Myrtle

•  “Thickish figure of a woman... carried her flesh sensuously”  

  • Objectifying myrtle, she is reduced to her body 
  • Feminist lenses- tom is using her for a sexual relationship and nothing more 
  • Working class fleshy and real  
• “I just slip it on sometimes.” (About her dress) 


  -Strives for what she believes to be the image of upper-class - 'slip' is casual, she puts on an expensive dress that would've been significant to her with the disregard that an upper class woman would change dress 5 times a day
• “They’re nice to have –a dog.” 

  • Strives for what she believes to be the image of upper-class  
  • Dogs = luxury, leisure that working-class don’t have time for 
  • Replacement for a child --> Daisy’s child with Tom 
• “The living-room was crowded...furniture entirely too large for it.”  


  Furniture for an upper-class house in a lower-class house --> tries to perpetuate upper-class but will never be able to –feels wrong, uncomfortable  
•  “He had on a dress suit and patent-leather shoes.” 

  • The first thing she notices about Tom is materialistic --> she identifies him as upper-class and sees him as an escape from her working-class reality  
  • Contrasts George’s borrowed suit for their wedding 
• “Her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingle her thick, dark blood with the dust.” (Chapter 7) 


  • ‘Extinguished’ --> fire element, fire put out against her will –lack of agency  
  • ‘Knelt’ --> praying imagery  
  • Gruesome, horror imagery, visceral --> contrasts Gatsby’s death 
  • Tragic climax of book  
  • ‘Dust’ --> came from the dust and returns to it --> symbolic of how American dream encourages working class people to believe they can rise above the ‘dust’ and become upper class, but this is just a dream, and they will always return to the ground –firmly rooted and immovable  
• “Her left breast was swinging loose like a flap...the mouth wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.” 


  • ‘Left’ --> heart exposed –consequences of living through emotion and not remaining detached like Daisy 
  • ‘Breast swinging loose’ --> disrespectful tone towards lower class and women (opposed to G’s death), final image is her sexuality (fem lens, Madonna/whore complex)
  • ‘Ripped at the corners’ --> connotative of smiling –the working class's complacency and forced into silence even in death