Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Daisy Buchanan is one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. Many first-time readers of The Great Gatsby are frustrated by Nick’s account of Daisy and wonder why Gatsby would risk so much for such a woman. However, they miss the point. Daisy represents something indefinable—an idealized love. As Roger Lewis says in “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” “the love becomes more important than the object of it” (49). Daisy herself is not his goal. Gatsby’s goal is to keep hold of the love that she once inspired, the memory of her, which is colored by his idealization of her. This nostalgic longing for a feeling rooted in the past is sentimentality at a profound level. In fact, at the end of chapter 6, Nick listens to Gatsby recount his first kiss with Daisy and describes Gatsby’s words as “appalling sentimentality” (Gatsby 111). Daisy’s effect on Gatsby is perhaps the biggest paradox of the novel. Based on her actions, it is difficult to gauge how she exerts a hold on Gatsby. Nick comes closest when describing her voice, which, Gatsby later notes, is “full of money” (120): “When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air” (108). Daisy’s “magic” is hard to define, and Nick seems to catch glimmers of it; but he is always at the periphery, unable to tell exactly what Gatsby sees in her. Especially after the car accident, Nick is amazed that Gatsby endangers himself by staying when he is, in Nick’s words, “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (154).

Film producers are uncomfortable with ambiguity, however. In general, all the film versions of Fitzgerald’s novel have followed a predictable route. Their marketing campaigns claim that they have tried to evoke the spirit of the novel, yet they boost the sentimentality of the story with great deliberation, pushing the use of pathos far beyond what Fitzgerald would have sanctioned. Most egregiously, producers and filmmakers try to make Daisy a more sympathetic character by changing her storyline. For Fitzgerald readers, this change in Daisy’s character is a continual disappointment. There have been five big-budget, filmed adaptations of The Great Gatsby: 1926, 1949, 1974, a 2000 television production, and 2013. All five films made significant changes to the story of the novel. Many of these changes elevated the sentimental, making Daisy a more domestic character and eliminating some of the ambiguity from Fitzgerald’s story.

The label “sentimental writing” is commonly used today to disparage a writer’s work, but this was not always the case. Nor was domesticity always associated with this type of writing. It is true that sentimental writing has commonly been associated with mass or commercial appeal. This alone is enough to condemn it in the eyes of some reviewers. However, such a blanket condemnation of “sentimental writing” is not helpful when trying to understand the development of American fiction and its traditions. A more careful study of the history of sentimental writing helps to reveal why Daisy’s character was, and continues to be, targeted by filmmakers for a sentimental makeover.

Sentimental writing made its appearance in eighteenth century France. Manon Lescaut (1731) by Abbé Prévost was one of the earliest and most popular of these early novels, and followed the sad story of a young noble who gives up a promising future to run away with a young lady with an “inclination to pleasure” (Prévost 29). Sentimental writing seeks to build a sympathetic emotional connection between the writer’s characters and the reading audience. To use Aristotle’s terms, sentimentalism emphasizes Pathos over Ethos or Logos, in order to impart a moral lesson or to build sympathy for characters whose apparent actions might not necessarily elicit sympathy from readers. The young noble and his lady love in Manon Lescaut would have been scorned and abused had their real life counterparts been encountered in 1731, but Prévost’s use of...