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Spirituality In The Great Gatsby

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Both texts The Great Gatsby written by Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets portray love, hope and spirituality through the context in which they were created. Fitzgerald emphasises on what’s missing rather than what’s there and really critiques the hedonistic lifestyle and the fall of the American dream to illustrate the illusion of love, hope and spirituality. Contextually, EBB was a time of romanticism during the Victorian era and portrays the Petrarchan form and male linguistics to challenge the tradition of courtly love. Although the two texts were composed in two distinct time periods, both texts are majorly influenced by their varying contexts in their portrayal of the enduring human concerns. During the Victorian era, …show more content…

Jay Gatsby's desire for a physical connection with Daisy Buchannan, provides means for him to escape the world he was born into. The symbolism of the green light represents Gatsby's yearning for love and his pursuit of the idealistic American dream. Fitzgerald presents the American dream, which is future oriented and inherently flawed by its features of obsession, fixation and sentimentality. Daisy embodies the materialistic and egotistical nature of the period, as displayed in Nick Caraway's cynicism, "Her voice is full of money, that was it...that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it." This imagery represents the reality of corruption and immorality through a desirable facade of wealth and idealism, lacking any spiritual connection. The driving power of an obsessive love to ‘own’ Daisy Buchanan highlights the idea that the transformative power of love can only exist as the material and the possessive in the Jazz Age. This is metaphorically evident in “her voice is full of money” where Gatsby’s idealised love is derived from the trappings of status and wealth.Thus, Fitzgerald conveys his perspective of love during the Jazz Age, which was a love lacking in transformative, spiritual, power and orbited around the material and obsessive nature of a consumerist

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