The Great Gatsby

A flower is a symbol youth and liveliness. In some cases it means beauty and love. Nevertheless a flower also dies and wilts with time. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy is the most recognizable character that is symbolized as a flower. Her name, Daisy, represents her character as well as her appearance. "Daisy," of course, suggests the flower, fresh and bright as spring, yet delicate and weak. Daisy is the beauty, the girl that every man dreams of having. She appears beautiful, rich, innocent and pure on her white petals. But that whiteness is mixed with the yellow of gold and the greed that money brings. Daisy's love for Gatsby fades as she begins to be more money hungry. Although Daisy seems pure and white, she is a mixture of things, just like the flower for which she was named; Daisy is the white flower with the golden center. Nick describes Daisy as "high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl" (86).

The love between Gatsby and Daisy also resembles a flower. In the beginning their love is fresh, beautiful, and full of life but with time their love fades little by little. Fitzgerald uses flower imagery in different parts of the book to show the blossoming or withering of something. For example, "Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete" (117).

Fitzgerald not only uses flower imagery to describe Daisy, but he also uses it to describe the beauty of women. "Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree" (111). Fitzgerald also uses a rose in his words when Nick contemplates why Gatsby died. "He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how the raw sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass" (169). This passage may have the rose symbolizing Daisy because Gatsby finds out that Daisy was not as pure and innocent as he thought.