Essay Comparing Sonnets From The Portuguese And The Great Gatsby

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Both “Sonnets from the portuguese” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning(EBB) and “The Great Gatsby” by Scott Fitzgerald reveal similarities that reinforce their individual textual qualities. The concepts of love, women and wealth heighten the similarities and differences between the individual pursuit of happiness. This combined with each text’s unique context of the time, they both draw on the concept of love with differences emerging from their unique context of 19th century ideals mixed with the roaring twenties attitudes that cause differences in the pursuit of happiness. Love is portrayed through individual desire in both texts that challenge the values and attitudes of their differing contexts that gives a reveal unique intertextual similarities and …show more content…

Victorian era gave women very little freedoms in expressing themselves which cause EBB to doubt her love which is seen through the caesura, “I seemed not one/ for such a man’s love! - More like an out of tune/ worn viola, a good singer would be wroth/ to spoil his song with” this is further evidenced through her reliance on Browning “My letters! - all dead paper...mute and white!-- And yet they seem alive and quivering” EBB’s individual desire forgoes the common constraints of women in her time in contrast to 19th century ideals. Similarly the roaring twenties saw greater sexual freedom to women than in Victorian times, yet the influence of wealth creates paradoxes through irony, “You know I love you” as Diasy withdraws from the romance of the moment it becomes to difficult. Likewise to Daisy, Jordan is also careless through the repetition “Unlike Daisy, she was too wise to ever carry well forgotten dreams from age to age” which is symbolically carried through their bad driving and Daisy’s killing of myrtle, and how this ultimately leads to the destruction of idealised love for

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