themselves.
Tom and Myrtle's affair also speaks to the unfair advantages that Tom has as a wealthy, white man. Even though for a moment he felt himself losing control over his life, he quickly got it back and was able to hide in his money while Gatsby, Myrtle, and George all ended up dead thanks to their connection to the Buchanans. In short, Tom and Myrtle's relationship allows Fitzgerald to sharply critique the world of the wealthy, old-money class in s New York.
By showing Tom's affair with a working-class woman, Nick reveals Tom's ugliest behavior as well as the cruelty of class divisions during the roaring twenties.
Tom's subtlety in dealing with Myrtle. Want to write the perfect college application essay? Get professional help from PrepScholar. Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges.
Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now :. We've covered the novel's two married couples—the Buchanans and the Wilsons—as well as the affairs of three out of four of those married parties. But there is one more relationship in the novel, one that is a bit disconnected to the others.
I'm talking, of course, about Nick and Jordan. Nick and Jordan are the only couple without any prior contact before the novel begins aside from Nick apparently seeing her photo once in a magazine and hearing about her attempt to cheat. Jordan is a friend of Daisy's who is staying with her, and Nick meets Jordan when he goes to have dinner with the Buchanans. We can observe their relationship most closely in Chapters 3 and 4, as Nick gets closer to Jordan despite needing to break off his relationship back home first.
However, their relationship takes a back seat in the middle and end of the novel as the drama of Daisy's affair with Gatsby, and Tom's with Myrtle, plays out.
So by the end of the novel, Nick sees Jordan is just as self-centered and immoral as Tom and Daisy, and his earlier infatuation fades to disgust. She, in turn, calls him out for not being as honest and careful as he presents himself as. So what's the story with Nick and Jordan? Why include their relationship at all? Let's dig into what sparks the relationship and the insights they give us into the other characters. I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.
Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before. As Nick eyes Jordan in Chapter 1, we see his immediate physical attraction to her , though it's not as potent as Tom's to Myrtle. And similarly to Gatsby's attraction to Daisy being to her money and voice, Nick is pulled in by Jordan's posture, her "wan, charming discontented face"— her attitude and status are more alluring than her looks alone.
Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing——" 1. Throughout the novel, we see Nick avoiding getting caught up in relationships—the woman he mentions back home, the woman he dates briefly in his office, Myrtle's sister—though he doesn't protest to being "flung together" with Jordan. Perhaps this is because Jordan would be a step up for Nick in terms of money and class, which speaks to Nick's ambition and class-consciousness , despite the way he paints himself as an everyman.
Furthermore, unlike these other women, Jordan isn't clingy—she lets Nick come to her. Nick sees attracted to how detached and cool she is. Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. In other words, Nick seems fascinated by the world of the super-wealthy and the privilege it grants its members. So just as Gatsby falls in love with Daisy and her wealthy status, Nick also seems attracted to Jordan for similar reasons.
However, this conversation not only foreshadows the tragic car accident later in the novel, but it also hints at what Nick will come to find repulsive about Jordan: her callous disregard for everyone but herself. It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm.
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired. Nick, again with Jordan, seems exhilarated to be with someone who is a step above him in terms of social class, exhilarated to be a "pursuing" person, rather than just busy or tired. Seeing the usually level-headed Nick this enthralled gives us some insight into Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy, and also allows us to glimpse Nick-the-person, rather than Nick-the-narrator.
And again, we get a sense of what attracts him to Jordan—her clean, hard, limited self, her skepticism, and jaunty attitude. It's interesting to see these qualities become repulsive to Nick just a few chapters later.
Just before noon the phone woke me and I started up with sweat breaking out on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker; she often called me up at this hour because the uncertainty of her own movements between hotels and clubs and private houses made her hard to find in any other way.
Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool as if a divot from a green golf links had come sailing in at the office window but this morning it seemed harsh and dry. Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy's house, but the act annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid. Later in the novel, after Myrtle's tragic death, Jordan's casual, devil-may-care attitude is no longer cute—in fact, Nick finds it disgusting.
How can Jordan care so little about the fact that someone died, and instead be most concerned with Nick acting cold and distant right after the accident? In this brief phone conversation, we thus see Nick's infatuation with Jordan ending, replaced with the realization that Jordan's casual attitude is indicative of everything Nick hates about the rich, old money group. So by extension, Nick's relationship with Jordan represents how his feelings about the wealthy have evolved—at first he was drawn in by their cool, detached attitudes, but eventually found himself repulsed by their carelessness and cruelty.
She was dressed to play golf and I remember thinking she looked like a good illustration, her chin raised a little, jauntily, her hair the color of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished she told me without comment that she was engaged to another man. I doubted that though there were several she could have married at a nod of her head but I pretended to be surprised.
For just a minute I wondered if I wasn't making a mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up to say goodbye. I don't give a damn about you now but it was a new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while. Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride. In their official break-up, Jordan calls out Nick for claiming to be honest and straightforward but in fact being prone to lying himself.
So even as Nick is disappointed in Jordan's behavior, Jordan is disappointed to find just another "bad driver" in Nick, and both seem to mutually agree they would never work as a couple. It's interesting to see Nick called out for dishonest behavior for once.
For all of his judging of others, he's clearly not a paragon of virtue, and Jordan clearly recognizes that.
So perhaps there is a safe way out of a bad relationship in Gatsby—to walk away early, even if it's difficult and you're still "half in love" with the other person 9. Nick and Jordan's relationship is interesting, because it's the only straightforward dating we see in the novel it's neither a marriage nor an illicit affair , and it doesn't serve as an obvious foil to the other relationships.
But it does echo Daisy and Gatsby's relationship , in that a poorer man desires a richer girl, and for that reason gives us additional insight into Gatsby's love for Daisy. But it also quietly echoes Tom's relationship with Myrtle , since we Nick seems physically drawn to Jordan as well.
The relationship also is one of the ways we get insight into Nick. For instance, he only really admits to his situation with the woman back at home when he's talking about being attracted to Jordan.
Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free" 3. Through Jordan, we actually see Nick experience exhilaration and love and attraction. Gatz, who has come all the way from Minnesota. Henry Gatz is proud of his son and saves a picture of his house. Sick of the East and its empty values, Nick decides to move back to the Midwest. He breaks off his relationship with Jordan , who suddenly claims that she has become engaged to another man.
Tom tells him that he was the one who told Wilson that Gatsby owned the car that killed Myrtle, and describes how greatly he suffered when he had to give up the apartment he kept in the city for his affair. He says that Gatsby deserved to die. Nick comes to the conclusion that Tom and Daisy are careless and uncaring people and that they destroy people and things, knowing that their money will shield them from ever having to face any negative consequences.
Nick muses that, in some ways, this story is a story of the West, even though it has taken place entirely on the East Coast. Nick, Jordan, Tom, and Daisy are all from west of the Appalachians, and Nick believes that the reactions of each, himself included, to living the fast-paced, lurid lifestyle of the East has shaped his or her behavior.
Nick remembers life in the Midwest, full of snow, trains, and Christmas wreaths, and thinks that the East seems grotesque and distorted by comparison. As the moon rises, he imagines the island with no houses and considers what it must have looked like to the explorers who discovered the New World centuries before.
Nick imagines that America was once a goal for dreamers and explorers, just as Daisy was for Gatsby. Nick senses that people everywhere are motivated by similar dreams and by a desire to move forward into a future in which their dreams are realized. Nick envisions their struggles to create that future as boats moving in a body of water against a current that inevitably carries them back into the past. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
She is also called to speak with Gatsby, and he tells her about his past with Daisy and how he hopes to meet her again through Nick, Daisy's cousin. In Chapter 4 , Jordan tells Nick about Daisy and Gatsby's history and gets him to help arrange their meeting, igniting Daisy and Gatsby's affair.
The group ends up going to New York City. Jordan rides up with Tom and Nick in Gatsby's yellow car. They stop at the Wilson's garage, and Myrtle sees the trio and takes Jordan to be Tom's wife. Later that night, Jordan drives back with Nick and Tom, but this time in Tom's blue coupe. They come across the scene of Myrtle's death: she has been run over by the yellow car.
Despite witnessing this awful scene, she seems surprised Nick doesn't want to come into the Buchanans' afterward for tea. The next day, she calls Nick at work, telling him she's moved out of the Buchanans' house and wants to see him, but they end up arguing over the phone and breaking up. Finally, in Chapter 9 , Nick seeks her out to more formally break things off, and she tells him she's engaged.
Nick doesn't appear to have liked it enough to put a ring on it. Want to improve your SAT score by points or more? We've put our best advice into a single guide. These are the 5 strategies you MUST be using to have a shot at improving your score.
They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy. This is an early example of Jordan's unexpectedly clever observations —throughout the novel she reveals a quick wit and keen eye for detail in social situations. This comment also sets the stage for the novel's chief affair between Daisy and Gatsby, and how at the small party in Chapter 7 their secrets come out to disastrous effect.
Compare Jordan's comment to Daisy's general attitude of being too sucked into her own life to notice what's going on around her. That's why I like you. Here we get a sense of what draws Jordan and Nick together—he's attracted to her carefree, entitled attitude while she sees his cautiousness as a plus. After all, if it really does take two to make an accident, as long as she's with a careful person, Jordan can do whatever she wants!
We also see Jordan as someone who carefully calculates risks —both in driving and in relationships. This is why she brings up her car accident analogy again at the end of the book when she and Nick break up—Nick was, in fact, a "bad driver" as well, and she was surprised that she read him wrong.
Another example of Jordan's observant wit , this quote about Daisy is Jordan's way of suggesting that perhaps Daisy's reputation is not so squeaky-clean as everyone else believes. After all, if Daisy were the only sober one in a crowd of partiers, it would be easy for her to hide less-than-flattering aspects about herself.
Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. In this moment, Nick reveals what he finds attractive about Jordan—not just her appearance though again, he describes her as pleasingly "jaunty" and "hard" here , but her attitude. She's skeptical without being fully cynical, and remains upbeat and witty despite her slightly pessimistic outlook.
At this point in the story, Midwestern Nick probably still finds this exciting and attractive, though of course by the end he realizes that her attitude makes it hard for her to truly empathize with others, like Myrtle. In contrast to Daisy who says just before this, rather despairingly, "What will we do today, and then tomorrow, and for the next thirty years?
As we'll discuss later, perhaps since she's still unmarried her life still has a freedom Daisy's does not, as well as the possibility to start over. While she's not exactly a starry-eyed optimist, Jordan does show resilience and an ability to start things over and move on. This allows her to escape the tragedy at the end relatively unscathed. It also fits how Jordan doesn't seem to let herself get too attached to people or places, which is why she's surprised by how much she felt for Nick.
I don't give a damn about you now but it was a new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while. Jordan doesn't frequently showcase her emotions or show much vulnerability, so this moment is striking because we see that she did really care for Nick to at least some extent.
Notice that she couches her confession with a pretty sassy remark "I don't give a damn about you now" which feels hollow when you realize that being "thrown over" by Nick made her feel dizzy—sad, surprised, shaken—for a while. Jordan, like Tom, is usually roped into essay topics to be compared with Daisy the way Tom is often contrasted with Gatsby or sometimes George , or to make a larger argument about the role of women more generally.
Since Jordan isn't as major of a character as Daisy, Gatsby, or even Tom, it's rare to get a standalone essay just about Jordan. To read some excellent detailed analysis of how to compare Jordan to Myrtle or Daisy, check out our article on comparing and contrasting the novel's characters. Make sure to move beyond the obvious when writing about Jordan —yes, she has a job while Daisy and Myrtle are both married, but what else makes her stand out?
Pay special attention to how Jordan is described versus Daisy, Jordan's dialogue, and Jordan's focus—it's clear that Jordan is often focused outward, observing other characters and their interactions, while Daisy tends to be turned inward, with her own emotions. Despite the progress in women's rights made in the early twentieth century, including the right to vote won in , most women, especially wealthy women, were expected to marry, have children, and stay at home.
Daisy sticks to this prescribed societal role by marrying and having a child. But Jordan plays golf professionally, "runs around the country" and doesn't seem to be in a hurry to marry 1.
In short, on the surface, it appears that Daisy is a traditionalist while Jordan is expanding the possibilities of a woman's life. However, Daisy and Jordan aren't exactly a straightforward housewife and career woman duo. First of all, Daisy is quite removed from her role as a mother, since her daughter Pammy is mostly raised by a maid.
She also seriously contemplates leaving Tom during the novel. Meanwhile, Jordan tells Nick at the end of the novel she's engaged. Whether or not this is true, it suggests that Jordan will certainly get married one day, and that her current golf career is just a temporary diversion, not a permanent independent lifestyle.
Indeed, both Daisy and Jordan are also both at the mercy of their families : Daisy derives all of her wealth and power from Tom, while Jordan is beholden to her old aunt for money. They don't actually have much control over their own wealth and would lose everything if they went too far out of line.
So while Daisy and Jordan both typify a very showy lifestyle that looks liberated—being "flappers," having sex, drinking in public which before the s was seen as a highly indecent thing for a woman to do , playing golf professionally in Jordan's case—they in fact are still thoroughly constrained by the limited options women had in the s in terms of making their own lives.
Jordan briefly narrates in Chapter 4. How is Jordan's narration different from Nick's? Why rely on her narration at all? What would the novel be like from her point of view? Jordan's narration is definitely distinct from Nick's. Her diction is a bit sharper and she has more blatantly judgmental asides , calling Daisy "drunk as a monkey" 4. She also uses more vivid imagery: the red, white, and blue banners on the houses flapping "tut-tut-tut-tut" in a "disapproving way" 4.
Her choice of words is a pretty good insight into her character and how sharply observant she is! So why is there a section narrated by Jordan at all? Perhaps Nick leans on Jordan because he feels unqualified to talk about Daisy's past. After all, aside from their conversation in Chapter 1, Nick doesn't have close conversations with Daisy. But since Nick gets to know Gatsby through several close conversations, he feels comfortable telling about Gatsby's past.
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