The study of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, in conjunction with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s suite of poetry, Sonnets of the Portuguese, display how oppressive societal expectations and imposed roles constrict individual freedom. Both composers assert this in regard to the role of women within society, as well as the impact of expectations upon the individual. Browning writes sonnets therefore subverting the traditional male form of poetry, rebelling against the patriarchal expectations within Victorian England in order to break through the strict gender roles of the time. Furthermore, through her revelation regarding ideal love, displays how she is able to break the expectations laid upon her by herself and others, and therefore …show more content…
is able to truly experience freedom. Similarly, Fitzgerald, as influenced by his own personal context, critiques the role that the post-war society placed upon women. Additionally, through the character of Jay Gatsby, he is able to comment on societies burdensome expectations upon people, whose downfall and ultimate demise was a result of these expectations. The impact of the role of women upon the individual is highlighted by both The Great Gatsby and Sonnets of the Portuguese. Fitzgerald wrote his famous novel during the Jazz Age, the racy post-war era which was characterised by rapid economic growth as well as the shifting role of people (particularly women) within society. Fitzgerald critiques these changes by depicting women as “beautiful fools” a sentiment mirrored by Daisy who claims that “That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful fool.” The acerbic tone displays how women, within this era, act as product of their societal context and that within this particular society, female intelligence is not valued. Women, within the novel, are thusly characterised as those who do not challenge the values of the time, buying into the idea that life is simpler when they are beautiful and dumb. Upon settling in New York, Nick goes to the Buchanan’s for dinner and as he walks into the living room he sees “two young women who were buoyed as though upon an anchored balloon... as if they had been blown back in after a short flight around the house.” The oxymoron of an “anchored balloon” emphasises the lack of agency of the females and that they cannot do anything themselves, rather they are showpieces. Furthermore, their lack of presence is accentuated as they are physically overshadowed by Tom’s presence, who metaphorically deflates the women like balloons. Fitzgerald therefore, attempts to display how the role of women in society hampers their individual freedom, and critiques the notion that women must be shallow showepieces. Browning similarly pushes against the role placed upon women during her time. Victorian England was an extremely patriarchal society that pigeon-holed women into a subservient and marginalised role. The fact that she writes Sonnets is extremely significant, as it was a form reserved for men. However, by writing sonnet and often subverting the traditional structure, Browning shows how it is necessary to break from the role that society had placed upon women. In Sonnet 14, she writes “If thou love me, let it be for naught/except love's sake only.” By employing high modality language, she assumes authority and is therefore able to critique the beliefs of the time by breaking free of the restrictive gender role placed upon her. Furthermore throughout the sonnets, she consistently does this in order to establish her identity which is seen in lines such as “How do I love thee?” and “Let the silence of my womanhood/Commend my woman-love to thy belief.” Therefore it is evident how both composers are able to convey the same message through different means. While Fitzgerald shows the negatives of gender roles by displaying how women buy into them, Browning displays the negatives by showing the freedom and authority that is obtained by breaking free of them. Browning further comments on the impact of expectation upon the individual, and through her revelation on ideal love, she is able to cast away those expectations and experience freedom.
At the beginning of her collection of sonnets, she is incredibly skeptical, describing Robert’s declaration of love “Who by turns had flung/A shadow across me”. The imagery of a shadow conveys the dark image of death and depicts how Browning easily mistakes love as death. This is very much a result of the expectations bestowed upon her by her Father. Due to various injuries and illnesses, Browning had been classified as an invalid and her Father was therefore very protective of her. This protectiveness manifested itself as great disapproval towards romantic exploits, which clearly fed into her own expectations regarding love. As her relationship with Robert continues, she writes in Sonnet 32 that “perfect strains may float ... from instruments defaced”. The metaphor of defaced instruments represents her own insecurity regarding herself. However, now she is confident in Robert’s sincerity and love for her, describing his love through the extended metaphor of music. Her growth is evident, however it is still visible that expectations still make her doubt herself. However, Browning ends up breaking free of these expectations, writing “Beloved... Contrarious moods of men recoil away.” By using the metonymy of “Beloved” to refer to Robert it shows how she has developed in her love for him. …show more content…
Furthermore, she is no longer concerned about the expectation of others because she has a renewed hope that their love has the power to recoil those expectations. This newfound freedom in her mind materialized in her life, as her and Robert eloped and fled to Italy. Fitzgerald, while also displaying the impact of expectations on the individual, approaches it from a different direction.
While Browning displays the freedom attained in breaking free, Fitzgerald depicts, through the character of Jay Gatsby, the demise that occurs as a result of buying into those expectations. Following one particular party, Nick witnesses the fallout of the next morning, saying “And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day... repairing the ravages of the night before.” The use of harsh adjectives creates a sense of hyperbole, which emphasizes the damage done by the partying crowd. This displays how they do not care and they are unaware of the damage, they do -- they merely have an expectation for Gatsby to throw parties. This mirrors the sentiment of Daisy, who at the end of the book accidently runs over Myrtle and allows Gatsby to take the blame. This ultimately leads to Gatsby’s death at the hand of George Wilson. When Nick finds Gatsby he “called her instinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone away early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.” The symbolism of Daisy and Tom taking their baggage, shows how they do not truly care and only wish to serve themselves. There was just a simple expectation of Gatsby, and once that expectation had run out or had become inconvenient, it was simply to be cast away and forgotten about. Gatsby’s chase of this expectation and his desire to fulfil it, ultimately
leads to his death. Society, will always place expectations on individuals and try and pigeon-hole people into a certain role. Oftentimes, this is oppressive and greatly hampers an individual's freedom. Fitzgerald is able to greatly depict how this occurs by showing the demise and lack of agency of the characters who buy into the roles and expectations of the time. While Browning also does this, she takes it further, showing how an individual is able to experience freedom by breaking free of roles and expectations. Therefore, through the comparative study of both texts, the impact roles and expectations have upon the individual is shown in a holistic light.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby’s conflicts between passion and responsibility demonstrate that chasing empty dreams can only lead to suffering. Gatsby’s motivation to achieve his dream of prosperity is interrupted when his fantasy becomes motivated by love. His eternal struggle for something more mirrors cultural views that more is always better. By ultimately suffering an immense tragedy, Jay Gatsby transforms into a romantic and tragic hero paying the capital price for his actions. Gatsby envokes a deeper Conclusion sentence
Gatsby makes many mistakes throughout the novel, all of which Fitzgerald uses these blunders as a part of his thematic deconstruction of the American Dream. However, Fitzgerald does not write Gatsby as a bad person whom embodies all that is wrong with western capitalism. Instead, Fitzgerald portrays Gatsby as a good man who was victim of the qualities ingrained in him by an imperfect ideological system. It is this distinction which makes Fitzgerald’s argument all the more potent, and his audience’s ability to mourn Gatsby as a tragic figure all the more important. Whereas Fitzgerald’s opinion of Gatsby may otherwise have been misconstrued as a negative one, the scene of Gatsby’s funeral clearly conveys the character of Gatsby as a tragic and sorrowful one.
Hugh Hefner once said, “I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss.” The parties of the Roaring Twenties were used to symbolize wealth and power in a society that was focused more on materialism and gossip than the important things in life, like family, security, and friends. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, portrays the characters of Tom and Daisy Buchanan as the epitome of the era. The reader sees these characters acting selfishly and trying to meddle with others’ lives. On the other hand, Nick Carraway, the narrator, acts more to help others and act honestly. Initially the reader sees Carraway’s views towards Jay Gatsby as negative as Gatsby’s actions are perceived as being like the Buchanan’s. As the novel moves forward, the reader notices a change in Carraway’s attitude towards Gatsby. Carraway sees Gatsby for whom he truly is, and that is a loving person who only became rich to win Daisy’s heart. But in this the reader also sees how corrupt and hurtful Gatsby’s actions were to the love of his life. Gatsby’s relationship with Daisy reveals that just as Gatsby’s dream of wooing Daisy is corrupted by illegalities and dishonesty, the “American Dream” of friendship and individualism has disintegrated into the simple pursuit of wealth, power, and pleasure.
Hawthorne and Fitzgerald, two great American romantics, display new attitudes towards nature, humanity, and society within their novels. The novels The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby are very similar with their adjacent themes, motifs, and symbols. The comparison between these two literary pieces show the transition from adultery to ability, societal standards during the chosen time periods, and good vs. evil.
Gatsby made himself from nothing and dedicated his life to achieving his dreams, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life…. an extraordinary gift for hope…. I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again”(Fitzgerald,67). It is not what Gatsby did or would be willing to do to achieve his dreams, but the drive and hope he embodied in his fulfillment of those dreams that makes him great, “For Nick, Gatsby 's lies, his pretensions, and his corruption are "no matter"; nor is his failure to win back Daisy; what matters is the sustaining hope and belief in the value of striving for a "wondrous" object, not its inevitable disappearance and meaninglessness”(Will). The fire that drives Gatsby defines him, an individual who would sacrifice his life for his dreams. “Jay Gatsby is the embodiment of the American Dream. He is shown to us with an insecure grasp of social and human values, a lack of cultural intelligence and self-knowledge, a blindness to or unconcern for the pitfalls that surround him”(Pidgeon). The greatest foe of the story is not George Wilson, who kills him, but Gatsby’s own persistence and desire to be accepted as something he will never be,“Old Money”. Gatsby works so hard expecting to be accepted by the Old Money social wealthy class, not knowing due to “lack of cultural intelligence” that it can never be achieved. The greatest hope Gatsby has is that over the five years it took him to build his materialistic legacy is that he could simply “repeat the past” with Daisy. Gatsby is shown throughout the novel of having overwhelming pertinacity and hope, this earns him the title and defines what makes him
At the hotel gathering, Gatsby struggles to persuade Daisy to confront her husband and she responds with “Oh, you want too much! . . . I did love him once--but I loved you too” (Fitzgerald 132). Daisy desperately tries to satisfy Gatsby but his imagination blocks his mind to such a degree that it eliminates his chances of learning how to comprehend reality. After Myrtle’s murder, Nick advises Gatsby to leave town but instead he realizes that “[Gatsby] wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free” (Fitzgerald 148). No matter how hard Nick attempts to help him make the better choice, Gatsby continues to skew his priorities like a juvenile. Unfortunately for Gatsby, Daisy stays with Tom, a more secure and experienced adult, leaving Gatsby alone. As Gatsby’s life loses his vitality, he obviously needs learn how to act like an adult and survive in the world; but unable to accomplish this, Wilson kills him soon
But his sympathy towards Gatsby is exaggerated, not so much in actions, but in the much praised language of the novel. Fitzgerald's book at first overwhelms the reader with poetic descriptions of human feelings, of landscapes, buildings and colors. Everything seems to have a symbolic meaning, but it seems to be so strong that no one really tries to see what's happening behind those beautiful words. If you dig deeper you will discover that hidden beneath those near lyrics are blatants, at best. In Nick's "perceptions" of the events in the last four chapters, this symbolism is overdone, especially in the scene where Gatsby kisses Daisy and in the scene where Gatsby dies.
In Fitzgerald’s works, losing love to someone of a higher status is a recurring motif. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby and Daisy are two lovers, brought apart by war. During this time Daisy marries a man named Tom, an extremely privileged young man, because of her need for love and falls in love with the wealth, rather than the man and the “perfection” that comes with it. When returning from the war, Gatsby sees their life in the newspapers
Gatsby’s obsession of his love for Daisy and wealth prove his dream as unattainable. Throughout the novel, he consumes himself into lies to cheat his way into people’s minds convincing them he is this wealthy and prosperous man. Gatsby tries to win Daisy’s love through his illusion of success and relive the past, but fails to comprehend his mind as too hopeful for something impossible. In the end, Nick is the only one to truly understand Gatsby’s hopeful aspirations he set out for himself but ultimately could not obtain. In the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald is able to parallel many themes of the roaring twenties to current society. The ideas of high expectations and obsession of the material world are noticeable throughout the history and is evident in many lives of people today.
After a 5 year rise to wealth and finally acquiring Daisy’s attention, we can see that Gatsby’s luxurious life of a dream led to a downward spiral to his inevitable death. Daisy is the embodiment of the corrupted American Dream, completely consumed by the material world. Murtaugh states that “Daisy is fatal to Gatsby due to her involvement in Myrtle’s death, and therefore Fitzgerald evokes the fatal quality of the materialistic American dream”, which means that Gatsby’s downfall is simply connected to him obtaining the American dream, which to him was Daisy. If Nick’s portrayal of Daisy, a careless woman who was fully consumed by materialism, was unreliable, all Daisy becomes is a “.woman caught in a complicated situation with two men she loves” and no longer a simple embodiment of the American dream. If Nick’s narration was deemed unreliable and did not portray the representations the characters were labelled as, Fitzgerald’s purpose of the novel is lost.
In the novel, Gatsby, a wealthy socialite, pursues his dream, Daisy. In the process of pursuing Daisy, Gatsby betrays his morals and destroys himself. Through the eyes of the narrator, Nick, one sees the extent of the corruption Gatsby is willing to undertake in order to achieve his dream. Although Fitzgerald applauds the American Dream, he warns against the dangers of living in a world full of illusions and deceit; a trait common during the Roaring 20s. The language and plot devices Fitzgerald uses convey that lies and facades, which were common during the Guided Age, destroy one’s own character and morals.
Women are seen from a biased point of view in pop culture as they are often criticized and portrayed in degrading ways. The Great Gatsby takes place in the early part of the 20th century which is also known as the Roaring 20's. In regards to feminism, the women in The Great Gatsby are mainly depicted as second class to men. The story gives readers an insight of the roles that gender played in past World War I America. In The Great Gatsby, the author Scott Fitzgerald shines a light on the submissiveness of females toward males during the Roaring Twenties by giving the women in the novel an unfair representation as they are often identified as passive or negative “objects”.
“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy” (54). F. Scott Fitzgerald details these large parties and much more in his American classic, The Great Gatsby. In this story, Nick Carraway, the narrator, moves in next to Jay Gatsby, an eccentric billionaire with a deep passion for Daisy Buchanan, the girl from his past that left him because he was poor. Gatsby tries to win her back by throwing huge parties and flaunting his wealth to prove his love for her. The social occasions depicted in this novel reveal the morals of the characters that surround Jay Gatsby.
The final passage of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald speaks to Nick’s disappointment over loss of a kind of romantic vision which he believed. Gatsby embodies that vision, which Nick described as his “romantic readiness”, and that Gatsby’s death, and subsequently the failure of Nick’s belief in that romantic vision, is what causes Nick to desire a world at “moral attention” at the beginning of the novel (2). The fading of Nick’s romantic vision is brought on by both the death of Gatsby and Myrtle, and Daisy’s refusal of Gatsby’s love. Nick sees people not taking responsibility for their actions, as Daisy does, and where people don’t fulfill their dreams for love in a moral manner, shown through Tom’s affair with Myrtle. Nick’s
As an American citizen we seem to make presumption that all cultures are different from ours, and some might even call those cultures weird. Americans fail to realize just how similar we are to these “weird” cultures. By reading Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe and The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald , it makes the reader realize how similar the African culture is from the American culture. There 's those obvious differences we already knew about with the two cultures, but readers can learn that not just American culture value men and give them advantages, but many cultures including 1900 's African culture. In both books we come across two main characters that is portrayed as being more superior compared to others. Okonkwo, main