Student Question

What are some references to purple, lavender, or violet in The Great Gatsby?

Quick answer:

References to purple, lavender, or violet in The Great Gatsby include a lavender-colored taxicab in chapter 2, a gas blue dress with lavender beads in chapter 3, a three-cornered lavender hat and rooms swathed in lavender silk in chapter 5, and the imagery of romances laid away in lavender in chapter 8.

Expert Answers

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Chap. 2:

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin....Up-stairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery....

Chap. 3:

“Sure I did. I was going to wear it to-night, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads....”

Chap. 5:

Under the dripping bare lilac-trees a large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy’s face, tipped sideways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic smile.

We went up-stairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths....

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them....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, and monograms of Indian blue....

Chap. 8:

She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known....There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms up-stairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms...of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered....

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