Does Daisy From the Great Gatsby Have Blue Eyes
Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby
Blue, yellow, and green all mean something very essential
Deciphering Fitzgeralds's deceptively simple color symbolism in The Great Gatsby is not only essential to understanding the duality of James Gatz but also a great lesson in artistic image clustering.
We could pick so many "images" — pictures if you will — or even sound devices from this novel from 1925 and have fun watching how Fitzgerald's poetic mind "clusters" the images from page to page, creating layers like a wedding cake. Such images include water imagery and light imagery.
In class, we track and dissect ten different image clusters. But for the sake of this essay, let's examine the colors blue and yellow. And then quickly add the green, if time allows.
Such image clustering makes Fitzgerald more akin to his favorite poet, the Romantic John Keats, than a novelist like Leo Tolstoy.
What is the Function of the Color Blue?
The color represents Gatsby's internal, romantic side. It's the side he does not want to "show" to the world. It represents vulnerability and tenderness. Anyone who would go to such incredible lengths for the sake of his "grail" — his "golden girl" — must have a "romantic readiness" that Nick has never seen, nor will ever see again.
So of course his chauffeur wear's a robin's egg blue uniform. His lawns look "blue." He came a long way to "these blue lawns," Nick informs us at the end. Like Gatsby, he's fragile like a robin's egg.
Fitzgerald writes:
"in his blue gardens, many girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."
The mystical eyes of T.J. Eckleburg in Chapter 2 are also described as blue. We can envision Daisy swimming in the blue waters of his eyes — of his soul and in the pool of his tears. Eyes are windows into the soul. Fitzgerald could have had those eyes so many other colors. Those blue retinas are framed with yellow spectacles.
Great writers not only give us color symbolism but specific colors. For example, in A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams has Blanche on her departure from Elysian Fields to the real Elysian Fields of Greek mythology dressed in "Della Robbia Blue."
This is the color associated with the Virgin Mary as her "background" color. What do these writers mean when they use such specific colors? Well, it's up to the readers and critics to decipher the clues and make a case.
At his party, a woman wears a "gas blue" dress with "lavender beads." The dress could be just "blue" or navy, but Fitzgerald wants combustion. His party even looks to Nick as if Gatsby's house was on fire — as if his West Egg mansion replaced the sun.
Blue also shows up time and again, like when Daisy arrives in Chapter 5, and there's a blue streak across her face. She wears lavender — a sexual color and the color of royalty. She is tender, too, and ready for romance — well, at least we think so the way she talks about the nightingale and the Cunard White Star Line.
In fact, this is a direct connection between Fitzgerald and Keats. The Great Gatsby can be seen as a retelling of the Endymion myth where a young shepherd falls in love with Diana — the blue moon. The beauty is there, but always out of reach. Instead of the blue sky, we have the blue bay of Long Island separating the Romantic and his love. Daisy's maiden name was also "Fay" — a word Fitzgerald uses in "Ode to a Nightingale" for a fairy.
And here we see image clustering hard at work.
Is Daisy Fay a fairy? Is she tender and romantic? Well, not really. She's cold and calculating, and with a "voice full of money." But it doesn't matter what we know. It's all in the blue eyes of the beholder — Gatsby.
What is the Function of the Color Yellow?
The much more frequent use of the various hues of yellow hides Gatsby's natural personality. He has to appear like a "golden god" — a King Midas. So he drives around a yellow Rolls Royce, — or that "yellow bug," which is sometimes cream-colored, and other shades of yellow, depending on the viewer.
His orchestra plays "yellow cocktail music." His buffet tables are —
"garnished with glistening hors d'oeuvres, spiced baked hams crowded again salads of Harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched with dark gold."
This yellow represents an artificial sun. Like his "artificial" wealth. A real sun needs to provide a "Daisy" with heat to live. But Gatsby thinks he can just "buy the luxury of sunshine" and procure a "moon" from a picnic basket. His money has made him think he can do anything — even challenge time and the elements and win. In many ways, he's a false prophet, like Ahab in Moby Dick, and perhaps both pursue a "grail" for purely egotistical reasons.
Of course, Gatsby wears a gold tie in Chapter 5. When Daisy arrives for the rendezvous in that pivotal chapter — the first four chapters climb to the "capturing of his dream" while the last four chapters reveal the dream slipping away. In that same chapter, Fitzgerald will foreshadow Gatsby's death with him standing in a puddle, his hands in his pockets like weights, looking like death. He is standing in the rain — blue — even though he wants to appear strong and "golden."
Even Jordan's slender arm "is golden" and Daisy takes out a little gold pencil in Chapter 6. Girls at the party appear in yellow cocktail dresses. They're also part of this fake world — to impress. It's all artificial. Yellow can mean gilded, cowardly, over-ripe, and even in the "yellow" leaf of the year — like autumn.
Even though the earth appears to glow brighter as it moves away from the sun, due to Gatsby's house "looking like Coney Island," it only appears that way. He cannot compete against Nature and reality.
Yellow also connotes corruption.
And Finally That Famous Color Green
The green light is the most famous symbol in the novel. That, and the rather obvious symbol of T.J. Eckleburg looking of a T.S. Eliot-like wasteland of "The Valley of Ashes."
Nick says Gatsby seemed disappointed that Daisy's green light at the end of her dock was now just a light — no longer a symbol of what he so wanted. Nick says something about the number of enchanted objects for Gatsby was reduced by one. Somehow, having Daisy didn't seem to measure up to what he stored up in his heart and in his imagination for all those years.
But we also get "the green breast of the New World" when Dutch sailors first looked at the land before them — virginal and pure for the first and last time. It must have given them a sense of wonder, Nick says. This is similar, of course, with Gatsby with Daisy — a sense of wonder of a world he so longed to belong to — a closed world of the super-rich and old money.
No amount of money can purchase a spot on Mrs. Astor's Four Hundred Club.
So of course yellow and blue make green. Take the energy of the yellow sun and mix it with the tender yearning of blue, and it seems like all green lights ahead — go — go — go.
But to go against reality is a date with death.
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Source: https://baos.pub/color-symbolism-in-the-great-gatsby-ecf011e954d8
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