Student Question
Compare the scenes with Daisy, Jordan, and Tom in chapters 1 and 7 of The Great Gatsby.
Quick answer:
In chapter 1, the mood seems light and calm as Nick describes the breeze that makes the curtains billow around a couch that looks like a huge balloon. Daisy and Jordan seem as if they are afloat or have just landed after blowing and flying through the air. In chapter 7, however, the mood feels heavy and tense. The women now seem to be made of "silver" and weigh down their dresses. The tranquility of the earlier scene is gone.
In chapter 1, the scene seems tranquil and airy. Nick describes Daisy and Jordan in an almost-dreamlike way, with the curtains billowing in the breeze around a huge puffed couch. He says,
A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.
Note the positive connotations of the words he chooses: "frosted wedding cake," "rippled," "buoyed," "balloon," "fluttering,"...
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and so on. Nick seems to be taken by the sight of the room, its calm feeling, and the beautiful women. Inchapter 7, however, the feeling is quite different. It is so terribly hot, Nick says, that "in this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life." The heat and humidity seem so extreme that they are oppressive. As for the scene, Nick says that
the room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool. Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols, weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.
Now, instead of being light and bright, the room is dark. Instead of appearing to be "buoyed up" with their dresses "fluttering" as if they'd just landed, Jordan and Daisy are "like silver idols" that weigh down their dresses. Instead of being calm and airy, the women now seem to embody a kind of heaviness and lethargy. "We can't move," they tell Nick. Even Tom, who is proud and supercilious in chapter 1 is now irritable and tense in chapter 7. The women are just as passive, while Tom is just as active, but the entire mood has changed.