Myrtle Wilson

Myrtle Wilson, the wife of George Wilson, is the woman with whom Tom Buchanan conducts an affair, and her life and death form a central thread in the novel's exploration of class, desire, and violence. She is introduced as a woman in her middle thirties, faintly stout, with an immediately perceptible vitality about her, as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contains no facet or gleam of beauty, yet she carries her surplus flesh sensuously. She lives with her husband above his garage in the Valley of Ashes, a desolate industrial wasteland between West Egg and New York City, where she has been trapped for eleven years.

Life and Marriage

Myrtle married George Wilson because she thought he was a gentleman, but she quickly realized her mistake: he borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in and never told her, and when the man came to reclaim it, she gave it back and then lay down and cried all afternoon. She describes her husband as unfit to lick her shoe, and she has been having an affair with Tom Buchanan, her first sweetie, for some time. Tom Buchanan is the only man she has ever been with outside her marriage. She meets him on the train, where she cannot keep her eyes off his dress suit and patent leather shoes, and when he presses his white shirt-front against her arm, she tells him she will call a policeman, but he knows she is lying. She is so excited that when she gets into a taxi with him she hardly knows she is not getting into a subway train, thinking over and over, "You can't live forever; you can't live forever."

The Apartment and the Party

When Tom brings Myrtle to New York, she buys a copy of Town Tattle and a moving-picture magazine, cold cream, and a small flask of perfume at the station drug-store. She insists on buying a dog from a gray old man who resembles John D. Rockefeller, selecting an Airedale for ten dollars, though Tom decisively identifies it as a bitch. At the apartment on 158th Street, a small living-room crowded with tapestried furniture too large for it, she changes into an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, and her personality undergoes a transformation: the intense vitality of the garage is converted into impressive hauteur, and her laughter, gestures, and assertions become more violently affected moment by moment, until she seems to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air. She telephones her sister Catherine and invites the McKees from the flat below, and during the party she tells the story of her first meeting with Tom, drinks heavily, and eventually, when she begins shouting Daisy's name, Tom breaks her nose with his open hand.

Jealousy and Discovery

Myrtle's jealousy of Daisy Buchanan becomes explicit when she peers down from the window over the garage as Tom, Nick, Jordan, and Gatsby drive past. Her eyes, wide with jealous terror, are fixed not on Tom but on Jordan Baker, whom she mistakes for his wife. This moment reveals that she has some sort of life apart from her husband in another world, and the shock of this discovery makes George Wilson physically sick. He locks her in the room above the garage, telling Michaelis that she is going to stay there until the day after to-morrow, and then they are going to move away. She rushes out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting, "Beat me! Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!"

Death

Myrtle Wilson is struck and killed by Gatsby's yellow car, which Daisy is driving. The car does not stop; it comes out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then disappears around the next bend. Her body, her life violently extinguished, kneels in the road, mingling her thick dark blood with the dust. When Michaelis and another man reach her, they tear open her shirtwaist, still damp with perspiration, and see that her left breast is swinging loose like a flap; there is no need to listen for the heart beneath. Her mouth is wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she has choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long. Her body is wrapped in a blanket, and then in another blanket, as though she suffers from a chill in the hot night, and laid on a work-table by the wall in the garage.

Aftermath and Significance

Myrtle's death sets off the chain of events that leads to Gatsby's murder. George Wilson, convinced that the driver of the yellow car was her lover, traces the car to Gatsby and kills him before committing suicide. Tom Buchanan, who had told Wilson that Gatsby owned the car, later weeps over the memory of the apartment and the box of dog biscuits, but he and Daisy retreat into their money and carelessness, leaving others to clean up the mess. Myrtle's sister Catherine, at the inquest, swears that her sister had never seen Gatsby and was completely happy with her husband, a lie that reduces Wilson to a man "deranged by grief" and simplifies the case. Myrtle Wilson's tragic achievement is forgotten, but her brief, desperate life and violent end expose the brutal cost of the careless pursuit of wealth and pleasure.