Chapter 7 - Reader Response

Daisy boldly invites Gatsby to her house for lunch with her husband which fuels Tom’s suspicions about a relationship between Daisy and Gatsby. The hot afternoon eventually spirals into a confrontation between Tom and Gatsby. Tom’s hypocrisy is accentuated when he berates Gatsby for being with Daisy when Tom himself also cheated on Daisy: “Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time” (131). Tom sees nothing wrong with his own actions of infidelity with the even lower class Myrtle, but sees the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy as apocalyptic: “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife…Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and intermarriage between black and white” (130). Tom degrades Gatsby by accusing him of owning “side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and [selling] grain alcohol over the counter.” Regardless of Daisy’s love for Gatsby, Tom knows that Daisy’s snobbery is alike to his own and she would never leave her upper-class husband for a bootlegger. Daisy is unwilling to say that she never loved Tom causing Gatsby’s hopes of repeating the past to die. Ultimately, Gatsby is unable to connect past to present and Daisy, in the end, stays faithful to Tom.