1
I
hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this
world, a beautiful little fool.
Daisy speaks these words in Chapter 1
as she describes to Nick and Jordan her hopes for her infant daughter.
While not directly relevant to the novel’s main themes, this quote
offers a revealing glimpse into Daisy’s character. Daisy is not
a fool herself but is the product of a social environment
that, to a great extent, does not value intelligence in women. The
older generation values subservience and docility in females, and
the younger generation values thoughtless giddiness and pleasure-seeking.
Daisy’s remark is somewhat sardonic: while she refers to the social
values of her era, she does not seem to challenge them. Instead,
she describes her own boredom with life and seems to imply that
a girl can have more fun if she is beautiful and simplistic. Daisy
herself often tries to act such a part. She conforms to the social standard
of American femininity in the 1920s in order
to avoid such tension-filled issues as her undying love for Gatsby.
