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Character analysis

Myrtle Wilson

in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Myrtle Wilson is a secondary yet essential character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, acting as a dark reflection of Daisy Buchanan and a symbol of how the American Dream is brutally out of reach for those not in the privileged class. Married to the dull and defeated George Wilson and stuck in the bleakness of the Valley of Ashes, Myrtle radiates raw energy and has an unquenchable desire for a better life. She chases this dream through her affair with Tom Buchanan, mistakenly believing that his wealth and brute strength can lift her out of her situation.

Myrtle's journey is marked by tragic self-deception. At the New York apartment party in Chapter 2, she tries to embody an exaggerated upper-class persona—dressing in a lavish outfit, adopting snobbish behaviors, and barking orders—showing both her ambitions and her fundamental misunderstanding of her own status. Tom's nonchalant, violent act of breaking her nose when she mentions Daisy's name highlights the power disparity she refuses to fully recognize.

Her death serves as the novel's most shocking turning point: as she rushes toward what she thinks is Tom's car, she is hit and killed by Daisy, who is driving Gatsby's vehicle. Myrtle never grasps that she is just a pawn in the reckless games of the wealthy. Her lifeless body, depicted in grotesque detail—her left breast torn off, her life literally squeezed out—becomes Fitzgerald's sharpest critique of the American Dream. Passionate, misguided, and ultimately disposable, Myrtle represents the price paid by those who reach too far beyond their social standing.

About this character

Form
Novel
Author
F. Scott Fitzgerald
First published
1925

The person01–03

01·Who they are

Who is Myrtle Wilson?

Myrtle Wilson is introduced in Chapter 2 as a woman straining against every circumstance life has handed her. She lives above her husband George's garage in the Valley of Ashes, a grey wasteland of industrial waste and crushed ambition that sits between West Egg and New York. Fitzgerald immediately distinguishes her from her surroundings: she carries herself with "a perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering." She is fleshy, loud, sensual, and alive in a way that George, bleached pale by failure, simply is not. Where the novel's wealthy characters perform cool detachment, Myrtle's desire is nakedly, recklessly on the surface — and that visibility, Fitzgerald suggests, is what makes her so vulnerable.

02·Arc & motivation

What is Myrtle Wilson's arc and motivation?

Myrtle's arc represents the American Dream stripped of its romantic packaging. She seeks elevation — social, material, emotional — and identifies Tom Buchanan as the vehicle that will deliver it. Her motivation transcends mere greed; it is a hunger for recognition and significance that her marriage to George has never satisfied. She tells Nick in Chapter 2 that she knew immediately she had "made a mistake" in marrying George because she "thought he knew something about breeding" and discovered he did not even own the suit he wore to their wedding — he had borrowed it from a friend. This single humiliation seems to have defined her entire subsequent life.

The tragedy is that her arc involves no genuine progress. She does not ascend; she only performs ascent. By the time Daisy's recklessness kills her in Chapter 7, Myrtle has gained nothing durable from the affair with Tom except a dog leash and a bruised nose.

03·Key moments

What are Myrtle Wilson's key moments?

The apartment party (Chapter 2) is Myrtle's fullest scene and her defining one. In the cramped Manhattan flat Tom keeps for their trysts, she changes into an elaborate afternoon dress and immediately assumes the posture of a society hostess — gossiping about her neighbours with practiced disdain, ordering her sister around, proclaiming opinions on interior decoration. Fitzgerald's prose quietly satirises the performance: "her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment." When she taunts Tom by chanting Daisy's name, he breaks her nose without a second's hesitation. The violence is almost casual, and that casualness is the scene's real horror: Tom does not even consider it a significant act.

Her death (Chapter 7) is the novel's mechanical pivot. Running into the road toward what she believes is Tom's car, she is struck by Gatsby's yellow vehicle driven by Daisy. Nick's narration renders the aftermath in visceral, almost clinical detail — the torn breast, the mouth still open as though about to speak. The image freezes her in the posture of someone still reaching, still mid-sentence, still wanting.

The cast04–05

04·Relationships

What are Myrtle Wilson's most important relationships?

Tom Buchanan is simultaneously Myrtle's aspiration and her destruction. She reads his physical brutishness as masculine power and interprets his attention as a mark of her own worth. She does not see — or refuses to see — that he compartmentalises her as strictly as he does his shirts. The broken nose in Chapter 2 is the novel's clearest image of class violence: quick, unashamed, and met with a handkerchief rather than remorse.

George Wilson represents the life Myrtle is fleeing. His docile grief following her death — and his terrible, misdirected revenge — reveals how thoroughly she underestimated him. He loved her in a way Tom never would; the marriage she dismissed as suffocating turns out to be the only relationship in which she was genuinely mourned.

Daisy Buchanan, her structural foil, never shares a scene with Myrtle, yet Daisy's hand is literally the one that kills her. Born into the world Myrtle is trying to enter, Daisy escapes consequence entirely. The irony is surgical: the woman Myrtle saw as her rival and obstacle destroys her, then retreats into money and privilege without accountability.

05·Connected characters

How is Myrtle Wilson connected to the other characters?

Tom Buchanan

Tom is Myrtle's lover and the engine of her aspirations. She clings to the affair as proof of her worth and a path to a glamorous life, while Tom treats her as a disposable amusement, made brutally clear when he breaks her nose without remorse in Chapter 2. Their relationship exposes the cruelty beneath Tom's patrician surface.

George Wilson

George is Myrtle's husband, whom she openly despises and deceives. She married him believing he was 'a gentleman,' but his poverty and passivity suffocate her. His eventual discovery of the affair, and his grief-stricken, misguided vengeance after her death, makes their marriage the novel's most tragic domestic portrait.

Daisy Buchanan

Daisy and Myrtle never meet directly, yet Daisy kills Myrtle with Gatsby's car and allows Gatsby to take the blame. They are structural foils—one born into wealth, the other desperately chasing it—and Myrtle's death at Daisy's hands is Fitzgerald's pointed commentary on how the careless rich destroy those beneath them.

Nick Carraway

Nick witnesses Myrtle at the Chapter 2 apartment party and is both fascinated and unsettled by her performative vitality. He is also present on the road the night she is killed, making him a horrified eyewitness to the aftermath. His narration frames her as a figure of pathos rather than mere scandal.

Jay Gatsby

Myrtle and Gatsby never interact, but their fates are fatally intertwined: it is his car, driven by Daisy, that kills her. Gatsby's willingness to shield Daisy from blame indirectly seals his own death when George Wilson comes for him, making Myrtle's death the pivot on which the novel's catastrophe turns.

Study06–07

06·Questions

Questions readers ask about Myrtle Wilson

How does Myrtle Wilson die in The Great Gatsby?

Myrtle is struck and killed by Gatsby's yellow car in Chapter 7, driven not by Gatsby but by Daisy Buchanan. She runs into the road believing the car belongs to Tom. Fitzgerald renders the aftermath in visceral detail — her left breast torn, her mouth still open as though mid-sentence — freezing her in the posture of someone still reaching for something just beyond her grasp.

Why did Myrtle Wilson marry George if she looked down on him?

Myrtle tells Nick in Chapter 2 that she married George because she believed he "knew something about breeding," only to discover he had borrowed the suit he wore to their wedding. That single humiliation seems to have defined her entire subsequent life, fuelling her contempt for George and her obsessive pursuit of a wealthier existence through her affair with Tom Buchanan.

What is Myrtle Wilson's relationship with Tom Buchanan?

Tom is Myrtle's lover and the engine of her social aspirations — she reads his physical power and wealth as a path to a better life. The relationship is brutally one-sided: Tom treats her as a disposable amusement and makes this clear when he breaks her nose without remorse in Chapter 2 simply for chanting Daisy's name, meeting the violence with a handkerchief rather than regret.

How are Myrtle Wilson and Daisy Buchanan foils of each other?

Myrtle and Daisy share the same desires for wealth and recognition but start from radically different social positions — Daisy is born into the world Myrtle is desperately trying to enter. They never share a scene, yet Daisy's hand literally kills Myrtle and Daisy escapes all consequence, retreating into money and privilege while Myrtle dies still reaching. Fitzgerald distributes punishment with pointed unevenness between them.

What does the apartment party scene in Chapter 2 reveal about Myrtle Wilson's character?

The scene exposes both Myrtle's ambition and her fundamental misunderstanding of class. In the Manhattan flat Tom keeps for their affair, she changes into an elaborate dress and performs the role of society hostess — gossiping with practiced disdain, ordering her sister around, pronouncing on décor. Fitzgerald quietly satirises the act, noting her "gestures and assertions became more violently affected moment by moment," showing that she can mimic upper-class behaviour but cannot secure its protections.

Why is Myrtle Wilson important to the novel's critique of the American Dream?

Myrtle represents the American Dream stripped of its romantic packaging — raw desire for social mobility with no realistic means of achieving it. Her arc involves no genuine ascent; she only performs one. Fitzgerald uses her not to punish ambition but to indict a system that made genuine upward mobility impossible for someone in her position, and her gruesome death underscores that she was always a pawn in the reckless games of the wealthy.

How does Myrtle Wilson's death connect to Gatsby's fate?

Myrtle's death is the novel's pivotal catastrophe: Gatsby shields Daisy by allowing her to believe he will take the blame for the accident. When George Wilson, grief-stricken and misdirected, goes looking for the driver who killed his wife, he finds Gatsby instead and kills him. Myrtle and Gatsby never interact in the novel, yet her death is the direct mechanism that causes his.

Is Myrtle Wilson a sympathetic character?

Fitzgerald frames Myrtle as a figure of pathos rather than mere scandal. She is loud, self-deceived, and complicit in her own exploitation, yet her hunger for recognition is entirely understandable given the bleakness of her life in the Valley of Ashes. Nick's narration treats her with fascinated unease rather than contempt, and her death — gruesome and unmourned by those who used her — invites sympathy over judgment.

07·Essay angles

Use this in your essay

Tool · Essay angles

  • Myrtle as the American Dream's victim, not its failure: Argue that Fitzgerald uses Myrtle not to punish ambition but to indict the system that makes genuine social mobility impossible, showing that the Dream was never available to her regardless of effort or desire.

  • Performance and class identity: Analyse how the Chapter 2 party scene exposes the constructedness of class behaviour

    Myrtle's mimicry both echoes and parodies the affectations of the wealthy, raising questions about whether "real" upper-class identity is itself a performance.

  • The body as symbol: Fitzgerald describes Myrtle in conspicuously physical terms throughout and renders her death in graphic bodily detail. Explore how her physicality functions symbolically

    what it represents for gender, desire, and class in the novel.

  • Foil to Daisy: Build a comparative thesis on how the two women illuminate each other: same desires, radically different starting points, and the ways the novel distributes punishment unevenly between them.

  • The Valley of Ashes and spatial determinism: Examine how geography traps Myrtle

    the Valley of Ashes as a space from which escape is narratively impossible, and what Fitzgerald is saying about where the American Dream actually lives and who gets to leave.

The Great Gatsby

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