Significance: Daisy's bruised finger indicates that Tom is an aggressive and angry man. Daisy portrays the frailness and submissiveness of the women during this time period because she allows Tom to treat her the way he does and she continues to stay with him.
Sig: Daisy's poor bruised finger = symbol of her marriage with Tom. Tom hurt it unintentionally and Daisy continues to talk about it. Their marriage is fragmented and unviable. No respect, Daisy uses "hulking" to mock him too.
When Daisy is complaining about her bruised finger to Tom, what is the implication? Tom is physically abusive.
That poor bruised little finger is like a symbol of Tom and Daisy's marriage: he hurts it unintentionally, and Daisy just cannot stop talking about it. You get the feeling that Fitzgerald kind of wants her to stop whining already. "Did you give Nick a little heart-to-heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly.
The blue pinky is symbolic of the abusive relationship between Daisy and Tom, as Tom was the one who bruised her pinky by force. Although Daisy acts cheerful through the rest of the dinner, there is the underlying fact that she is unhappy and abused, as conveyed by the pinky.
Representation. Pammy most likely represents a younger version of Daisy. Daisy wishes that her baby girl will be a fool like her so she ends up married and well off with a rich man. She also wants her daughter to be a fool so she is protected.
Daisy appeared quite in love when they first got married, but the realities of the marriage, including Tom's multiple affairs, have worn on her. Tom even cheated on her soon after their honeymoon, according to Jordan: "It was touching to see them together—it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way.
Tom is restless and unhappy, and his wife, Daisy, is the primary victim of the side effects of Tom's emotions. Tom not only has a visible affair with a woman in town, but he is abusive to both his wife and his mistress.
Tom is involved with Myrtle because he is bored, and their affair offers him an exciting break from his normal life. He likes the idea of having a secret. As a member of the upper class, he is supposed to comport himself with decorum and restraint.
Tom finds out about the affair between Gatsby and Daisy in Chapter 7, just before the three of them, along with Nick, take a trip to New York.
Daisy is a beautiful, well-groomed young woman whose only real outward sign of her illness is being reclusive and unwilling to socialize. However, she suffers from severe obsessive compulsive disorder and a laxative addiction, and is also deeply traumatized from a lifetime of abuse at the hands of her father.
At lunch, Tom realizes that Daisy and Gatsby are in love. Later, in a hotel in New York City, Gatsby forces Daisy to tell Tom that she never loved him, and Tom reveals that Gatsby is a bootlegger.
The importance of time and the past manifests itself in the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom. Gatsby's obsession with recovering a blissful past compels him to order Daisy to tell Tom that she has never loved him. Gatsby needs to know that she has always loved him, that she has always been emotionally loyal to him.
A self-aware Daisy who has shirts thrown at her and is elated by how beautiful they are. A Daisy that realises that she is vacuous and only cares for material wealth. And that is what makes her sad and that is why she cries.
Daisy's color is white, she wears white dresses and recalls her “white girlhood” (chapter 1), and this use of color helps her to characterize her as the unattainable “enchanted princess” who becomes incarnate as Gatsby's dream.
Jordan recounts to Nick the story of Daisy's wedding day, when Daisy got drunk and told Jordan that she did not want to marry Tom. Her decision to return the pearls ends up being purely symbolic, however, because she finally does wed Tom for his wealth and high social standing.
The relationship between Tom and Daisy is built more on money rather than love, however, there is little bits of love. Daisy marries Tom because of his wealth, but throughout their relationship she does, fall in love with Tom at least once.
However, Daisy falls victim to her love for Tom and her lust for Gatsby. Gatsby managed to sacrifice his whole life to become Daisy's dream guy. Although wealth and money were not inherited, he earned his wealth by bootlegging. Gatsby allowed his fantasy of having a life with Daisy control him.
Scott Fitzgerald highlights the failure of the American Dream through the lives of his characters. Gatsby's dream is to win Daisy back and so he relentlessly pursues what he did not have, namely material wealth. In the process he loses himself and fails to attain his dream.
Tom and Daisy both show corruption through selfishness in similar ways. They both cheat on each other and do not even think to wonder how this will affect the other. They believe they are above others in society because of their money and use it to their advantage.
He represents the worst aspects of the super-rich in American society whose money insulates them from the normal constraints of law or morality. Nick describes them as: careless people – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.
Themes. There is confusion when Gatsby keeps saying that Daisy loves only him. Daisy says she never loved Tom, but admits to having loved him once. “I never loved him,” she said, with perceptible reluctance” (Gatsby 139), and then Daisy says “Even alone I can't say I never loved Tom,” she admitted in a pitiful voice.
To Gatsby, the innocent and naive Daisy comes to embody the American dream, in other words wealth and social status, a goal he will have reached by winning her hand.
Eventually, Gatsby won Daisy's heart, and they made love before Gatsby left to fight in the war. Daisy promised to wait for Gatsby, but in 1919 she chose instead to marry Tom Buchanan, a young man from a solid, aristocratic family who could promise her a wealthy lifestyle and who had the support of her parents.
To be with Daisy, he pretended to be of the same social standing as her. One night, they slept together, and he felt like they were married. After that, he went away to fight in World War I, and Daisy waited for a while before marrying Tom Buchanan.