Tuesday, November 11, 2014

How does Tom feel toward Jordan Baker?

Jordan Baker despises Tom Buchanan and works relentlessly to get Daisy away from him, at least temporarily, by encouraging Daisy's affair with Gatsby. Tom, although unaware that Jordan is working against him behind his back, does not like Jordan but thinks he can use her. He understands that she epitomizes the unattached, independent modern woman, but he is both too complacent within his own machismo to perceive her as a threat and too self-absorbed in his own affair to pay much attention to what his wife and her friends are doing.
On the first occasion Nick is with the Buchanans and Jordan, she tries to interrupt Tom's pompous endorsement of a racist book, and he simply ignores her. Later it becomes clear that he has no idea Jordan knows about Myrtle and another fling he had years earlier. He vaguely thinks she needs restraining, saying "they oughtn't to let her run around the country this way," meaning travel to play in golf tournaments. It seems that Tom is happy to have Jordan staying in their home and keeping Daisy occupied because it will facilitate his carrying on with Myrtle.


At one point, when Tom is curious about where Gatsby would have met Daisy, he says,

By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me.

Here, he must be talking about women of his own class, the upper class. Otherwise, he would be referring to women like Myrtle Wilson and all the others with whom he has had affairs that were made possible precisely because these lower-class women were happy to "run around," as he puts it, with him. The main person Daisy "runs around" with is Jordan Baker, her best friend, and so I imagine that he finds Jordan a little too progressive for his taste too: she is always going to parties and into town, playing in tournaments, and so forth. If he believes that Daisy has strayed from his "old-fashioned" values, then it stands to reason that he feels the same way about her friend.


Tom and Jordan interact directly with each other very rarely throughout the novel. Jordan and Daisy are good friends and have been since they were young. (The reader even meets them at the same time, when Nick walks into the Buchanans' living room to see them lounging in the heat.) But Tom and Jordan are connected through Daisy alone. Though Tom never directly states his opinion on Jordan, we can infer from their personalities that Tom at least respects Jordan, because they are in fact very similar.
Jordan, Tom, and Daisy all grew up wealthy and remain wealthy. Nick calls Tom and Daisy "careless people," people who use their money and influence to avoid responsibility and do whatever they like without consequence. Jordan lives her life in a similar way, though she is not responsible for something as gruesome as two deaths, like Tom and Daisy are (Myrtle Wilson's death after Daisy hits her with the car and Gatsby's death when George Wilson believes he killed his wife and shoots Gatsby in his pool). Toward the end of the novel, Nick describes Jordan:

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.

Nick grows close to Jordan over the course of the novel, but his overwhelming sense of her is of someone who is cold, cynical, superficial, and prone to dishonesty. These are traits Fitzgerald largely assigns to wealthy people in the novel (namely Tom, Daisy, and Jordan), and these similarities make it likely that Tom thinks of Jordan Baker as at least a peer.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."

Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...