The Chosen and the Beautiful

Jordan was brought to America by Eliza Baker, who visited Tonkin and fell in love with the baby she was. Eliza died within a year of her return to America and then Mrs. Baker died. As a result, Jordan is left with the ancestral ghost of Anabeth Baker and Judge Baker, a racist judge who pushes the hardest sentences for Black men and tells Jordan, in an alcoholic stupor, that he forgives her for Eliza’s death. She is happy to be able to escape the dour household when she attends high school and makes friends with Daisy’s help.

Jordan’s first real attraction is toward a girl called Helen Archer, who she makes out with in a closet. Jordan spends her teens in sexual experimentation with both girls and boys. She stays at their houses and knows the right things to say at family dinners to make everyone comfortable. Nevertheless, she is aware that “it was my exotic looks and faintly tragic history that made me such an attractive curiosity” (78).

She is staying with the Fays, when Daisy’s father insists that they attend a function where there are officers from Camp Taylor. There, Daisy meets Gatsby, a man who looks at her unguardedly. Jordan later sees them kissing passionately on a boat and they become “the great secret of the summer” (81). Jordan helps the romance along by covering for Daisy when necessary. Daisy is devastated when Gatsby leaves for Europe.

In the next few years, Daisy and Jordan drift apart, with Daisy not approaching Jordan until 1919, needing help obtaining her abortion. Meanwhile, Jordan does domestic war work as Judge Baker declines. Daisy marries Tom and Jordan gets swept up in Daisy’s relative Walter Finley. She has sex with him and worries about becoming pregnant, but nothing happens. Still, she is devastated when he leaves, having liked him more than she could even admit to herself.

When Judge Baker dies, Jordan feels a desperate urge to get out of Louisville and ends up going to live with Judge Baker’s aunt in New York, a Mrs. Sigourney Howard, who allows Jordan to call her Aunt Justine.

As Nick becomes more established on the New York social scene, he and Jordan see each other more frequently. She knows that he is seeing other people, including a girl from Jersey City. Jordan minds this less than the fact that Nick expects that she would not know about his other affairs.

At a house party, Nick and Jordan half undress and Jordan warns him that she is not easy and prone to changing her mind. Nick accompanies Jordan to speakeasies, but will not go to the Cendrillon, a place known for its sexual activity.

Located between Cathedral Heights and Harlem, the Cendrillon looks like a “sad little theater” from the outside and you can only get in by wearing the right flower (91). Jordan exoticizes herself by keeping a tab under the name “Miss Shanghai” (93). However, the name works in obtaining her good drinks and she feels completely at home there, dancing and flirting with the regulars and experiencing the frisson of sexual attraction with both men and women.

She finds Gatsby there, who has been amusing himself with a privileged young man from Amherst College. He insists on talking to her in one of the Cendrillon’s back rooms. Gatsby comments that Nick has a midwestern attitude and would never come to the Cendrillon himself. Gatsby wants Jordan to get Nick on his side so that he can arrange a meeting at his house with him and Daisy. Gatsby claims he still loves Daisy. When Jordan questions his love and his motives, Gatsby threatens her, first by being physically intimidating and then by saying that she should run out of town if she does not grant him his wish. He insists that he has only ever loved Daisy in his life, and that a meeting with her will remind her of this. Jordan plans to take the train to East Egg the next day to see Daisy.

On the train to East Egg, Jordan sees a woman come out of a garage door who bears the description of Tom’s mistress Myrtle from Fitzgerald’s original novel. Once she gets to the house, Daisy feigns delight at seeing her and Jordan insists that they go somewhere they can talk privately. She delivers the news that Gatsby still wants Daisy. Daisy repeats that Gatsby still loves her like a mantra. She grips Jordan’s hand in anticipation and fear.

Daisy’s marriage to Tom occurs three months after the abortion and nine months after the Armistice. The wedding is a grand social event that takes place in the Church of the Nazarene, which Daisy and Jordan have attended since their girlhood. At the wedding, Jordan is enchanted with Walter and uses him as a distraction from the scene that occurred the previous evening.

Mrs. Fay approaches Jordan and asks her to “do something about Daisy” before the pre-wedding dinner (110). Jordan finds Daisy drunk and devastated on her bed, proclaiming that she has changed her mind about the wedding. She has cried so much that her tears have disfigured her. Jordan hastily tries to get Daisy under cold water and realizes that the latter is clutching onto Gatsby’s letter while in the tub.

Daisy tries to get Jordan to make up a paper doll cutout of her—one that will come to life and potentially perform her social duties for her. Jordan obliges, careful that the doll should resemble Daisy as closely as possible. It ends up being a high school version of Daisy, with a sheared small finger. Still, Daisy feels unready and confesses that Gatsby is back from the war and wants her. She shivers and then tells Jordan that she has changed her mind back and wants to make a life with Tom. Daisy makes it through the dinner and afterward, strikes and buries the paper doll Jordan had made of her on the lawn until “the poor paper girl was a smoking pile of earth and ash” (123). Jordan walks home, utterly haunted by what has happened, imagining that she is surrounded by her own cast-off paper dolls.