Friday, January 4, 2019

At the bottom of page 7, he enters a room where he finds Daisy and Jordan. What do we learn about Daisy from the descriptions and dialogue on pages 7-9? What is revealed here about Daisy's relationship with Tom?

At the bottom of page seven, Tom leads Nick inside to a "rosy colored space," a room with French windows at either end. We learn on these pages, as Nick reconnects with his cousin Daisy, that she is charming, beautiful, alluring, and speaks in a murmur, which, Nick has heard, is meant to get people to lean towards her.
We hear about Daisy's thrilling voice, an important part of her allure. It's low and musical and holds a promise that "gay, exciting things" are about to happen soon. It is exciting to men, the "kind of voice that the ear follows up and down." We also learn that her face is both bright and sad. She is introduced as both a charismatic and slightly mysterious figure; why, after all, we might wonder, is her face sad?
Daisy and Nick flirt gallantly, and we find out at the bottom of page nine that she has a "baby" (actually a child), when she suggests that Nick see it.
On these pages we don't learn much about Tom. It's significant, however, that the room is rosy and that there is a "wine-colored rug" on the floor, "making a shadow on it as the wind does on the sea." The two women, Daisy and Jordan, are seated on an enormous couch and their white dresses ripple and flutter in the breeze. The breeze also lifts and blows the white curtains, so that they whip and snap. All of this is an allusion or reference to Homer's Odyssey, in which Odysseus travels on what Homer calls a wine dark sea (like the wine colored rug), while the white sails of his vessel billow and blow like the white curtains and the women's white dresses.
This opening suggests the women and Nick are embarking, like Odysseus, on a voyage of discovery. Tom, however, is the one who shuts the windows, deflating the breeze, foreshadowing his role as the buzz kill of the novel.
At the end of page nine, Daisy demands in a joking, childlike way that she and Tom return to Chicago tomorrow, showing (although she is joking) that she is not one to act independently of him.
To find out more about Tom and Daisy's relationship, you could turn to pages 12 and 13. There, Daisy displays her bruised finger and calls Tom brute, then puts him down for his racial theories about Nordics, mocking him as "very profound." From the start, we realize there are strains in this marriage—a little later Nick will discover that Tom is having an affair.

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