Fitzgerald Daisy The Siren Voice Analysis

Pursuing a mostly uncharted analysis of an over-analyzed canon text provides a certain level of challenge that at times breaks from the critical literary tradition. Glenn Settle in her article, “Fitzgerald’s Daisy: The Siren Voice” delineates an interpretation of the American canon work, The Great Gatsby, that has been pursued with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s European modernist contemporaries but somehow excluded his works. Though Fitzgerald spent much of his time in Europe, especially the French Riviera, a deep analysis of works in the same classical light seems to be frequently lacking, whether that roots from Eurocentric assumptions about American authorship or mere oversight is yet to be known. Settle’s text seeks to officiate the consideration of Daisy, in The Great Gatsby, as a Homeric Siren. Siren imagery is a “central part of her characterization,” though Settle divides Daisy’s characterizations into three, historically based groups (115). Each section is extensively argued, almost in brutal excess, utilizing example-filled comparisons to classical and modernist authorial depictions from Homer and Hesiod to Keats and T. S. Eliot. Probably the most illuminating evidence is presented in the central …show more content…
Settle notes two major geographic contrasts, Daisy’s home versus the desolation that is other parts of New York. “The island of the Sirens is called ‘Flowery’ (‘Anthemoessa’),” which matches with the repetitive discussions of Daisy’s home “where Nick first sees Daisy lies a full ‘half acre of deep, pungent roses’ (p. 8). At dinnertime he is led from the drawing room ‘out onto a rosy-colored porch’ (p. I2), and in the midst of the dinner scene Daisy perceives Nick as ‘a rose, an absolute rose,’” (117). In desolation we see Settle take a similar approach in her contextualization of Daisy’s sociohistorical