Gatsby Didn't Love Daisy. He Loved What Daisy Meant

The Great Gatsby is remembered as a tragic love story. But somewhere between losing Daisy and finding her again, Gatsby stops loving a woman and starts loving everything he has made her represent.

I don't think Jay Gatsby is in love with Daisy Buchanan. Which is slightly inconvenient, given that he buys an enormous house across the bay from her, throws extravagant parties in the hope she'll wander into one, accumulates a suspicious amount of money and spends five years arranging his entire existence around getting her back. If that isn't love, Gatsby would probably like to know what exactly else he was supposed to do.

And that's the problem. Gatsby can show us everything he has done for Daisy. I'm less convinced he could tell us who Daisy actually is.

That sounds harsher than I mean it to. I don't think Gatsby is lying when he says he loves her. I don't think his feelings are fake. And I certainly don't think Daisy means nothing to him. Quite the opposite. Daisy means far too much.

She isn't allowed to be simply Daisy Buchanan anymore. She is the girl Gatsby loved before the war. She is wealth. She is status. She is youth. She is possibility. She is the life James Gatz decided he ought to have. She is proof that everything he has done to become Jay Gatsby worked. She is the green light at the end of the dock.

That's an awful lot to ask one woman to be, especially when she has had five years to become a person Gatsby didn't account for.

Daisy has had five years to become inconvenient

Five years is a long time to love somebody you aren't actually with. More importantly, it's a long time to imagine them, because the wonderful thing about loving somebody in your head is that they become remarkably cooperative. They don't interrupt. They don't change their mind. They don't develop opinions you don't like. They don't make decisions without consulting the version of themselves you've been carrying around. They don't disappoint you unless you decide they should.

Gatsby has spent five years in love with Daisy — or perhaps with the life he has built around her.

The Daisy in Gatsby's memory has spent five years preserved at exactly the point where he lost her. The actual Daisy hasn't. She married Tom Buchanan. She had a daughter. She built a life. Not necessarily a particularly happy life. Not necessarily the life she would have chosen if Gatsby had returned sooner. But a life nonetheless.

She has memories Gatsby wasn't there for. She has feelings he didn't witness. She has made choices he doesn't like. And when Gatsby finally gets her back into a room, those five years become a problem, because Gatsby doesn't merely need Daisy to love him now. He needs the intervening years to stop mattering.

That's what makes his insistence that the past can be repeated so revealing. It isn't enough for Daisy to say she loves Gatsby. She has to erase Tom. Erase the marriage. Erase the possibility that she might have loved them both at different times, in different ways. Gatsby doesn't want to continue their story. He wants to return to the page where he stopped reading.

And Daisy can't do that. Not because she's incapable of love, but because time happened.

There is something almost childlike about Gatsby's inability to accept this. He has spent five years constructing the perfect conditions for Daisy's return and seems genuinely bewildered when the actual woman doesn't behave exactly like the woman in his head.

And yes, Daisy is selfish. She's careless, frustrating and cowardly. I don't think Gatsby's idealisation magically absolves her of anything. Actually, her flaws are precisely the point. Gatsby's Daisy isn't allowed to have them.

The dream cannot accommodate the woman.

Gatsby has done this before

There is another reason I think Gatsby believes reality should be this editable. He's already rewritten a person once.

Himself.

James Gatz becomes Jay Gatsby long before Daisy has to become the Daisy of his memory. New name. New mannerisms. New clothes. New money. New history. Eventually, an entire mythology grows around him.

Who is Gatsby? Perhaps he inherited his money. Perhaps he killed a man. Perhaps he was a German spy. Perhaps he went to Oxford. The rumours almost don't matter.

Gatsby has understood something incredibly powerful about identity: if you construct a story convincingly enough, people will begin responding to the story.

And it works. James Gatz, a poor boy from North Dakota, becomes Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire whose parties attract hundreds of people who don't even know him.

So why shouldn't everything else be equally malleable? Why shouldn't Daisy become the girl she was five years ago? Why shouldn't the past be repeatable? Why shouldn't money get him back to the point before everything went wrong?

Gatsby remade himself. I think part of him genuinely believes he can remake reality.

Except there is a fairly significant difference between reinventing yourself and reinventing somebody else.

Daisy never agreed to be rewritten.

And this is where Gatsby started reminding me of a man in a completely different story. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that man had access to magic.

Bear had magic. Gatsby had money.

While watching Curry Barker's Obsession, I found myself asking a question about Bear that I think applies surprisingly well to Gatsby: does he love her, or does he love what being loved by her would mean about him?

Bear is in love with his friend Nikki. At least, that's how he understands it. But so much of what Bear tells us about Nikki revolves around what Nikki has done for Bear. She was nice to him when he was new. She made him feel welcome. She made him feel seen.

And when Bear is eventually given the opportunity to tell Nikki how he feels, he doesn't. Instead, he later uses a magical object to wish that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world.

The wish works.

That's the horror.

Nikki's own desires are overwritten by Bear's. The actual woman becomes trapped underneath a version of herself designed around what he wanted.

Gatsby obviously doesn't do that to Daisy. Daisy isn't Nikki. Gatsby isn't Bear. And wanting a former lover to choose you is not morally equivalent to magically removing somebody's autonomy.

But the similarity underneath the stories fascinates me. Both men struggle to accommodate a woman who exists independently of what she means to them. Bear wants Nikki's feelings to confirm his fantasy. Gatsby wants Daisy's choices to confirm his.

Bear gets magic. Gatsby gets money: the mansion, the shirts, the car, the parties, the spectacle.

Everything Gatsby has built seems to say: Look. I did it. I became the man I told you I would become. Now you have to become the woman I remember.

But Daisy doesn't.

And Gatsby cannot understand why the dream isn't enough to make her.

Heathcliff has a different problem

Then there is Wuthering Heights. Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have suffered terribly from being flattened into a cultural shorthand for passionate romance. They are passionate. They're also frequently appalling.

But what interests me here isn't simply that their relationship is destructive. It's that Catherine and Heathcliff take the idea of loving another person somewhere Gatsby doesn't.

Gatsby struggles to accept Daisy as somebody separate from his dream of her. Catherine and Heathcliff struggle with the idea of being separate at all. Their attachment is tied to identity itself.

The language surrounding them repeatedly makes their bond feel less like I love this person and more like this person is somehow part of what I am. Which sounds terribly romantic until you think about what that actually means.

Because healthy love rather depends on the other person remaining an other person: someone with a mind you cannot access completely, someone capable of wanting something you don't, someone whose existence does not begin and end at the boundary of your own.

Catherine and Heathcliff's relationship threatens that boundary. And unlike Gatsby and Daisy, Catherine participates in the mythology. That's important.

This isn't simply Heathcliff imposing an imagined woman onto Catherine while Catherine desperately attempts to escape it. They help construct the idea of themselves as something elemental, something beyond ordinary relationships, something that cannot simply be replaced by Edgar or Isabella or marriage or geography.

Or, eventually, death.

And death should create the ultimate separation. Instead, Heathcliff refuses it. Catherine becomes simultaneously absent and omnipresent.

There is something fascinating about what happens to an obsession once the person at its centre can no longer contradict it, because the unavailable person is remarkably easy to perfect.

Daisy is across the bay. Catherine is beyond the grave. Nikki, before the wish, exists largely inside Bear's longing for her.

Distance leaves room for invention. Proximity introduces personality.

And personality is inconvenient.

And then there's Humbert Humbert

Lolita takes this idea somewhere much darker.

I want to be careful here, because Jay Gatsby wanting Daisy to erase five years of her life is obviously not morally equivalent to Humbert Humbert sexually abusing a child. It isn't.

What interests me is the literary mechanism underneath both stories: the distance between a person and the version of that person somebody else has constructed.

Fitzgerald makes that distance tragic. Brontë makes it Gothic. Nabokov makes it horrifying. Curry Barker makes it literal.

Humbert doesn't merely construct an idea of Dolores Haze privately. He constructs one for us.

“Lolita” is his creation. That's part of what makes the novel so disturbing. Humbert controls the narration. He has the language, the wit, the intelligence, the elaborate prose, and he uses all of it to try to control how we perceive the girl he is abusing.

Dolores is inconvenient to that story. She has wants. She has fear. She has a life that does not belong to Humbert. She is a child.

And throughout the novel, the actual Dolores keeps threatening to emerge from underneath the beautiful language Humbert has wrapped around “Lolita”.

That's what makes the book so uncomfortable to read. We aren't simply watching one person project onto another. We're being asked to notice the projection while the person responsible for it is actively trying to persuade us to look somewhere else.

Humbert wants his version to become ours.

Which raises a darker version of the question Gatsby poses: what happens when the person doing the imagining also gets to tell the story?

Gatsby doesn't narrate The Great Gatsby. Nick does.

And that matters, because Gatsby's dream is filtered through someone capable of being simultaneously enchanted by him and critical of him. Nick can see the beauty in Gatsby's capacity for hope. He can also see the enormous distortion required to sustain it. We can admire the dream without necessarily accepting the dreamer's version of reality.

Dolores has to fight through Humbert's language to remain visible. Daisy has Nick.

I'm not sure Gatsby's version of The Great Gatsby would have been nearly as kind to her.

Maybe Gatsby does love Daisy

This is where I have to complicate my own title, because saying Gatsby doesn't love Daisy at all feels too easy.

I think he does. Or did. Or does in whatever way love can continue existing after five years of memory, longing and invention have been piled on top of it.

Human beings are inconvenient like that. We rarely feel one thing cleanly. Gatsby can love Daisy and love what she represents. Bear can genuinely care about Nikki and be incapable of seeing how completely his desire has swallowed hers. Catherine and Heathcliff can experience something profound and destructive.

The point isn't that obsession automatically makes every feeling underneath it fraudulent. It's that love becomes dangerous when the other person's reality stops being allowed to interfere with it.

And that's what Gatsby cannot tolerate.

Daisy can love him. She just can't love him in the precise way his dream requires. She cannot undo Tom. She cannot undo her daughter. She cannot undo five years. She cannot become eighteen again because Gatsby has finally acquired the house, money and shirts necessary to recreate the moment. She cannot make the past stop being the past.

And Gatsby has built his entire life around the assumption that she can.

The real person is always the problem

Maybe that's why the green light works so beautifully.

From Gatsby's lawn, Daisy can still be anything. She's across the water: close enough to see evidence of her existence, far enough away to imagine the rest.

The girl he loved. The life he lost. Old money. Acceptance. Success. The future. Proof that James Gatz really did become Jay Gatsby.

All of it condensed into one tiny light.

The problem with turning a person into a destination is that eventually you have to reach them.

But eventually you have to cross the bay.

Eventually Catherine isn't the Catherine Heathcliff needs her to be. Eventually Dolores emerges from underneath “Lolita”. Eventually Bear's Nikki gets a moment to speak from inside the woman his wish created and makes horrifyingly clear that she would rather die than remain there.

Eventually Daisy becomes Daisy.

And Daisy is considerably more complicated than a green light. She has a husband. A daughter. Five years of memories Gatsby wasn't there for. She is selfish. She is frightened. She is privileged. She is capable of loving more than one person and of failing both of them. She makes choices Gatsby doesn't like. She has an interior life that does not exist solely to complete his.

Five years passed for Daisy too.

She is, unfortunately, a person.

And people make terrible dreams. They change. They contradict us. They want things we don't want them to want. They have lives that continue when we're not in the room.

Fantasy doesn't.

Fantasy waits exactly where you left it.

Perhaps that's why Gatsby needs Daisy on the opposite side of the bay. From there, she can still be everything.

Bear had a magical object capable of forcing Nikki to become the woman he imagined. Humbert had language powerful enough to try to bury Dolores underneath the girl he invented. Heathcliff and Catherine built a love so consuming that even death struggled to establish a boundary between them. Gatsby had money, memory and an almost superhuman capacity for belief.

Different stories. Different moral stakes. Different kinds of love.

The same inconvenient obstacle: the person they want keeps existing outside the story being written for them.

And perhaps that's Gatsby's tragedy. Not that Daisy fails to live up to the dream. No living woman could.

Gatsby has spent five years loving someone who cannot contradict him, then mistakes the return of the real woman for the return of the fantasy.

It isn't.

Eventually the dream becomes a person, and then you have to decide whether you can love them when they refuse to follow the script.

I'm not sure Gatsby ever could.