Interesting thesis, although my immediate reaction is that Daisy is too passive and cowardly a character to be a Faerie Queen.
I watched the 1974 film adaptation last night on Netflix -- the one with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. I saw it when it first came out, but at age 13 I would've disliked it simply because it was a romance. I'd forgotten that the screenplay was by Francis Ford Coppola. The screenplay is very true to the book, with almost all of the dialogue and most of the incidents straight off the page, although there's some rearranging and some things are cut.
It helped to have the characters embodied for me to understand better why I have such a hard time with them. For example, Gatsby's insistence that Daisy has never loved anybody but himself just doesn't feel real to me. It doesn't seem admirable, and yet Nick seems to admire him for it. And maybe Nick is the key figure. He is someone who is apparently incapable of love himself, and so he admires the fact that everything Gatsby has done he has done for love. He admires Gatsby's foolish romanticism because it isn't corrupt or selfish, unlike the Buchanans or Jordan. Yet I've never been able to share the admiration. All I can see is someone throwing his life away for a vain, selfish, vapid fool. Maybe the Faerie Queen explanation make sense of this conundrum: it's ensorcelment.
On the other hand, Daisy recognizes herself for what she is, and she even says she wants her daughter to be exactly the same kind of fool she is. Self-loathing, FTW!
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2013-04-11 03:05 pm (UTC)I watched the 1974 film adaptation last night on Netflix -- the one with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. I saw it when it first came out, but at age 13 I would've disliked it simply because it was a romance. I'd forgotten that the screenplay was by Francis Ford Coppola. The screenplay is very true to the book, with almost all of the dialogue and most of the incidents straight off the page, although there's some rearranging and some things are cut.
It helped to have the characters embodied for me to understand better why I have such a hard time with them. For example, Gatsby's insistence that Daisy has never loved anybody but himself just doesn't feel real to me. It doesn't seem admirable, and yet Nick seems to admire him for it. And maybe Nick is the key figure. He is someone who is apparently incapable of love himself, and so he admires the fact that everything Gatsby has done he has done for love. He admires Gatsby's foolish romanticism because it isn't corrupt or selfish, unlike the Buchanans or Jordan. Yet I've never been able to share the admiration. All I can see is someone throwing his life away for a vain, selfish, vapid fool. Maybe the Faerie Queen explanation make sense of this conundrum: it's ensorcelment.
On the other hand, Daisy recognizes herself for what she is, and she even says she wants her daughter to be exactly the same kind of fool she is. Self-loathing, FTW!