Daisy Buchanan is not only famous for her old-money beauty and her role in the story of Jay Gatsby, her fame is also accredited to one of her most famous quotes in The Great Gatsby.
“And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl in this world can be, a beautiful little fool.”
On the surface, especially to older men in my experience when discussing Daisy, this statement may portray Daisy as a carefree, shallow woman who embraces the sexist and submissive role society places onto women. However, I think there’s a lot more to this than what we can observe on the surface level. I think Daisy is incredibly intelligent because she said that. Daisy is aware of the world and the expectations that surround her. Her saying that can be interpreted as a bitter commentary on 1920s America and its limited mobility for women.
When Daisy says that in The Great Gatsby, she is talking about her daughter to Nick. She expresses her joy that her child was born a girl then continues to wish that she turns out to be a beautiful little fool. However, she is not only talking about her daughter; she is also talking about herself. In the 1920s, or any era before feminism swept the country in the way we see it now, women—especially wealthy women—were expected to be accessories. They were supposed to be decorative, mindlessly tolerant, and quiet. Any form of intelligence or a whiff of ambition did more harm than good to a woman back then. Their lives became more difficult rather than better due to the iron-clad grip and oppressive aura of the patriarchy during that era. So when Daisy voices her hope for her daughter to be a “fool,” it’s not because she values ignorance. It’s because she recognizes and surrenders to the reality of it being the only way to survive and sustain a luxurious lifestyle with little to no suffering.
Rather than being a “fool” herself, Daisy is playing her assigned role on a stage with patriarchy as the lead. She knows her beauty gives her influential power, but that power is very fragile and conditional. Acting carefree, naive, detached, and adopting a foolish nature protects her. Her charm, laughter, and lightheartedness are all just features of her act. Her performance is what keeps her in good graces with the men that surround her all while masking the disillusionment she is feeling underneath her mask.
Daisy’s awareness becomes even more apparent as the novel progresses. For example, she chooses to stay with her husband, Tom Buchanan, despite his cruelty, infidelity, and careless nature towards her. If she left him, that would mean that she would lose the fruits of her labor. She would lose her social standing and stability. Her return and decision to stay with Tom was not out of love; it was out of necessity and survival because she has no personal agency outside of a marriage with a man like Tom.
When Daisy gets the labels of “shallow,” “foolish,” and “careless,” we tend to miss the bigger, implied nature of Daisy. Her “beautiful little fool” comment was rooted in mournful surrender. It’s a critique. She knows the world doesn’t reward women for their personal, independent achievements. Her wisdom is very tragic; she understands the era and environment she lives in and chooses to go along with it.
Daisy is far from being a fool. She is one of the most self-aware characters in The Great Gatsby. Her tragedy in the novel, alongside the other women who mirror her story in the real world, is that she is smart enough to know the truth, but she is powerless to do anything about it.
Pixels and Parenthood: How Gaming Shaped My Childhood
Growing up, I spent most of my time with a controller in my hands and a TV screen a foot away from my face. Whether it was a Wii remote, a PlayStation controller (before it was called DualShock kids!), or an Xbox controller, I was always engulfed in the medium of gaming. My childhood was shaped this way due to my dad being substantially more present and involved in my life growing up. It was inevitable. My dad was (still is) a huge advocate for gaming; he loved anything related to nerd and geek culture. Much to my mother’s dismay, her daughter was a tomboy because of dad. Instead of Barbies, princess dolls, and playing dress up, I was much more interested in playing with videogames instead. I loved spending my days as a kid with Mario, Link, and Sonic the Hedgehog; I still do actually, and I am not ashamed to admit it!
The Dark Age: Sonic’s Lost Momentum in the 2010s
Although…my interest and enjoyment of Sonic in the 2010s rightfully waned. I would not enjoy it again until the 2020s. What happened in the 2010s you ask? Nothing good. The Sonic franchise was a dumpster fire, and Sonic Team just kept adding fuel to the fire because they’d rather go down with the sinking ship since their funding was dramatically reduced by SEGA during that time. I blame it on the failures that were Sonic Lost World [2013] and SonicBoom [2014]. For some reason, Sonic Team could not keep the momentum they created from 2011’s Sonic Generations. I still continued to check in every once in a while to see how the blue blur was doing out of nostalgia and foolish hope. As YouTuber Alpharad said while playing Sonic Forces (a horribly received game by the way)back in 2017, “It’s like a car crash, y’know? Like when you see one, you can’t look away even though you know it’s horrible.”
The Sonic Renaissance: Sonic’s Roaring 20s
So what happened to make me hop back into the series in the 2020s? It all started with the success of Paramount’s movie adaptation and interpretation of Sonic the Hedgehog back in 2020. Yeah, that movie—the one with the now-iconic “Ugly Sonic” redesign that forced Paramount to halt the film’s release to properly redesign him. Heck, Disney even poked fun at that in Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022). As much as I’d love to talk about “Ugly Sonic” and how it caused one of the only instances (that I can think of) where the internet successfully bullied a massive media and entertainment company into delaying a major film, this would turn into a full-fledged scholarly essay about how protesting actuallyworks rather than a fun blog post about Sonic and Daisy Buchanan.
Point is: Paramount reviving Sonic by kickstarting the first-ever successful movie gaming trilogy back in 2020 is what drew me back to a series that heavily defined my childhood. I am now unashamedly enjoying Sonic as an adult. You can bet I saw Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)on its debut day! I was actually more excited for that film releasing in my graduation year rather than my actual graduation.
A Hedgehog Without Origin: Sonic’s Elusive and Ambiguous Identity
With the revival of Sonic in my personal life, I inevitably retaught myself lore that I had forgotten due to the long passage of time. While revisiting the franchise, I realized something strange. I know a lot about Sonic’s universe, but I don’t know much about Sonic himself. That’s not entirely my fault; there actually isn’t a lot to know about him on his own. Sonic doesn’t have a canon backstory (at least not one that’s stuck). His identity isn’t grounded in origin; he only exists through his adventures and what he’s perceived as.
I watched a video by YouTuber ALtheBoi titled “Leitmotifs in Sonic” awhile back that supports my assertion. If you are not familiar with leitmotifs, they are a recurrent theme that is associated with a certain character, object, setting, or event. Leitmotifs are found in all forms of media, not just Sonic. They’re a unique tool used by composers to establish identity, emotion, and continuity without relying on visuals or dialogue. Isn’t that cool? Anyways, in Sonic’s case, he actually doesn’t have a traditional leitmotif. By traditional, I mean that his “theme” is not consistent at all compared to one of his most notable competitors, Mario. Everyone is familiar with Mario’s theme. Once you hear it, your mind instantly pictures the famous Italian plumber. But with Sonic? He doesn’t really have that. Why?
Sonic, despite being the face of the franchise, rarely has a clear, consistent leitmotif compared to other characters in the series like Shadow or Metal Sonic. The absence of an official leitmotif reflects Sonic’s ambiguity as a character. He’s less about who he is and more about what he is doing. He’s speed, he’s freedom, he’s action, and he’s a hero. That’s his identity, nothing more. ALtheBoi notes how Eggman, Sonic’s main antagonist, has a consistent leitmotif across the franchise regardless of what he’s doing while Sonic doesn’t. A commenter on the video offers a possible explanation saying, “Maybe it’s a reference to how Sonic is always moving and changing and becoming better than before while Eggman just stays the same.” So…what can we take away from that? ALtheBoi says that Sonic does not possess a single defining leitmotif because no one theme represents Sonic. He’s built different. More specifically, he’s built by the adventures he goes on. ALtheBoi proposes that perhaps the main themes of the gamesare supposed to represent Sonic and the adventure he embarks on in saidgame.
Here are the examples ALtheBoi provides:
“Knight of the Wind” by Crush 40 — Sonic’s stoicism and how it ties to his journey to understanding and challenging the codes of chivalry.
“It Doesn’t Matter” by Tony Harnell— Sonic’s philosophy on everything: he’ll never give up, he’ll never back down from a fight, and that it doesn’t matter who is wrong or who is right because he will always keep running until the end.
“Sonic Heroes” by Crush 40 — The bonds of friendship and camaraderie Sonic has made throughout life that he values dearly.
So what is Sonic’s theme? All of them.
ALtheBoi says this is evidence of Sonic being a well-done static character in the context of gaming, but what about in the context as a character in a story? It appears that Sonic has a lack of fixed internal self. He’s a symbol, a brand, and a hero that exhibits the projections of the people he is saving rather than a character with emotional depth or personal history.
Just a Guy Who Loves Adventure: The Illusion of Simplicity
There’s this one iconic line that Sonic says in Sonic Adventure 2 while conversing with Shadow before their famous iconic rival battle.
Shadow asks, “What are you?”
Sonic replies, “What you see is what you get! Just a guy that loves adventure!”
As a kid, Sonic just seemed really cool to me when he said that. He’s so free-spirited, confident, and defiant. I remember thinking that I wanted to be carefree like that. However, as an adult with media literacy skills, it just seems kind of…empty and deflective. Sonic defines himself by what others view him as. No depth, no history, no room for questioning, he is just Sonic: the guy who loves adventure—that is what he is and all he is. He accepts and embraces it. It can be seen as liberating, but if we take a closer look, something more fragile lies beneath that bold declaration. Sonic didn’t actually answer Shadow’s existential question. He doesn’t say whoheis; he says whatheappearstobe. His identity is grounded in what he is perceived as by others which shows through his response and his leitmotif mobility. He is quite literally “just a guy who loves adventure.” Very simple and easy to digest.
And that, oddly enough, reminds me of Daisy Buchanan.
Enter Daisy Buchanan: Sonic’s Surprising Literary Mirror
Daisy is another character that is shaped more by how others see her than by who she truly is. Just like how Sonic is the embodiment of adventure, Daisy is the embodiment of the American Dream and all its glitz, glamour, elegance, and drowning materialistic riches. In The Great Gatsby, she is idolized, adored, and obsessed over by Gatsby because of all those things she represents rather than who she actually is. Keeping the objectivity going, Daisy is essentially a mirror, one that reflects others’ desires for the fantastical life she lives. She knows she is perceived as the ultimate trophy and is dangerously desirable. She knows what it means to be a woman in 1920s America.
And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
Like Sonic, she plays the role assigned to her. She understands that being ignorant (or appearing to be) is an effective survival strategy for living in a patriarchal society, so she puts on a performance for the world around her to create security and detachment from the confining reality she is shackled to. Her voice is full of money. She floats through rooms like an alluring dream. And yet, upon closer inspection, there’s nothing but hollowness. She doesn’t say anything meaningful outside of the central conflict of The Great Gatsby. She doesn’t fight for self-actualization; she’s simply there for the adventure. Like Sonic, she is her assigned persona. Whatever may lie beneath that surface will never emerge from its shallow waters.
Regardless of how radically different the genres and worlds these characters come from, Sonic and Daisy exhibit the fragile nature of persona. They both perform the roles given to them with little to no resistance. That doesn’t mean there is no expense to them though. Sonic may come off as “cool” and be “that guy,” but his lack of introspection and depth makes him emotionally flat compared to the other characters in the Sonic franchise. Daisy may be beautiful, desirable, and an object of many’s affections, but her detachment from everything combined with her hollow and careless nature makes her a tragic character. Sonic and Daisy are characters who refuse—some argue unable—to look inward and truly reflect. In turn, that makes their identities feel manufactured, fake, and hollow in a sense.
Persona vs. Person: The Cost of Being a Symbol
In both Daisy and Sonic, we have two characters who are less about who they are internally and more about what they symbolize in their respective worlds. Sonic stands for freedom, action, adventure, and simplicity. Daisy stands for desire, wealth, and unattainable dreams leading to unforeseen tragedy. While these personas most certainly make them iconic and widely discussed amongst their respective fandoms, they’re also trapped by these identities. The tragedy of Daisy is that the world and era she lives in only wants her to be a symbol of wealth and grace rather than a complex, flawed human being. The irony of Sonic is that being consistently characterized as carefree and unbothered across his franchise is actually giving him no room for growth. At their core, both of them reveal how powerful and limiting it can be to live behind a non-self embraced image.
The Show Must Come to an End: Who are We Without a Role?
For us as readers, gamers, or just as humans in general, we can’t help but wonder what will happen to us when we define ourselves by how others see us? What happens to us when we confuse our identity with the others’ perception of us? And what, if anything at all, is left of us when the show comes to an end?
Perhaps it’s not as simple as “What are you?”
What if it’s “Who gets to decide?”
Of Hedgehogs and Heiresses: A Curious and Unlikely Connection
I know it’s a very strange comparison, and this could also be seen as me wanting to rant about one of my peculiar interests alongside me giving voice to my inner-music nerd with the (unnecessary, yet supporting) section about leitmotifs, but I think Sonic and Daisy reveal interesting things about how persona and perception is portrayed in fiction as a whole. Whether it’s a blue hedgehog rolling around at the speed of sound or a socialite lounging around in her East Egg mansion, what you see isn’t always what you get.
When we think of the American Dream—an ethos that promises opportunity, reinvention, and the manifestation of all one’s material desires through hard work—we often paint the picture of upward momentum. It starts with a new house, then a new car, some luxury clothes, an awe-inducing status, and overall a better life. Sounds too good to be true, right? Whether this ethos is attainable today remains a controversial debate among Americans. Although, some Americans hold onto it in hopes of climbing out of an unsatisfactory life with almost no regard of what it truly means or what it takes to bask in wealthy materialism.
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald takes this dream and turns it inside out, revealing what lies beneath its glitz and glamorous face. In the context of his novel, looming behind the mysticism of the American Dream is Daisy Buchanan: a woman who is a beautiful gem, elusive, and hollow. Her role in the story is not just a love interest or a passive character caught between two controlling men. She is the dream Gatsby longs for throughout the story and his entire character arc; she functions as an ideal that drove him to reshape his entire identity. To him, Daisy represents the American Dream: intoxicatingly beautiful, wealth to no end, prestige, and emotional fulfillment. But Fitzgerald rips off the veil of this fantasy by showing us that Daisy is not a dream fulfilled but rather a dream fabricated. She is more a symbol instead of a person; it is akin to a mirage created from the shimmering of a horizon.
Ultimately, to Gatsby, Daisy is the dream. She is the trophy that symbolizes his years of ambition, discipline, and transformation. Gatsby reinvented himself, creates wealth (by criminal means), and buys a mansion that sits across the bay from her all of which are products of his hopeless pursuit of a love that he believes still exists and is up for reclamation. He believes that it still exists. It doesn’t. Fitzgerald makes it clear; the dream he is after is nothing more than an illusion, and Daisy, despite all of her charm and beauty, is not the ideal he imagines and sees her as.
Let’s examine one of the novel’s most famous lines of dialogue.
“I can’t say anything in his house, old sport.”
“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it… High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…
This scene is jarring, not only because of its poetic sharpness, but for its truth. Gatsby’s sudden remark, “Her voice is full of money,” is more than a romantic observation. It’s a realization. It’s a revelation. In that moment, Gatsby has recognized what Daisy means to him and what she represents. It’s not love, it’s not longing, and it’s not even emotional fulfillment. It’s wealth, it’s status, and it’s privilege. It’s alluring. It’s intoxicating. Her voice being described with imagery like “the jingle of it” and “the cymbals’ song” does not just serve to be something poetically beautiful, it serves to exhibit a capitalized beauty. They’re the sounds of unattainable luxury wrapped in Daisy’s femininity.
From this, we as the readers can now see that Gatsby doesn’t just love Daisy. While by no doubt he loves her, he appears to be more in love with what she represents. She’s a dream; dreams can alter and manipulate an individual’s conscious will. Dreams are a one-sided relationship between itself and the dreamer. There is no sense of human connection; dreams are projections of our wants, shaped not by truth by our desires. In a metaphorical sense that strays away from the continuous usage of “dream,” Daisy is similar to a canvas to which Gatsby has smeared the colors and strokes of his life on. She is still an object either way regardless of what analogy you would like to use. Daisy does not exist as Daisy in The Great Gatsby; she exists as a personification of an ethos in the context of a man.
Daisy Buchanan isn’t just the woman Gatsby loves; she’s the embodiment of everything he worked for. She’s a representation of his character arc. (Note: I wonder if The Great Gatsby passes the Bechdel Test…) Daisy is wealth, status, beauty, femininity, and not real in a figurative sense. She’s an illusion. The closest thing she is when it comes to offering any kind of fulfillment is the stale echo of it. It’s a lie, and lies are nothing more than stale sentiments. Is that her fault? Not necessarily. After all, she’s a dream invented by Gatsby. It’s through this way that Daisy becomes a symbol of the American Dream: captivating, glittering, and hollow.
In the end, Gatsby’s downfall and tragic conclusion was not solely due to lost love; it’s about paying the price of chasing a fantasy. Through Daisy, Fitzgerald makes a powerful reverberating statement: the American Dream may look satisfying, but more often than not, it is nothing more than a front to cover up its unstable foundation built upon tragedy, lies, and illusions.
To understand Daisy Buchanan, the woman that possesses Jay Gatsby’s heart, it is important to utilize the sociological imagination and insert oneself into the 1920s. Fitzgerald did not just create characters for a one-hit wonder novel; he created vessels that were products of his time. Fitzgerald lived during one of America’s most notable eras: the Roaring Twenties. The 1920s was a decade defined by its glamour, wealthy and social appeal, innovative nature, society-wide moral shifts, and confining social norms. Most of these characteristics of American society have either been lost or heavily diluted over the past century. For 21st century readers, it is natural for us to jump to criticize Daisy for her careless actions, shallowness, and indecisive nature. However, we live in an era where there is a lot more social fluidity. While modern women of today still suffer the consequences of their actions alongside the effects of modern-day patriarchy, the women of 1920s America were rigidly shackled by society with little to no wiggle room. Understanding the era and the world Daisy lived in reveals a lot of nuance to be considered.
Social Expectations & Gender Norms
Reading the novel we learn two things about Daisy Buchanan: her silent, strong love for Gatsby and the comfort her marriage to Tom Buchanan offers. Pre-The Great Gatsby and WWI, Daisy and Jay Gatsby fall deeply in love. Despite this indisputable fact, Daisy married Tom Buchanan while Gatsby was away. It is the classic, yet realistic, tragic romantic cliché: life goes on. Tom is a man of influence and wealth which Gatsby was not (yet). Daisy felt the social and familial pressures to let go of the past in order to wed a man that would be a good provider and bring honor to her family name. Marriage served more as a means of security, vanity, and obligation. While there is debate as to whether Daisy loves Tom or not, I believe it is safe to assume that she does love Tom; perhaps not as much as she did Gatsby. Regardless, marriage was still considered to be a woman’s ultimate goal despite the social norms surrounding it being viciously resisted and challenged. With these social factors being considered, is it really so strange that Daisy refused to run away with Gatsby despite their romance being suddenly rekindled five years after the fact?
