What Are The Negative Aspects Of Romantic Love In The Great Gatsby And Midnight's Children

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How do the authors of Othello, The Great Gatsby, and Midnight’s Children portray different negative aspects of romantic love as detrimental to the main progression of the characters who engage in it?
Different forms of romantic love between a man and a woman can be seen throughout each of the three chosen texts, but through each negative aspect of these relationships they appear to affect them in an adverse way, whether this is through false love, forbidden love, or through unrequited love.
In ‘The Great Gatsby’ F. Scott Fitzgerald brings about a sense of emptiness in Chapter 1 when we are first introduced to Daisy, Nick’s cousin, and Tom, her brutish, ex-sportsman husband. In Daisy’s first appearance, she and her friend Jordan Baker are described as ethereal beings, “both in white, and their dresses rippling and fluttering”. This façade that likens Daisy to a goddess is halted as “there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains …show more content…

At best, it could be argued to be a case of unrequited love on Gatsby 's part. Most people would see Gatsby 's feelings towards Daisy as being extremely unhealthy. He had a short relationship with her as a young man which he never gets over. The idea of her (and winning her back) becomes the obsession which dominates his life. Even when he is finally reunited with her, Nick says she must have, "tumbled short of his dream". Yet his devotion to her remains undiminished.
Although Gatsby gets what he wants in being reunited with Daisy, it seems that he acknowledges that achieving this goal is not as satisfying as he would have hoped:
" 'If it wasn 't for the mist we could see your home across the bay, ' said Gatsby. 'You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock '... Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by

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