9/3/18 - Favourite Character Praise Friday WITH A TWIST

Today, 9/3/18 is the fifth instalment the series of posts praising my all-time favourite characters for their quirks and flaws etc. called Favourite Character Praise Friday. I will be sharing these posts every two weeks to gush about fictional characters in a proactive environment. With this segment, I intend to demonstrate what makes characters great so you and I alike can use these facts to improve our characters!

HOWEVER, there is a twist! As suggested by my best friend, every fifth Favourite Character Praise Friday, I will praising characters that I absolutely despise! This is to demonstrate how it takes great skill from a writer to create a character that the reader come to hate and not sympathise with! I hope that I can create characters that readers hate just as much as I hope that I can create ones that readers adore!

So who is the subject of my first Hated Character Praise Friday?

Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby! Portrayed by Carey Mulligan in the 2013 film adaptation!

Before we begin, I would like to establish that this is not a bash of Mulligan! She played this part amazingly! The subject of this post is why I dislike DAISY? 

Warning! There will be spoilers! 

She claims that the best thing to be is a fool - she is anything but

What tends to horrify me about people who read Gatsby is that they will declare it to be a beautiful love story between star-crossed lovers Gatsby and Daisy, kept apart by not only the bay but their lives being two worlds apart; old money and new money. Daisy is very clever and uses her smarts to her advantage, playing the role of the fool and taking advantage of the pity she receives along the way. For example, she indulges in the attention Gatsby handed her and claimed to love her old flame, yet when she caused him trouble, she refused to take responsibility for her actions. 

The juxtaposition between the person Daisy claims to be at the beginning of the book and the person she is revealed to be throughout is very clever, but it does give the audience a large reason to dislike her. 

She, unlike her cousin Nick, is depicted to be greatly materialistic

The first two lines of Fitzgerald's novel go as follows: 

'In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'

The introduction was written by Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story. He and Daisy Buchanan are cousins and yet this advice is of stark contrast to how Daisy lives her life. Due to how close the pair are shown to be ((with Daisy and Nick being of similar ages, and close enough for Daisy to have lamented over Nick's absence from her wedding due to the war)), it would not be unfeasible to suggest that perhaps Nick's father bestowed the same advice onto Daisy. It gives the reader the chance to ponder, that if Nick's father had given Daisy the same advice, did she carelessly forget the advice as she grew older or had she consciously decided to ignore when she married into money.

Throughout the novel, Daisy is demonstrated to be awed by the material things that she is exposed to. For example, when she visits Gatsby's home for the first time, she says that she has "never seen such beautiful shirts before".

It was clever to contrast the protagonist with someone so close to him. A contrast this striking was bound to be a clever and conscious decision made by Fitzgerald. It works well as it establishes conflict between the protagonist and the other characters around them.

It can be argued that despite rarely being shown in the role of a mother, she stayed with Tom at the end of the book in order to give her daughter the best start in life

In The Great Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan is a mother of a young daughter, who she gives to a nanny to take care of. As her daughter is not demanding to be the forefront of her mother's attention, Daisy is free to have an affair with Jay Gatsby. She does this whilst married to Tom Buchanan, and despite the fact she is aware that Tom is also having an affair and has had several beforehand, she opts to stay with him at the end of the book. It can be argued that because Gatsby was murdered, Daisy's way to escape had also died. 

BUT there is still the chance that she understood that Gatsby's illegal activities meant that her future with him would have been uncertain and she would have resented him had she left her husband with her daughter and Gatsby had been arrested due to how he acquired his fortune through illegal and unjust means. Therefore there is room to assume that she did not stay with Tom because she cared not for Gatsby but instead it was because she wanted to give her daughter a good life. 

So what can we learn about characters from Daisy Buchanan? 

1. Writing clever characters need not mean that they are nerdy characters, they can be witty and sharp, knowing the world they live in well enough to manoeuvre within it without causing harm to themselves. 
2. Writing characters with similar roots and completely different lives are interesting to analyse
3. There is always a way to try and redeem an unlikable character

Thank you for reading my reasons that I DON'T LIKE Daisy! I hope I influenced the way you perceive your own characters!

Until next time!

And remember: 

Per Ardua Ad Astra! 

- Imogen. L. Smiley