Depiction of clothes is regularly mentioned in the book for the purpose of underlining ,first of all, the position of a character in society, secondly, to reflect the mood of him or her and , finally, to create an appropriate atmospere. But considering clothes without regarding its COLORS is not a right thing to do.
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Golden stands
for
1) richness, but also
2) happy or prosperous: golden days, golden age
3) successful: the golden girl of tennis
4) extremely valuable: a golden opportunity
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At Gatsby's parties even the turkeys turn to gold. "..turkeys bewitched
to a dark gold".
Jordan Baker - the golden girl of golf - is associated with that color.
"With Jordan's slender golden arm resting in mine" ; "I put my
arm around Jordan's golden shoulder" .
With a few sentences Fitzgerald throws a light at the turbulent months while
Daisy is waiting for Gatsby during the war. "All night the saxophones
wailed the hopeless comment of the »Beale Street Blues« while a hundred pairs
of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour
...". Here even the dust in the rooms, usually grey, is shining, while
the usually golden tea is served at the grey tea hour. We find that contrast
between golden and grey once more in "we went about opening the rest of
the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey-turning, gold-turning
light" .
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Silver represents jewellery and richness.
In The Great Gatsby the moon or moonlight or the stars are
often silver: "the silver pepper of the stars" ; "The moon had
risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales";
"A silver curve of the moon hovered already in the western sky".
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Sometimes the gold at Gatsby's house turns to yellow. Thus the richness is only a cover, a short sensation, like the yellow
press for the more offensively sensational press. Gatsby has a
yeallow car to show off, to impress other people, especially the rich so they
could tell Daisy about him. "…now
the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music". In contrast to the
golden girl Jordan, her admirers are only yellow. "two girls in twin
yellow dresses"; "»You don't know who we are,« said one of the
girls in yellow, »but we met you here about a month ago.«" "... we
sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow". Remarkably Daisy's
daughter has old and yellow hair: "Did mother get powder on your old
yellowy hair?".
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Gatsby has two important experiences in his life before the story starts.
(1) Dan Cody with his yacht "that yacht represented all the
beauty and glamour in the world."
(2) Daisy Fay. She wears white clothes and has a white car.
White stands for
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1) morally unblemished
2) honorable '
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"High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl" . When
Nick Carraway visited the Buchanan he met two young women, of course Daisy
and Jordan "They were both in white". Even the windows at Daisy's
house are white "The windows were ajar and gleaming white". "Our
white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white" . "…they
came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight”.
In a El-Greco-like picture at the end of the novel "four solemn men in
dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a
drunken woman in a white evening dress" . "His heart beat faster as
Daisy's white face came up to his own" .
Fitzgerald uses the color white for the real West, although he doesn't
even mention the name of the color. "When we pulled out into the winter
night and the real snow, our snow". At the end of the novel ["the
party was over" , like the end of the Jazz Age at the Great Depression
1929] somebody soiled Gatsby's house. "On the white steps an obscene
word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the
moonlight, and I erased it" .
Green stands
for a variety of meanings, but Fitzgerald used it mainly for "not
faded", like in "a green old age", or for hope. "I
glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light".
This green light is across the sea where Buchanan's house is supposed to be.
Gatsby said: "»You always have a green light that burns all night at the
end of your dock«" ; "Now it was again a green light on a
dock"; "...when he first picked out the green light at the end of
Daisy's dock" ; "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic
future that year by year recedes before us" . Later the whole water
between Gatsby and Daisy gets green "On the green Sound, stagnant in the
heat,.." . Once (as far as I found it) Fitzgerald used "green"
for envious or jealous: "In the sunlight his face was green".
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Grey is often used for neutral, dull, not important. "grey little
villages in France"; "The grey windows disappeared" ;
"... a grey, florid man with a hard, empty face" about the portrait of Dan Cody in Gatsby's
bedroom. Gatsby's ideal is grey and empty. The Wilsons, living in the valley
of ashes, appear in grey, except for Myrtle, when she enjoys the company of
Tom Buchanan. Wilson "mingling immediately with the cement color of the
walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled
everything in the vicinity – except his wife, who moved close to Tom".
The only way for Myrtle to get out of the grey seems to be Tom Buchanan.
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Blue is the color of being depressed, moody, or unhappy.
Therefore a lot of things around Gatsby are blue. "In his blue gardens
men and girls came and went" . Although a lot of people are in and
around his house, his gardens (plural!) are blue. "... ghostly birds
began to sing among the blue leaves", of course in Gatsby's gardens.
"So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves". After Myrtle's death
George Wilson and Mr.Michaelis are in a blue mood. " ... a blue
quickening by the window, and realized that dawn wasn't far off. About five
o'clock it was blue enough outside to snap off the light" . The most
unhappy place is the graveyard: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn"
(Carraway at Gatsby's grave) . Arguably, "this lawn" means the lawn
at Gatsby's house. It is mentioned at the beginning of that paragraph.
Anyway, the lawn at Gatsby's house is an unhappy place as well. |
Pink
Sometimes Gatsby comes up with the color pink. "the luminosity of his
pink suit under the moon" . When Gatsby and Daisy are finally together,
"there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea" .
The color itself is not usual to describe a man, so the purpose of it, as it
seems, is to create the controversial attitude towards what is happening, to create
a feeling of something bad coming. Besides, Tom immediately notices that
wearing pink suit is not reasonable for an Oxford man.
Lavender
Lavender in this clip,
provides a feeling of elegance. Traditionally purple represents royalty.
Fitzgerald uses the purple taxi to display wealth.
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Up-stairs, in the
solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a
new one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and in this we
slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine". Fitzgerald
uses lavender to develop an idea of unnecessary wealth and elegance. "It
was gas blue with lavender beads".
"Daisy's
face, tipped sideways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a
bright ecstatic smile" .In this section purple compliments Daisy’s
attitude and personality. By adding the purple hat with her bright smile, the
author sets the tone of the moment along with adding character clues. The
implementation of the color - purple - allows for a full understanding of the
luxury in which Gatsby lived. Fitzgerald uses the color and silk to establish
wealth.
"We went
upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new
flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms, with sunken baths---intruding
into one chamber where a dishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises
on the floor". While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap
mounted higher ---shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and
apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of
Indian blue”.
Once again the vibrant
colors are a description of an asinine luxury in the novel. While lavender is
not the only color, it still helps set a seen of money and wealth.
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Red associated
with live, joy, love, shame, and rage.
The inside of Buchanan's home is in red. "We walked through a high
hallway into a bright rosy-colored space" ; "Inside, the crimson
room bloomed with light" . Red is a color of the rich, of aristocracy,
so it expresses the idea of difference
between the Newly rich and the Rich, among whom there are many representatives
of regal families. |
A variety of colors
To impress Daisy Jay Gatsby brings up a pile of shirts "and covered the
table in many colored disarray ... in coral and apple-green and lavender and
faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue" .
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