Daisy: Symbol and Siren

In The Great Gatsby, the character Daisy Fay Buchanan serves as a symbol of wealth, as well as Gatsby’s dream in flesh. She is also the real-life equivalent of a Siren from Greek mythology. Daisy has many obvious characteristics of the wealthy, as well as less readily apparent clues. Like a Siren, Daisy has certain qualities that lure people in, and draw them towards her: to their doom. To Gatsby, she is both his dream and his doom.

Daisy is a symbol for wealth in a very real way: she is wealthy. She possesses ‘old wealth:’ the kind that is not earned by the current generation, but that allows them to become completely vacuous and self-centered. So out of touch is Daisy with the real world that she wonders aloud, “’What do people plan?’” (pg 11) and “’What’ll we do with ourselves…[for] the next thirty years?’” (pg. 118). She has no idea what people do, and her life has no direction. Her only purpose is to be rich, and to do that which will make her happy. 

Daisy’s world is an insubstantial and artificial one, but it is one full of wealth. She has a debut: an event for only the very wealthy upper class, is from a very wealthy family, and marries a very wealthy man. Gatsby was unable to marry her himself as a result of not possessing the required wealth. He “had no real right to touch her hand” (pg. 149) as a penniless soldier. To Nick, Daisy seems a beacon of wealth: “safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” (pg. 150). 

Daisy’s voice is a verbal reminder of the wealth she symbolizes. Her “voice is full of money” (pg. 120), and creates an image of her “high in a white palace…the golden girl” (pg. 120). Daisy seems to be wealth personified as a person. Her voice is money, her background is wealth, and her personality is the cold and hard comfort of coins. She possesses all the trappings of wealth, but has become as insubstantial as the paper signifying that wealth. 

To Gatsby, Daisy is more than just a symbol of wealth. To Gatsby, she is his dream incarnate. He dreamt of serving a “vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty,” (pg. 98) and when he fell in love with Daisy his dreams were “wed…to her perishable breath…[and] she blossomed for him like a flower”(pg. 110-11). Daisy becomes Gatsby’s dreams incarnate. Gatsby too, dreamt of wealth (part of his scheme to be worthy of Daisy), and she was the symbol of what that wealth meant to him. Gatsby committed himself to Daisy, but he also committed himself “to the following of a grail” (pg. 149). The idea of Daisy as Gatsby’s dream was just that: an idea, a symbol. She was a grail to be sought after in the fulfillment of a dream, a symbol to always strive towards.

In Greek mythology, the Sirens were bird-women who lured sailors to their death with beautiful song. Upon an island surrounded by jagged cliffs and rocks, the Sirens sang their wondrous song: an irresistible melody that drew any who heard it. They were drawn to their deaths.  The Sirens are not always portrayed as beautiful women, and their song promised not gifts of the flesh or other such things, but knowledge instead. 

In The Great Gatsby, Daisy’s voice is that of a Siren. Like a Siren’s, her voice is one that “the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again” (pg. 9). Daisy’s voice is a song, and a “promise…[of] gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour” (pg. 9).  Daisy is able to “compel [people] forward breathlessly” (pg. 14) with her voice: she draws people towards her with irresistible force. With the sounds of her voice, not the words themselves, Daisy is able to attract people to her, and draw them into her spell.

Daisy also uses the things she says and does to enhance the spellbinding quality of her voice. She “murmur[s]…to make people lean toward her,” (pg. 9), and completely captivates Gatsby. In chapter seven, as the moment of Truth with Tom approaches, she continues to reinforce her hold over Gatsby through her casual remarks, and not-so-subtle displays of affection, and even begins to draw Nick into her spell with her “thrilling scorn” (pg. 131). 

Daisy uses the innate qualities of her voice, as well as the things she says and does, to cast a spell over those she wishes to control. In chapter one, Nick notices the breaking of this spell as soon as she stops talking (pg. 17). While listening to Daisy babbly nonsense, Nick fully believed and agreed with her, but once he regained his senses realized the “basic insincerity of what she had said” (pg. 17). Like Odysseus, Nick loses all individual and free thought while listening to the Siren, but regains his judgment once silence falls. Even Tom feels the effects of Daisy’s spell. It is broken when he deduces that Daisy loves Gatsby: he looks like a man struck dumb, and “recognize[s] her as someone he had known a long time ago” (pg. 119). The spell is broken, and he remembers her as she was before he fell into her trap of words.

Like the Sirens of Greek mythology, Daisy promises wonderful things with her voice, but her intentions are vastly different. In chapter seven, Nick realizes that she had “never intended doing anything at all” (pg. 132). She disregards all the plans she and Gatsby made, all the schemes and ideas with which to escape Tom, with seemingly little thought. With just a few words from Tom she turns against Gatsby with every word he utters. From that point onward, she returns more and more fully to Tom. She transforms from someone promising wonder and joy to Gatsby, to one causing only great pain: a Siren. Ultimately, this duplicity of intents creates circumstances leading to Gatsby’s death. He becomes another luckless sailor drowned in the poison of a beautiful voice.

Daisy Fay Buchanan serves to illustrate wealth in The Great Gatsby though who she is. She is a symbol of wealth because of her background, her life, and her very being. To Gatsby, she was more than just a symbol of wealth: for almost the entire book, and stretching back beyond the first page, she is his dream personified as a person. Everything he seeks in like is symbolized by her, and made real through her. To the reader looking in on the story, it is apparent that Daisy is a Siren: she lures in the unsuspecting and destroys them with her voice and actions.