A very early clue as to the nature of Jordan Baker in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby actually comes in the book’s opening chapter, when Nick Carraway is visiting the expansive estate of his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom. Nick is a Midwesterner newly arrived in New York and unaccustomed to the pretentiousness prevalent in the “old money” environment of East Egg, Long Island. He is smart and perceptive, but will struggle with his attraction to a woman through whom he can see quite clearly. The scene in Chapter One when Nick is at the Buchanans' palatial home provides Fitzgerald’s young, ambitious narrator the opportunity to engage with a category of humanity to which he might aspire but by which he will ultimately be repelled. During his initial visit to the Buchanan home, Nick meets Jordan Baker, a beautiful young woman who, it turns out, is a professional golfer familiar to Nick, prompting the following exchange and observation:
‘Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,’ explained Daisy, ‘over at Westchester.’
‘Oh,—you’re Jordan Baker.’ I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.
So, we know from early on that Jordan is beautiful, but not necessarily kind, and certainly not above the pretentiousness that will prove a major turn-off for Nick. Nick’s next interaction with Jordan occurs at a party at Gatsby’s enormous house, described in Chapter Three, during which the narrator’s sense of discomfort with his surroundings becomes clear. Having failed to ascertain from other guests the whereabouts of his host, Nick feels immediately defeated, as though he knows he is out of his element: “. . . I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.” It is while seeking solace in the garden, however, and with the intention of becoming inebriated, that Nick is reacquainted with Jordan, who, in contrast to Nick, is very much in her element, and, “looking with contemptuous interest down into the garden” in which he stood. Jordan’s contemptuous interest, however, does not extend to Nick, whose hand she takes with the intent of keeping him company, if only in a platonic sense.
During dinner at the party, Jordan is bored with the conversation and leads Nick and a “young undergraduate” man serving as her escort away from the table towards the library. While Nick will learn to abhor pretty much everything Jordan represents, she is his savior at this point in the story, navigating the young outsider through the rocky shoals of upper-class society. In fact, Jordan is friendly and inviting to Nick, suggesting he contact her in the near future.
It is midsummer when the two reconnect and Nick is able to observe for the first time the true nature of this beautiful woman. In Chapter Three, Nick describes the revelation that this woman he finds so physically attractive and a little intriguing is also more than a little lagging in the integrity department. The “bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something . . . and one day I found what it was.” "What it was" was Jordan’s refusal to accept responsibility for the damage inflicted on a borrowed car when she failed to put the roof of the convertible down and rain flooded the vehicle. Not only did Jordan fail to accept responsibility, Nick notes, “then she lied about it,” which sparks in his memory an episode from Jordan’s career as a professional golfer:
At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his statement and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind. Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body.
This passage is revealing. Jordan is revealed as a fundamentally dishonest person whose selection of men involves those too dim or too dishonest themselves to care about her duplicitousness, and this revelation begins Nick’s reappraisal of this woman he would otherwise like to pursue sexually if not romantically. In Nick, she has a male friend who she can count on to watch out for her carelessness and disregard for conventional notions of civility and common sense, as in the following exchange pertaining to Jordan’s ineptitude behind the wheel of a car:
‘You’re a rotten driver,’ I protested. ‘Either you ought to be more careful or you oughtn’t to drive at all.’
‘I am careful.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Well, other people are,’ she said lightly.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘They’ll keep out of my way,’ she insisted. ‘It takes two to make an accident.’
‘Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.’
‘I hope I never will,’ she answered. ‘I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.’
Chapter Three ends, of course, with one of the seminal sentences from Fitzgerald’s classic—one that captures the essence of this haughty society in which Nick has found himself and the fundamental reason he is not long for that particular world: “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
In Chapter Four, Nick is alone with Gatsby as they drive across Long Island when Gatsby asks Nick for his opinion of him, explaining that he hopes to dispel any misconceptions the relative newcomer may have regarding this mysterious figure’s past. Jordan had, in Chapter Three, while at the party at Gatsby’s estate, suggested to Nick that she felt their host was not who he suggested he was, an old-money transplant from the Midwest educated at Oxford University in England. As Gatsby informs Nick of his autobiography, Nick sees it is filled with the details that Jordan had called into question, and provides Nick a curious comparison between these two deceptive characters who have come to play such major roles in his life. In the following passage from Chapter Four, Nick describes the sensation of discovering that his new friend is a fraud:
‘I’ll tell you God’s truth.’ His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. ‘I am the son of some wealthy people in the middle-west—all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.’
He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase ‘educated at Oxford,’ or swallowed it or choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him after all.
It is also during this scene that Nick is exposed to the depth of both Jordan and Gatsby’s duplicitousness and how those two are somehow metaphysically connected by their shared lack of integrity. Mentioning that he is aware that Nick and Jordan are to get together for tea, Gatsby assumes that the purpose of the meeting will be to share notes about him, Gatsby, and that Jordan and Gatsby have colluded to perpetuate a myth:
'You see, I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.’ He hesitated. ‘You’ll hear about it this afternoon.’
‘At lunch?’
‘No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you’re taking Miss Baker to tea.’
‘Do you mean you’re in love with Miss Baker?’
‘No, old sport, I’m not. But Miss Baker has kindly consented to speak to you about this matter.’
I hadn’t the faintest idea what ‘this matter’ was, but I was more annoyed than interested. I hadn’t asked Jordan to tea in order to discuss Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be something utterly fantastic and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot upon his overpopulated lawn.
Much of Chapter Four involves Jordan’s relating to Nick Daisy and Gatsby’s previous history, during the war years when Gatsby was a young lieutenant and the two were presumably very much in love, although it would turn out that Daisy already had her sights on a much different future for herself. It is Jordan, also, who enlightens Nick as to Gatsby’s agenda to continue his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan—an obsession that has brought both Gatsby and Nick to their current situations. Jordan and Nick, Jordan reveals, are but tools Gatsby is exploiting to win back his lost love, Daisy Buchanan. It is now that Jordan makes a comment that reveals the extent to which she and Daisy have both lived emotionally empty lives: “‘And Daisy ought to have something in her life,’ murmured Jordan to me,” suggesting that Daisy’s marriage to Tom was empty and served as little more than a formality (and we know that Tom is a chronic adulterer, by the way).
So, after all that, we know that Jordan and Gatsby are kindred spirits even while Jordan nuzzles up to Nick, who is highly receptive to intimate overtures (“It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm”) and that Nick’s cynicism towards the Long Island upper-class has firmly taken root. Jordan’s carelessness is evident in the story about the damaged car, and in her willingness to participate in a scheme that will get Daisy back together with Gatsby. And we know from the automobile and golf anecdotes about Jordan’s dishonesty. Her physical beauty, that "jaunty body," however, continues, at this point in the story, to sway Nick in her direction, at least for a time.
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