The American Dream or the American Nightmare?: the Corrupted Reality of the Roaring Twenties

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, presents the idea that the “Jazz Age”, or the Roaring Twenties were not as romantic as they seem to the average spectator of the twenty-first century through staged movies and prose. The character Daisy Buchanan perfectly encompasses this theme of beauty on the surface, but wicked deceit underneath the façade. She is the epitome of unfaithfulness and love for the material rather than the moral. Daisy uses her beauty as a way to control the people around her and influence their opinions about her and Tom Buchanan, her husband, and Jay Gatsby, her lover, who are just instruments in her ambidextrous plans. Essentially, she gets away with the accidental murder of her husband’s mistress, Myrtle, by hitting her with a car because Tom is so convinced Gatsby committed the crime and no witnesses come clean. Although this life of frivolity was all that she had ever known, she did not see the cruelties she put others through despite the repercussions of her actions: For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor. Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now,