English Advanced: Mod A - The Great Gatsby & Sonnets of the Portuguese

[aireiya]

Hi! Finally reworking my essays haha. I'd appreciate it if anyone helps me out by giving me some feedback! It's clunky but yeah haha ty in advance!



Literature, as products of the era in which they were written, reflects, shapes and challenges its contextual values, capturing the desires and ambiguities of their time. Although the Victorian and post-war eras differ greatly, Elizabeth Barret Browning’s (EBB) Romantic poems ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ (1850) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (FSF) Modernist novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ converse through displaying the timeless universal significance of emotion whilst exploring the transformative ability of love and critiquing ideals of their era’s culture.

The notion of love and its transformative power is insightfully explored in EBB’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ which documents the growth in her character from her individual social isolation to her marriage. Sonnet 13 embodies vulnerability as she is exposed to love. The constant use of ellipsis and repetition before the use of the word ‘love’ is symbolic of stuttering as she cannot articulate her love. By Sonnet 21, EBB becomes giddy with excitement, asking her lover to use his words through a cuckoo-like repetition of ‘say dost thou love me, love me, love me’ which heavily contrasts her inability to, highlighting her progressive openness to declarations of admiration. Sonnet 43 acts as her ultimate declaration of love as its believer through anaphora “I love thee” where she eloquently voices the magnitude of her feelings in comparison to her hesitance and inexperience in Sonnet 13. Through basing her sonnets on her and her husband’s courting days, EBB created literature which challenges the notion of courtly love and is now considered timeless.

FSF’s modernist novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ (TGG) illustrates Gatsby’s pursuit for his ideal love but unlike EBB who was able to obtain it, Gatsby could not despite his efforts to change for Daisy. He actively chases the past, symbolic of the green light that he “stretches out his arms toward” and the clock that he nearly breaks at Nick’s. EBB in her sonnet sequence had obtained an authentic love, but Gatsby’s love had become one that is superficial, corrupted by the materialism and immoral values in the Jazz Age. However, Gatsby’s quest for love is admirable due to his genuine feelings and child-like hope “getting deeper in love every minute” which is contrasted by Daisy’s insincerity and materialistic ambition as the line “her voice was full of money” metaphorically depicts. Despite his desperate efforts to recapture the past, they were futile as Daisy retreats to her secure, materialistic world with Tom as signified when “she and Tom had gone away early that afternoon and taken baggage with them.” He is fatally idealistic as he waits for a signal from her but is let down as she, at “about four o’clock, … stood there for a minute and turned off the light.” Daisy’s duality conveys the temporality and superficiality of love within the Jazz Age as she fails to display consistency to Tom and to Gatsby like EBB’s authentic devotion to her lover.

In the context of EBB’s sonnet sequence, patriarchal power and order were strongly imposed and women held a more passive role in society. EBB constantly challenges this social construction through her writing which conveys a passionate and commanding female voice. Her use of the Petrarchan form is defiant of its history as amatory poetry had traditionally been a vehicle employed by men. By continually choosing this form, EBB rebels against the convention of courtly love, reversing the ideals of women being voiceless and transforming the female voice into one that is passionate and assertive. In Sonnet 13, the narrative voice questions the request of her lover ‘And wilt thou have me fashion into speech …” which juxtaposes and challenges feminine gender constructions. Her final poem within the sequence, Sonnet 43, rebels the most as the female voice is direct and at its strongest due to her passionate declarations of love. High modality and joyful hyperboles articulate her love in all including metaphysical “depth and breadth and height my soul can reach” and religious as she compares her love to her ‘childhood’s faith,’ conveying its intensity; one that is not normally spoken by women.

Akin to how EBB challenges patriarchal constructions of femininity in her context, FSF subverts his contexts values by employing modernism to conjure a pessimistic image of a misguided, materialistic community and the withering of the American Dream. Gatsby’s symbolic gesture of reaching out towards the green light represents his idealistic goals to fulfil the American Dream but his death ultimately represents the failure of a flawed ethos. The American Dream is depicted as Gatsby’s fallible and idealistic pursuit is described through the metaphor “the rock of the world was founded on a fairy’s wing.” This enunciates that it is impossible in a corrupted community such as theirs and any attempts will be rendered as futile. FSF’s reflection on the community’s substitution of the American Dream for materialism is furthermore expressed through Gatsby’s metaphorical realisation ‘Her voice is full of money.’ This is the epiphany that rather than love, he had been pursuing money and wealth hidden behind a pretty face, crushing the ideal which he had been chasing which ultimately shows the withering of the American Dream. Through Nick’s critique as a distant observer, FSF questions his context’s ideals, influenced by the nihilistic modernist movement through a modernist lens.

The timeless and universal experience of love within the human condition is central within EBB’s ‘Sonnets of the Portuguese’ and FSF’s ‘the Great Gatsby.” In their contexts, neither of the texts were conventional as both commented on and challenged the ideals and structure of their society, simultaneously revealing the transformative qualities of love. EBB provides an example of an assertive female voice as she transformed within her courtship. On the contrary, Fitzgerald comments on the superficiality of the Jazz Age’s construct, connoting that a pure and idealistic but obsessive love such as Gatsby’s cannot thrive in an avaricious society, deconstructing the myth of the American Dream.