Scott Fitzgerald, portrays the lives of the largely divided social classes of Long Island in the 1920's. Jay Gatsby depicts the young man desperate to win the acceptance of the old money, elitist class, and in particular the love of his former partner, Daisy Buchanan. As the story unfolds, it becomes easily apparent that Fitzgerald portrays women in a negative fashion. In particular, Fitzgerald uses Daisy, Jordan Baker and Myrtle Wilson to illustrate the disapproving qualities of carelessness, selfishness, dishonesty and hypocrisy.
Over the years, Gatsby imagines Daisy as the perfect girl that he once knew before the war. Upon his first meeting with her in five years, he appears "pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets" (Fitzgerald 91). Although Gatsby refuses to relinquish his obsessive dream of Daisy as the ideal girl, events throughout the novel portray to everyone except an oblivious Gatsby that Daisy possesses a true nature of raw carelessness. After Daisy hit Myrtle with the car on the way home from New York City, she "stepped on it," and she would not even stop the car (151). Despite Gatsby's unwavering love for her, she continues play with his feelings. Even .
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after his death, "Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower" (183). Fitzgerald presents Daisy as a girl who has everything, yet still cannot see beyond what affects only herself.
Jordan Baker also comes from the society in Louisville, yet she does not quite belong to the same superior class as the Buchanan's. Nick, the narrator and Gatsby's neighbor, carries on a relationship with Jordan throughout the novel. As much as he cares about her, he still describes her as being "incurably dishonest" (63). Jordan, a champion female golfer, arouses suspicion of her honesty first when her caddy makes "a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad-lie in the semi-final round" (62). Fitzgerald not only depicts Jordan as being dishonest, but also as being quite selfish at times.
