Daisy Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson Similarities: The Great Gatsby Guide

Daisy Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson are the two central women of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and the similarities between them are striking despite their opposite social stations. Both pursue status through relationships with wealthy men. Both define themselves through male attention. Both build romantic illusions that collapse into disillusionment. And both are ultimately destroyed by the gender and class expectations of Jazz Age America. Daisy is Nick Carraway’s cousin, Tom Buchanan’s wealthy wife, and Jay Gatsby’s lost love. Myrtle Wilson is Tom’s working-class mistress, the wife of garage owner George Wilson. One is old money, one is new desire, but their fates rhyme.

Social Class and Ambition

Daisy and Myrtle sit at opposite ends of the social ladder, yet both treat romance as an instrument of class security or class mobility.

Daisy was born into Louisville aristocracy. She married Tom Buchanan partly because he offered wealth, prestige, and the approval of her social world, not because she loved him deeply. When Gatsby reappears with a fortune made through bootlegging, she is drawn to his money but recoils from its new origins. Her class position shapes every romantic choice she makes.

Myrtle’s ambition runs in the opposite direction. She married George Wilson believing he had gentlemanly potential; the belief evaporated once she saw his shabby garage and borrowed suit. Tom Buchanan becomes her ticket out of the Valley of Ashes, a path to the upper-class life she reads about in gossip magazines. Fitzgerald sets Tom’s affair in a Manhattan apartment filled with expensive furniture and cheap trinkets, a visual summary of Myrtle’s aspiration and the limitations of what she can actually attain.

The contrast sharpens the similarity. Daisy already possesses inherited status, so her ambition is defensive: she must protect her place in the social order. Myrtle lacks it entirely, so her ambition is acquisitive: she wants in. Both women, however, understand the same lesson: status is guarded by men, and the surest way to reach it is through a powerful partner.

Dependence on Men

Fitzgerald gives Daisy and Myrtle almost no independent agency. Their identities, decisions, and survival depend on male attention and male financial support.

Daisy’s famous voice is full of money, a phrase Nick uses to describe the seductive quality of her charm. That charm is her only real currency, and she spends it on Tom, on Gatsby, and on the men who surround her at her parties. Her income, her home, and her social standing all rest on her marriage to Tom.

Myrtle is even more explicitly dependent. Her husband provides a modest living; Tom provides the apartment, the clothes, and the sense of glamour. When Tom strikes her at a party, the violence reveals how conditional the arrangement is. She has no legal claim on him and no leverage to demand better treatment.

Both women read male desire as proof of their value. Daisy’s appeal lies partly in her beauty and voice; Myrtle’s lies in her energy and sexual confidence. Each performs femininity for an audience of men, and each collapses when that audience withdraws or turns hostile. Nick Carraway observes this dynamic without correcting it, which is part of the novel’s critique: in his world, a woman’s self-worth is not hers to define.

Illusion vs. Reality

Daisy and Myrtle share a talent for constructing romantic self-images that reality cannot sustain.

Daisy imagines herself as the victim of circumstance, a woman trapped between two men who love her. Her rehearsed lament that she has been everywhere and seen everything becomes a way of avoiding a real decision. Gatsby idealises her into a symbol of everything he has lost and everything he wants, which forces her to choose between the man she is and the myth he has built. When she finally says that Gatsby asks too much, the illusion breaks on both sides.

Myrtle’s illusions are more concrete but just as fragile. She behaves in the apartment as if she were a wealthy hostess, changing into elaborate afternoon dresses and talking over Tom and the other guests. She believes Tom will leave Daisy for her, a fantasy nobody else in the novel treats as possible. The reality is that Tom treats her as a possession, and her dream of becoming Mrs. Buchanan dies with her.

Both women are disillusioned, but the cost is unequal. Daisy retreats into her money and her marriage, protected by class privilege. Myrtle’s illusions cost her her life. Fitzgerald uses the disparity to show that the same romantic mistake is survivable for a rich woman and fatal for a poor one.

Fate and Downfall

The endings of Daisy and Myrtle are the sharpest evidence of how gender and class expectations crush both women in different ways.

Myrtle is killed on the road outside her husband’s garage when Daisy, driving Gatsby’s yellow car, hits her and does not stop. George Wilson, driven mad by grief, later shoots Gatsby and then himself. Myrtle’s death is the novel’s pivot: it destroys Gatsby’s dream and confirms Tom’s power.

Daisy survives the novel, but she does not escape unbroken. She and Tom retreat into their inherited wealth, careless people who leave others to clean up the wreckage. Her silence in the final chapters is as damning as Myrtle’s fate: Daisy has learned to survive by surrendering any claim to moral responsibility.

Neither woman escapes the structures that defined her. Daisy ends where she began, locked inside a class that protects her but demands her compliance. Myrtle ends in death, the price of reaching above her station. Gatsby, the man who loved one and was destroyed by the other, ends in his own pool, a victim of the same economy of class and desire.

Key Takeaways

• Both Daisy Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson pursue status through relationships with wealthy men, though one already has inherited class and the other does not.
• Both define themselves through male attention and financial support, leaving them with little independent agency.
• Both construct romantic illusions, Daisy as Gatsby’s ideal and Myrtle as Tom’s future wife, that reality shatters.
• Both are destroyed by Gatsby-era gender and class expectations, but the cost differs sharply: Myrtle dies physically, while Daisy survives as moral wreckage.
• Their mirrored fates give The Great Gatsby its critique of the American Dream and of a society where women are valued for their beauty, loyalty, and connections to powerful men.