Daisy, Jim, Native Americans and "Chinamen"

Since the beginning of the year, we've talked a lot about groups that have been oppressed in our country. It seems that throughout our history, we as Americans have abused many of the minority and disadvantaged groups in our country, and left them with nothing. Just as Huck and Tom left Jim all alone with $40 at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn after he had endured an entire adventure with him; just as we placed thousands of Native Americans in downtown Chicago during location, and just as Ludacris dumped all of his "Chinamen" in the middle of the street at the end of the movie Crash, just telling them to "go," Americans have a tendency to throw money and displacement at a minority or disadvantaged group and pretend like everything's okay.

While this trend can be easily observed among different racial and ethnic groups, there's also another "disadvantaged" group that throughout history has been frequently helpless and abandoned: single women.

This line in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby reminded me a lot of many class discussions that we've had about abandoned American cultures, all of the times that we've left disadvantaged people in the dust.

"I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms- but apparently there was no such intentions in her head" (Fitzgerald, 20).

Daisy is a fantasticly strong female character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, but there are still many things that she cannot deal with. When I read this line, at the very end of the first chapter, the only thing that I could think was where would she go? While she clearly doesn't love Tom and she resents her life with, I believe Daisy can't leave Tom for fear of having nowhere to go. He is the source of her money, her wealth, her well-being. If she were to get a divorce, she would have been just as well off as the thousands of Native Americans taken from their homes and dumped in downtown Chicago during "relocation."

Hopefully now that Daisy and Gatsby have revealed their love for each other, Daisy will feel more confident about leaving Tom, but it doesn't change the fact that women during the time of The Great Gatsby needed a man to latch on to in order to have a successful life. The marriage process turned them from "girls" into "women," no matter what their literal age was.