Daisy is not the ideal woman as Gatsby imagines her. While he pines after her and wants to rewind time so that he can be with her before she married Tom, the reality is that Daisy is a selfish and careless person. She marries Tom after he gives her an expensive pearl necklace, and, though she admits to once having loved Gatsby, she returns to Tom in the end. While Tom is a brute and Daisy doesn't care much for their daughter (who she hopes will be a "fool"), Tom offers her the upper-crust lineage and lifestyle she wants. She doesn't even attend Gatsby's funeral in the ultimate show of emotional coldness. The reader might pity Daisy for having to make her life with Tom, but she ultimately shows that she doesn't really want any other type of existence.
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is another tragic figure in literature who finds that her love affair is not what she had imagined. She leaves her husband for a passionate love affair with the dashing Count Vronsky, and she must abandon her young son for her life with Vronsky. In the end, Anna feels that Vronsky cannot satisfy her, and she becomes possessive and self-tormenting and ultimately throws herself under a train in one of the most tragic scenes in literature. Her descent from passion to madness is hard at times for the reader to understand, but it in part arises from her sense that Vronsky can not equal what she has sacrificed to be with him, including her position in society and her child with her husband.
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