Daisy’s “Advertisement of the Man”: An Evasive Self-Revelation

Daisy’s Chapter 7 reference in The Great Gatsby to the “advertisement of the man,” an evasion in the Buchanans’ salon to draw attention away from her previous oblique admission of love for Gatsby, reveals something important about her thinking and character as well as something important about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magazine reading when working on the novel. Not a reference to the illustrated Arrow Collar Man, but rather to an advertising first, an advertisement including the photograph of an actual man, this evasion demonstrates a shrewd maneuver on Fitzgerald’s part of appealing to his readership’s “Smart Set” while providing a visual consumerist sartorial metaphor of Gatsby’s uniqueness of character, the dashing and singular constancy of purpose that attracted Daisy to him in the first place.