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March 29, 2024, 01:15:04 am

Author Topic: "English Advanced: Great Gatsby and Barrett Browning essay  (Read 2287 times)

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Ajay Singh

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How does a study of Barrett-Browning’s poetry contribute to our understanding of the nature of desire in The Great Gatsby.



The process of discovery contributes to our nature of desire through different people’s values throughout different times. This is evident in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (EBB) ‘’Sonnets from the Portuguese’’ (13, 43) and F Scott Fitzgerald’s modernist novel ‘’The Great Gatsby’’, whereby both composers explore the contexts of 1840’s Victorian England and the ‘’Roaring 20’s’’ in America through the use of poetic devices. Through a comparison, one may acknowledge how Ebb highlights how a female may challenge patriarchal values to explore an authentic love, firmly based in spirituality. However, Fitzgerald offers insight into how materialism in the Jazz Age may corrupt love and submerge spiritual values and female identity.

Ebb’s 13th Sonnet challenges the value placed on female obedience within a patriarchal society, as she develops her passionate female voice, strengthening her argument for authentic love and dissents from the expectations of her context. As such, the use of rhetorical question and a challenging tone in ‘’wilt thou have me fashion into speech the love that I bear thee?’’, confronts Browning’s desire to express her love through speech. The connotation of ‘’fashion’’, coupled with her use of first person, challenges male-centered expectations for extrinsic expressions of love, prominent in her time. This is further expressed through vivid visual imagery and a declarative tone in ‘’drop it at thy feet’’. Here, Ebb subverts a courtly love allusion, through the connation of ‘drop’, symbolising her rejection of a distant and idealized love commonly portrayed in Victorian and Romantic literature. Her use of an active verb rather than a passive verb, demonstrates how she favours to become an agent within their relationship, not just as an object of affection. Thus, in Ebb’s 13th Sonnet she accentuates her distinctive context of 1840’s Victorian England, as she challenges contextual expectations within relationships, valuing an equal and reciprocal love.

Whilst both Ebb and ‘’The Great Gatsby’’ portray characters who desire a reciprocal love, Fitzgerald accentuates the context of the 1920’s in America. His novel is framed within the Jazz Age, a time when hedonistic values and the American Dream informed relationships, ultimately transforming Gatsby’s life into a quest for materialistic power and corrupting his love for Daisy. Nick recalls Gatsby as having ‘’a romantic readiness…extraordinary gift for hope.’’ Fitzgerald’s use of alliteration and high modality encapsulates Gatsby’s naïve and eager desire for Daisy’s love, contrasting to Ebb’s caution in sonnet 13 and entrapping Daisy as an ideal rather than as an individual. Fitzgerald ultimately highlights this love is mutable and ends tragically when Daisy leaves him at the end of the novel. Nick describes ‘’I left him alone…in the moonlight, watching over – nothing. ’Here the end emphasis on nothing creates an image of abandonment and isolation, a result of Gatsby’s unrealistic desire for Daisy’s love. Thus, unlike Ebb who values an authentic and intrinsic love, Fitzgerald accentuates the distinctive context, as he explores how love based on external elements will result in a sense of loss.

Ebb continues to accentuate her distinctive context, in the conclusion of the sonnet sequence, Sonnet 43. In Sonnet 43, she highlights how when an experience of physical and earthly love is firmly based in spiritual identity, this will ensure its longevity into heaven. Declaring her love for Robert Browning, she expresses ‘’I love thee to the depth and breadth and height’’, Browning’s use of assonance and first person demonstrates how her female identity and soul has been heightened with the presence of a stable love. The use of religious connotations and enjambment in ‘’smiles, tears, of all my life…and if God choose…. Better after my death’’. Here, her structural variation of the traditional sonnet line endings, through her use of enjambment, implies a confident identity, also reflected through the full end rhyme scheme throughout the sonnet. Thus, in EBB’s 43rd Sonnet, she confirms how love based on spiritual values, will ultimately be fulfilling to the female identity, accentuating her distinctive context.
Unlike EBB, who places a high value on spirituality, Fitzgerald’s ‘’The Great Gatsby’’, offers insight into how individuals turned from spirituality to consumerism in the Jazz Age, emphasising the context of the ‘’Jazz Age’’. Myrtle pursues Tom Buchanan, to escape her spiritless existence in the Valley of Ashes. Fitzgerald’s highlights how Myrtle is consumed with possessions, as a basis for her relationships. Her restatement, ‘’you can’t live forever, you can’t live forever’’, through repetition, emphasises her focus on the moment rather than the future, contrasting to EBB who looks to heavenly rewards. Her desires concerning love, culminate to the tragic scene where Myrtle is killed. Fitzgerald’s use of violent diction and repellent visual imagery, in ‘’ violently extinguished…mangled her thick dark blood with the dust’’, becomes a tragic symbol for how consumerism has corrupted her, and how she has become a victim of the immoral wealth. Even after Myrtle’s death, her husband Wilson, has a distorted view of spirituality, referring to Dr TJ Eckleburg, he declares ‘’God see’s everything.’’ Here, the biblical reference highlights the corrupted view of punishment and retribution. Thus, unlike EBB who relies on spiritual blessing for her relationship to develop, ‘’the Great Gatsby’’, accentuates and critiques the distinctive context, as he highlights how love based on Earthly concerns may lead to experiences of tragedy.
Therefore, EBB’s ‘’Sonnets from the Portuguese’’ (13 & 43), and F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘’The Great Gatsby’’ strongly accentuates their distinctive cultural contexts by using poetic devices through the depiction of the desire for authentic love and spiritualities. Whilst EBB portrays love as confirming to a passionate female, Fitzgerald challenges the notion that love will satisfy and reward the morally vacant.