Comparing Love In The Great Gatsby And F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Texts reflect the concerns and values of their composers. Discuss the differences in the representation of love and hope that arise from the contexts of The Great Gatsby and Browning’s poetry.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella The Great Gatsby, explore different ideals in their definitions of love, and the power of hope. Barrett-Browning heightens the reader’s understanding of interpersonal emotion through a subversion of the immutable religious and patriarchal principles of the Victorian Period. Contrastingly, in his novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald critiques the world of the 1920s, in which materialism and consumerism dominate the public desire to realise the American Dream. Thus, …show more content…
In Sonnet XIV, Barrett-Browning reflects the dominant contextual perspective of superficial Courtly Love through the accumulative use of ellipsis and dialogue, “I love her for her smile...her look...her way of speaking gently…”. This reinforces that the shaping and defiance of ideal love can be influenced by social and contextual paradigms. Subverting this cultural paradigm, Barrett-Browning’s idealised love is founded around a union of spirit and mind rather than physical transient measures. As expressed in the use of second person, “If thou must love me, let it be for nought // Except for love’s sake only”. Barrett-Browning emphases a love based upon purity and emotional connection that is eternal, rather than on artificial qualities,“Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity”. This idea of a continual and growing love, contrasts the artificiality of love in Fitzgerald’s novella. For Jay Gatsby, a man living in the 1920s Jazz Age, ideal love is based upon the qualities of consumerism and materialism. In striving for ideal love, Gatsby ignores the lack of emotion and shallowness of Daisy, and strives to build and sustain a high class lifestyle that represents the importance of these material possessions. Through the use of first person, Gatsby, himself addresses Daisy’s consumeristic nature of love, “She only married you because I was poor”. This emphasises that …show more content…
F Fitzgerald have incorporated cultural values and morals of their era in their designed texts to accentuates different perspectives of idealised love and hope. Barrett-Browning heightens the reader’s understanding of interpersonal emotion, contrasting to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, idealised love is focused more upon consumerism and the hope in replicating the past.

I would have liked you to make some mention of Nick Carraway in your discussion of hope because as narrator, we share Nick’s pessimistic view of hope detracting from the truth. The word count is ok although I have made a few
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