Abstract:EVERAL readers of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby have i3 found that voice of Daisy, a voice full of money, helps form a central part of her characterization.2 What has not been suggested, and ...EVERAL readers of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby have i3 found that voice of Daisy, a voice full of money, helps form a central part of her characterization.2 What has not been suggested, and what seems to me to form a coherent, though certainly not exclusive reading of Daisy's role in Gatsby, is that both backdrop against which she is presented and, even more, Fitzgerald's artful handling of quality of her voice allow a reading of Daisy as classical Siren. As amalgamation of woman, fish, and/or bird with magically alluring voices, Sirens arise in Plato (who categorizes three kinds of siren), Aristotle, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, and Sir Thomas Browne. In Septuagint (Jb. XXX.29; Isa. Xiii.2I, xxxiv.I3), Map7)VEq denote unusual, foreboding birds. In later traditions, Byron in Childe Harold (Canto iv, st.s8) speaks of the poetry of speech, whose sounds are song, as siren tongue. In his well-known sonnet On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again, Keats likens Lear to a fair plumed Siren enticing him away from his responsibilities as poet. And what modern reader is unaware of Eliot's mermaids singing, each to each, hisRead More
Publication Year: 1985
Publication Date: 1985-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 9
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot