-
Essay / Addressing Human Values in the Sonnets of E.Barrett-Browning and Great Gatsby by S.fitzgerald
Gatsby vs Barret BrowningThe historical, social and cultural contexts of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and F. Scott Fitzgerald play a important role in the forms and characteristics of language, ideas, values and attitudes communicated in their respective writings. Due to contexts, composers' perspectives on the concerns of their texts both align and conflict. Through the subversion of the Petrarch-style sonnet, Barrett-Browning challenges the expectations of women of her time while expressing her ideas about love, mortality, and the influence of the past on the present. In the same way, Fitzgerald confronts the morals of his time in his novel The Great Gatsby, while also addressing these human values. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay The concepts surrounding love in the sonnets and the novel primarily address an ideal, pure love. The texts also address the transcendental and transformative power of love. Barrett-Browning adopts a modified form of Petrarch's sonnet to challenge ideas of courtly and ideal love – attitudes toward a woman's duty in a relationship of her time. In Sonnet 14, it is evident that Barrett-Browning desires nothing more than pure love: "If thou must love me, let it be for nothing, but for love only." This contrasts with Fitzgerald's environment characterized by prohibition, consumerism, and disillusionment. Caused by the post-war period, all the factors that proved to hinder Gatsby's dream of sharing love with Daisy, Gatsby himself are also corrupted, especially the means of acquiring wealth. This is illustrated in the dialogue between Gatsby and Daisy while they are. at the Plaza Hotel, the quote reads: "Tell him...you never loved him..." Love's ability to transcend the physical is expressed primarily in Barrett-Browning's poems; it recognizes the spiritual meaning of love in a more evocative way; Elizabeth's background is more religious than Fitzgerald's, with Christian language woven into her poetry. Love is also mentioned to have power over the proverbial "spirit" of death in his first sonnet: "But there the silvery answer rang...not death, but Love." » In Gatsby's world, it is the inability of love to subvert the physical that provokes Nick's and the reader's feelings of despair. This was due to growing materialism which led to the belief that love was no longer defined by the passions of the heart, but limited by physical characteristics such as social status. We can see it while Gatsby, Tom and Daisy are arguing, Daisy says, "Oh, you want too much!" - “I love you now – isn’t that enough?” Love can also transform, as Elizabeth's sonnets explain as she reconstructs traditional male influence on poetry to implement her own female voice to challenge the constraints of love in the Victorian era. As her writing progresses, we see an illustration of the changes occurring within her due to her emerging and changing emotions. Barrett-Browning refers to “Spring” and “Cuckoo Song” in Sonnet 21, and this is symbolic. The technique suggests a rebirth of his “melancholy years”. Likewise, Fitzgerald echoes this perspective that love is a powerful transformative force primarily through the physical metamorphosis that took place within James Gatz to create Jay Gatsby. Love as a catalyst for transformation is hardly effective though. she is atthe work in the secular and superficial atmosphere of the 1920s. This is manifested when Fitzgerald communicates that Gatsby's glorified affection for Daisy is always limited by the importance of status and wealth. Gatsby returns to Nick about Daisy: "her voice is full of money." The use of hyperbole here demonstrates Gatsby's futile efforts to transform himself and Daisy through the power of his love. Having been written at different times, these two texts display different perspectives on the same ideas around love. In conjunction with these values, mortality is characterized by a number of references within Barrett-Browning's sonnets. First, she comments on her past and the number of deaths that highlighted her. We get our first glimpse of this in Sonnet 1, where she describes "the sweet and sad years, the melancholy years,... those of my own life, which by turns had cast a shadow over me..." Despite this, we soon discover that death has not yet completely understood it, but rather it is love that is capable of lasting beyond. In reflecting this, Fitzgerald paints a picture of a world that depreciates death while valuing opulence and aristocracy. It is in this environment that Gatsby falls victim to selfish and self-indulgent attitudes that end up working against him until his final moments. Nick recounts a phone call he had with one of Gatsby's associates: "Look here, it's not Mr. Gatsby. Mr. Gatsby is dead." …A long silence…an exclamation…then a brief cry when the connection was broken. This is where the use of a synecdoche uses aural and visual imagery to provide a picture of both the triviality and finality of Gatsby's untimely end. It can also be said that it was Gatsby's fear of his own mortality that kept him tied to the past. There are several instances where his death is foreshadowed, the most obvious being Nick's nightmare: “I couldn't sleep all night; ...and I was swinging half sick between reality and wild, frightening dreams...I felt that I had something to tell him, something to tell him, something to warn him about and that the morning would be too late. Barrett-Browning begins her journey plagued by this fear as she enters into uncertain love, while Gatsby is initially unaware of his weakness as a human. At the end of both texts, the ideals have no longer changed. overwhelmed by death, but Gatsby ultimately loses the battle against it. The past has a great influence on the lives of both Barrett-Browning and Gatsby, and through each text it continues to have an impact on Barrett-Browning which gives clues to his painful past. In the first sonnet, she feels like the early events in her life will hinder her ability to love. She first reflects on Theocritus, but instead sees his past in a sad light, followed by a comparison to what the Greek love poet had written. her own reflection of her past years, "the sweet years, the dear and desired years...the melancholy years..." Barrett Browning uses an ellipsis at the end of the line for effect, and also to indicate that she is still contemplating the time gone. Correspondingly, Fitzgerald uses foreshadowing on another occasion to imply the main motif of the novel in a discussion between Gatsby and Nick, where the former says, "Can't you repeat the past?" » – “Why, of course you can!” "The dramatic irony emphasizes the inescapable situation in which Gatsby is trapped, while illustrating that Gatsby himself is unaware of how his past will eventually catch up with him. The novel ends with a symbolic metaphor that focuses on the struggle that humans must lead to transcend or recreate the past to...