You're rereading The Great Gatsby* for the third time. Maybe it's for a class. Not Daisy. So maybe you just like the prose. Still, myrtle. Not Rose. And her name? Either way, you hit chapter two and there she is — Myrtle Wilson, buying a gossip magazine and a bottle of perfume on a train platform, her vitality practically vibrating off the page. Myrtle.
That's not an accident. Which means fitzgerald didn't pick names by throwing darts at a flower dictionary. The myrtle flower symbolism in The Great Gatsby* runs deeper than most readers catch on a first pass. Day to day, it's not just a pretty botanical reference. It's a key to understanding Myrtle Wilson herself — her desires, her delusions, and the brutal irony of her end.
What Is the Myrtle Flower (and Why Does Fitzgerald Care?)
Myrtle — Myrtus communis* — is an evergreen shrub native to the Mediterranean. Glossy dark leaves. It's been cultivated for millennia. And blue-black berries. Ancient Greeks crowned newlyweds with it. Because of that, romans associated it with Venus. Small white flowers. In Victorian floriography, the language of flowers that obsessed the 19th century, myrtle meant love, fidelity, and marriage.
Here's where it gets interesting. Here's the thing — myrtle is also tough. It survives poor soil, salt spray, drought. Plus, it's used for hedges and topiary — shaped, controlled, contained. And its essential oil? Day to day, antiseptic. In real terms, astringent. Used to clean wounds.
Fitzgerald knew all of this. He was obsessed with names. That said, daisy. Jordan. On the flip side, nick. Gatsby himself — "gat" as in gun, "by" as in beside. He chose "Myrtle" for a woman married to a man named George Wilson, living in the ash heaps between Long Island and New York City, desperate to escape into a world of silk dresses and apartment parties in the city.
The flower doesn't grow in the valley of ashes. That's the point.
A flower out of place
Myrtle Wilson doesn't belong in the valley of ashes any more than a myrtle shrub belongs in a desert. Worth adding: she's vibrant, sexual, alive in a landscape defined by gray dust and spiritual emptiness. Nick describes her in that first meeting: "She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye.
Walking through her husband as if he were a ghost. That's the myrtle energy — pushing through, refusing to be contained by the circumstances she was planted in. Myrtle the plant can be invasive. But there's a cruelty to it too. Myrtle the woman treats George like furniture.
Why It Matters in The Great Gatsby*
The novel is obsessed with surfaces and what lies beneath. Still, names are part of that surface code. Day to day, white dresses. Yellow cars. Daisy — the flower that opens its petals to the sun, innocent on the outside, hollow at the center. Rose — beauty with thorns. Because of that, green lights. Myrtle — evergreen, enduring, associated with marriage vows.
But Myrtle Wilson breaks every vow she makes. She cheats on George. Here's the thing — she performs a version of wealth she can't sustain. She buys Town Tattle* and The Saturday Evening Post* and "a small flask of perfume" and pretends the apartment on 158th Street is a palace.
The myrtle flower symbolism in The Great Gatsby* works because it's ironic. Because of that, the plant represents fidelity. And the woman destroys her marriage. The plant represents enduring love. The woman chases a man — Tom Buchanan — who will never love her back, not really. He breaks her nose at a party and she calls it passion.
The wedding wreath connection
At its core, the detail most people miss. In Victorian England, myrtle was the wedding flower. Still, queen Victoria's daughter carried it. Every royal bride since has carried a sprig from the same bush planted at Osborne House. It's the flower of legitimate marriage, of dynasty, of continuity.
Myrtle Wilson wants that legitimacy desperately. She tells Catherine at the apartment party: "I married him because I thought he was a gentleman... I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe.
She doesn't want Tom for Tom. So naturally, she wants what Tom represents — the wedding wreath. That's why the social contract. The entry into a world where women like Daisy float on couches and never have to pump their own gas. But she can't have it. She's not the bride. She's the mistress in a borrowed dress, wearing someone else's myrtle.
How the Symbolism Works Throughout the Novel
The myrtle references aren't scattered randomly. They cluster around three key moments — each revealing a different layer of the symbolism.
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The introduction: vitality as performance
Chapter two. The train stops at the valley of ashes. Myrtle appears, "faintly stout" but carrying "her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can." She's not delicate. Plus, she's not ethereal like Daisy. She's alive* — and she knows it.
"I'm going to make a list of things I've got to get," she tells Tom on the train. "A massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother's grave that'll last all summer."
A wreath with a black silk bow. On the flip side, the myrtle flower lasts. Day to day, she wants things that endure. Myrtle — the evergreen, the symbol of enduring life — buying a funeral wreath. The foreshadowing is blunt. " She wants permanence. For a grave. But notice the detail: "that'll last all summer.She doesn't.
The apartment party: the performance collapses
The party at 158th Street is where the myrtle symbolism curdles. Myrtle changes dresses three times. Each change makes her more artificial, less herself. "With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur.
She's playing a role. Consider this: the myrtle plant doesn't pretend to be a rose. But Myrtle Wilson does* — and the performance fails. She screams "Daisy! Day to day, daisy! Daisy!Still, " at Tom. He breaks her nose. The blood runs down her face and she wipes it with a handkerchief, "her mouth wide" — a grotesque parody of the white-petaled purity the flower suggests.
And the dog. In real terms, she buys a puppy — "a little white dog" — and leaves it in the apartment. Forgets it. The myrtle plant is used in herbal medicine for healing. Myrtle the woman can't even care for a living thing she chose.
The death: irony made flesh
This is where the symbolism lands its hardest blow.
The fatal encounter occurs on the desolate stretch of road that separates the ash‑filled wasteland from the glittering world of West Egg. Gatsby’s sleek automobile, a symbol of newly acquired wealth, bears down on Myrtle as she darts across the highway, desperate to reunite with the man who promises a different life. Worth adding: the impact is sudden and brutal; the evergreen that once signified endurance is instantly snapped, its branches scattering like the shattered hopes of a woman who has tried to graft herself onto a higher social stratum. The irony is palpable: the very flower that is associated with perpetual life is the one that meets a violent, premature end, underscoring how fragile her aspirations truly are.
In the aftermath, the narrative forces the reader to confront the stark disparity between the worlds that Myrtle strives to enter and the one that remains indifferent to her fate. While Daisy retreats into the safety of her privileged existence, the Wilsons are left to pick up the pieces of a life that has been reduced to a smear of blood and broken glass. The misidentification of the driver — Gatsby’s car is wrongly blamed for the accident — adds another layer of deception, mirroring the broader deception that permeates the characters’ attempts to reinvent themselves. Myrtle’s death, therefore, is not merely a personal tragedy but a symbolic execution of the dream she has been chasing, a dream that the established order simply cannot accommodate.
The myrtle’s traditional association with restoration and healing is turned on its head in this climactic moment. On top of that, where the plant is normally invoked to signify recovery, its destruction illustrates the irreversible damage inflicted by class division and the hollow pursuit of status. The valley of ashes, already a landscape of desolation, becomes the burial ground for a flower that could have thrived elsewhere had circumstances allowed. This juxtaposition reinforces the novel’s critique of an America where material excess coexists with moral decay, and where the promise of upward mobility is undercut by entrenched privilege.
When all is said and done, the recurring myrtle motif weaves together themes of vitality, performance, and decay, illustrating how the quest for identity and social acceptance can lead to self‑destruction. Think about it: by tracing the plant’s appearances — from the hopeful wreath purchased for a funeral, through the artificial transformations of the apartment soirée, to its violent termination on the highway — the narrative reveals a consistent pattern: the evergreen’s promise of permanence is continually undermined by the characters’ inability to live authentically within the constraints of their world. The tragedy of Myrtle’s death crystallizes this tension, serving as the novel’s starkest reminder that the glittering façade of the American Dream often masks an underlying emptiness.
