Who is Daisy?

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby has not only revived an interest in Fitzgerald's novel, but it has also revived an interest in the characters of the novel.

Daisy, for instance, remains an enigma; who is she? Don't look to the novel for much help, because in the prose, Daisy is less of a person, and more of an ideal, of all that, not only Jay Gatsby, but most of the romantically aspiring, male youth, of the novel yearn for.

Novelist Benjamin Lythal, whose debut novel, A Map of Tulsa, has a Gatsbyesque plot--in it a man goes home and stages a reunion with his former girlfriend, with disastrous consequences--says Daisy is to Jay Gatsby what Galatea is to Pygmalion (more or less).

To get to this analogy, Lythal quotes Joseph Brodsky's take on Pygmalion (from the essay, "On Grief and Reason"):

His fascination is not with what he sees but with what he imagines it conceals—what he has placed there. He invests her with mystery and then rushes to uncloak it: this rapacity is always Pygmalion’s double bind. It is as though the sculptor found himself puzzled by the facial expression of his model: she “sees” what he does not “see.”

The Jay Gatsby and Daisy relationship is akin to a Pygmalion relationship, in that Jay,

[The lover] is not even sure his beloved really exists but nonetheless craves her tutelage, her authority to see his life and judge it. She is the novel he has tried to write about himself.