Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby
DANIEL J. SCHNEIDER is a professor of English and chairman of the Department of English at Windham College, in Vermont. He has published a number of essays on the fiction of Fielding, Henry James, Conrad, Hemingway, and Hawthorne in various journals of literary criticism and is writing a book on symbolism in the fiction of Henry James.
The vitality and beauty of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing are perhaps nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in his handling of the color-symbols in The Great Gatsby. We are all familiar with "the green light" at the end of Daisy's dock—that symbol of the "orgiastic future," the limitless promise of the dream Gatsby pursues to its inevitably tragic end; familiar, too, with the ubiquitous yellow—symbol of the money, the crass materialism that corrupts the dream and ultimately destroys it. What apparently has escaped the notice of most readers, however, is both the range of the color-symbols and their complex operation in rendering, at every stage of the action, the central conflict of the work. This article attempts to lay bare the full pattern.
The central conflict of The Great Gatsby, announced by Nick in the fourth paragraph of the book, is the conflict between Gatsby's dream and the sordid reality—the foul dust which floats "in the wake of his dreams." Gatsby, Nick tells us, "turned out all right in the end"; the dreamer remains as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an attainment "commensurate to [man's] capacity for wonder." What does not turn out all right at the end is of course the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enchanted universe is exposed as a world of wholesale corruption and predatory violence, and Nick returns to the Midwest in disgust. As we shall see, the color-symbols render, with a close and delicate discrimination, both the dream and the reality—and these both in their separateness and in their tragic intermingling.
Now the most obvious representation, by means of color, of the novel's basic conflict is the pattern of contrasting lights and darks. Gatsby, Nick tells us, is "like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light." His imagination has created a "universe of ineffable gaudiness," of "a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty"—a world of such stirring vividness that it may be represented now by all the colors of the rainbow (Gatsby's shirts are appropriately "coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue"), now simply by light itself, by glitter, by flash. In his innocence, Gatsby of course sees only the pure light of the grail which he has "committed himself" to follow. The reader, however, sees a great deal more: sees, for example, the grotesque "valley of ashes," "the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it"— the sordid reality lying beneath the fictions of the American dream of limitless Opportunity and Achievement.
If for a time "the whole front" of Gatsby's mansion "catches the light," ifthe house, "blazing with light" at two o'clock in the morning, "looks like the World's Fair," the reader understands why it comes to be filled with an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere and why "the white steps" are sullied by "an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick." Fair and foul is the intermingling of dream and reality; as Nick observes in Chapter VIII, there is a "gray-turning, gold-turning light" in the mansion, and the moral problem for the young Mid-westerner is to prevent himself from mistaking the glittering appearance for the true state of things.
The light-dark symbolism is employed with great care. It is not accidental, for example, that Daisy and Jordan, when they are introduced to the reader in the first scene of the novel, are dressed in white. In this scene, in which almost all of the color symbols are born, Nick tells us that "the only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house."
White traditionally symbolizes purity, and there is no doubt that Fitzgerald wants to underscore the ironic disparity between the ostensible purity of Daisy and Jordan and their actual corruption. But Fitzgerald is not content with this obvious and facile symbolism. White, in this early appearance in the novel, is strongly associated with airiness, buoyancy, levitation. One is reminded of the statement in Chapter VI that for Gatsby "the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing." Daisy and Jordan seem about to float off into the air because they are—to both Gatsby and Nick—a bit unreal, like fairies (Daisy's maiden name is Fay); and they are in white because, as we learn in Chapter VII, to wear white is to be "an absolute little dream":
ACHIEVEMENT
[Daisy's] face bent into the single wrinkle of the small white neck. "You dream, you. You absolute little dream."
"Yes," admitted the child calmly. "Aunt Jordan's got on a white dress too."
The white Daisy embodies the vision which Gatsby (who, like Lord Jim, usually wears white suits) seeks to embrace—but which Nick, who discovers the corrupt admixture of dream and reality, rejects in rejecting Jordan. For, except in Gats-by's extravagant imagination, the white does not exist pure: it is invariably stained by the money, the yellow. Daisy is the white flower—with the golden center. If in her virginal beauty she "dressed in white, and had a little white roadster," she is, Nick realizes, "high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl." Her voice is "like money"; she carries a "little gold pencil"; when she visits Gatsby there are "two rows of brass buttons on her dress."
As for the "incurably dishonest" Jordan, she displays a "slender golden arm" and "a golden shoulder"; her fingers are "powdered white over their tan"; the lamp-light shines "bright on ... the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair." When she enters the hotel with Daisy, both are wearing "small tight hats of metallic cloth"; and when Nick sees them both lying on the couch a second time, they are "like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans"—the silver, of course, symbolizing both the dream and the reality, since as the color of the romantic stars and the moon (the first time we observe Gatsby he is gazing up at the "silver pepper of the stars") it is clearly associated with the romantic hope and promise that govern Gatsby's life, and as the color of money it is obviously a symbol of corrupt materialism.
Both Jordan and Daisy are enchanting—but false. And Nick's attitude toward them is identical with his attitude toward life in the East. In the apartment in New York with Tom and Myrtle, he tells us that he is like the "casual watcher in the darkening streets" looking up and wondering" at "our line of yellow windows" in the "long white cake of apartment-houses": "I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life." Viewed from "without," the windows glow with all the beauty and potency of the Dream; but "within" the apartment, Nick observes only greed, irresponsibility, conspicuous waste: he recognizes that the glow of the windows is that of money, not of enchantment. If, like Gatsby, he has tasted "the incomparable milk of wonder," he discovers that the milk will presently sour: turn yellow.
These conjunctions of white and yellow in contexts exhibiting the contrast between the dream and the reality are so numerous that most readers are likely to perceive the symbolic functioning of the colors. The symbolism of blue and red is less obvious.
The first striking reference to blue occurs at the beginning of Chapter II, where Fitzgerald describes the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg peering out over the Valley of Ashes, "above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust."
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose.
When, later in the novel, Wilson, staring at these same eyes, says, "God sees everything," and Michaelis contradicts him, "That's an advertisement," it is clear that Fitzgerald wants us to view T. J. Eckleburg as a symbol of the corruption of spirit in the Waste Land—as if even God has been violated by materialism and hucksterism—reduced to an advertisement. This might suggest that blue symbolizes a certain ideality; but the meaning of the symbol is not defined until we reach Chapter III, which begins: "There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and women came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."
The romantic blue is obviously associated with the promise, the dream that Gatsby has mistaken for reality. Fitzgerald is even more explicit in Chapter VII: "Our eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog-days along shore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles."
Here blue and white become the symbols of the ultimate bliss, the ideal perfection which Gatsby's parties in the blue gardens seem to promise. If, later on when the parties are over, it is necessary to repair "the ravages of the night before"; if the "five crates of oranges and lemons" that arrive every Friday, leave the back door "in a pyramid of pulpless halves"; if the parties degenerate into ugliness and violence and "a sudden emptiness" falls upon the house—that is, after all, no more than we have already learned to expect: the white and the blue of the dream are inevitably sullied by the yellow. So T. J. Eckleburg's blue eyes are surrounded by yellow spectacles; so the music in the blue gardens is "yellow [15/16] cocktail music"; so the chauffeur in a uniform of "robin's-egg-blue" turns out to be "one of Wolfsheim's protégés." Gatsby begins his ascent toward Greatness when Dan Cody takes the young man to Duluth and buys him "a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap." But on the day of his death his clothes change color symbolically—as we shall see after examining the symbolism of red.
The first striking reference to red occurs in Chapter I, where Nick tells us that he "bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew." It is possible that Fitzgerald's choice of red in this context is arbitrary, but a study of the many appearances of the color in the novel, and especially of its appearances in conjunction with yellow and white, suggests strongly that red should be interpreted not merely as image but as symbol. In fact it has, I believe, the same signification as yellow: that is, it may represent either the "ineffable gaudiness" of the dream or the ugliness of the reality.
It stands for the dream because it is one of the glittering colors of Gatsby's romantic universe. We remember that Gatsby describes himself as a collector of jewels, "chiefly rubies," and in Chapter VI Nick remarks ironically: "I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart." Gatsby's bedazzlement by the crimson rubies is matched by the awed Nick's wonder at what is to him, at the beginning of the novel, the almost enchanted world of the Buchanans. Entering this world of the rich, Nick is dazzled by the glowing light, the reds, and the rosiness: he walks "through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space"; there is "a rosy-colored porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind"; the French windows are "glowing . . . with reflected gold"; there is "a half acre of deep, pungent roses"; later on, "the crimson room bloomed with light," and on his way home he observes how "new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light."
Red, in these passages, is glitter, is enchantment, is dream; but there is another and a more interesting reason for the frequent occurrence of the color. As the color of blood, it is inevitably associated with the violence caused by the human animals who prey upon Gatsby—not merely the Hornbeams and the Blackbucks and Beavers and Ferrets and Wolfsheims, but also the respectable Tom and Daisy, the "careless people" who smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Thus Tom breaks Myrtle's nose and there are "bloody towels upon the bathroom floor." (He is also involved in an accident in which "the girl who was with him," a hotel chambermaid, has her arm broken.) Daisy runs down Myrtle, whose "thick dark blood" mingles with the dust of the Valley of Ashes—the foul dust which floats in the wake of Gatsby's dreams. And Wilson murders Gatsby, whose blood leaves "a thin red circle in the water." The beautiful reds become the color of carnage, and, as Nick tells us, perhaps even Gatsby, discovering the truth about Daisy, [16/17] would find "what a grotesque thing a rose is."
On the hypothesis that red symbolizes the violent reality as well as the glittering dream, it is not surprising to find that just as yellow is inextricably joined to white, so red is wedded to both white and yellow, to reveal, simultaneously, both the dreamlike enchantment and the actual brutality. Thus it is appropriate that the Buchanans' house is a "cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion"; and (though I may be guilty of forcing the symbolism here) I find it significant that Gatsby, when he enters the Buchanan house for the first time, "stood in the center of the crimson carpet and gazed around him with fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed, her sweet, exciting laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into the air."