Comparing The Great Gatsby And Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet
at Gatsby and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets explore the role of human aspirations and the quest to establish or maintain an identity against vastly different social contexts and in markedly different literary forms. While The Great Gatsby (TGG) develops an ironic, shifting but ultimately pessimistic if not cynical viewpoint on the nature of human aspirations and our likelihood of maintaining an individual identity against the range of social pressures, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets present a more idealistic and optimistic assessment of the role aspirations and identity can play in our lives if we approach them with courage and sincerity.
Fitzgerald explores aspirations and identity chiefly through the central figure of Jay Gatsby. Gatsby himself is an elusive and problematic figure we are made to view through a series of lenses, above all through the admiring but cynical and …show more content…
world-weary gaze of Nick Carroway.
Gatsby’s aspiration to win Daisy and achieve the perfect life, abolishing five years of life and reclaiming the Daisy he fell in love with as a young officer, is a bold plan Nick can’t help but admire. From his opening “Gatsby turned out all right in the end” to his closing words spoken to Gatsby across the sweep of his lawn, “They’re a rotten crowd . . .You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together”, Nick makes it clear that to him Gatsby is special, the shining star, out there above the rest because of his “extraordinary gift for hope”, a self-made man “who had come a long way to this blue lawn”, to be so close to his “dream”. While Nick would settle for a pragmatic affair with the careless new-age woman Jordan Baker or where others like Tom Buchanan cynically use people, leaving a trail of damage behind them, Gatsby
holds out for his dream and all he has done was aimed step by step at achieving that dream. Fitzgerald crafts for us a deeply ambivalent figure – a gangster, a crook, the man who purchases a huge mansion and throws extravagant parties that he does not attend himself, a man who shapes his own image from clothes and cars to accent and language, yet who maintains an almost boundless innocence, willing to believe that Daisy has only to say “I never loved you” to Tom for all to be right. When Nick comments “You can’t repeat the past” and Gatsby says “incredulously”, “Why of course you can!” we gain a sense of his overweening belief in the power of his endeavours. What is especially tragic is that Gatsby has selected as the object of all his passion a confused young woman whose “artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery”. When EBB and TGG are read together what stands out immediately is how artificial the people in TGG are (except for Nick who is too cynical to risk unreserved unqualified love) compared to the sincerity and openness of EBB.
Gatsby’s aspirations and identity are deeply flawed – Fitzgerald hints throughout – both because they are built on a spoilt rich girl who lacks the daring needed to give substance to Gatsby’s dream and, more importantly, because they suffer from “the vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” dreamed up by a deeply-corrupted, money and appearances-obsessed society. Gatsby’s logic is ‘Daisy rejected me because I lacked money, very well I will make money, it doesn’t matter how and then, dazzled by my wealth and all wealth creates, she will fall into my arms’. Fitzgerald uses the bizarre image of Daisy weeping into the shirts (“I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts”) to capture the warped values of US 1920’s society. Likewise in the subplot involving Myrtle Wilson, Myrtle rejects her husband since he couldn’t buy the suit he was married in and seems drawn to Tom first of all by his clothing. Her affair itself is betrayed by the diamond-studded dog-collar she leaves lying about in the garage. The vacuous edge of all the main characters – Daisy, Tom, Myrtle, Daisy, even Gatsby – is captured in their lack of any vocabulary to talk about their inner life or to show their love. Whether it’s Gatsby’s “Absolutely”, Daisy’s “I’m awfully glad to see you again”, Tom’s confession of how much he cried seeing “that damn box of dog-biscuits sitting there on the sideboard” after Myrtle’s death, none of the major actors in the drama of the book has a vocabulary of love, relying entirely on the magnificent gestures of things, vaulted ceilings, cascading flowers, billowing curtains to cloak in outward splendour emotions that seem rote-learned and half dead.
When TGG is read in comparison with EBB’s Sonnets, the flawed nature of American 1920’s aspirations becomes apparent. EBB in the Sonnets writes both a narrative of a real love affair, the story of her growing love for Robert Browning, and a personal, spiritualised portrayal of her aspirations for what a shared, fulfilled love should be. While Gatsby is drawn to Daisy by her good looks, her smile, her voice that is “full of money”, her status as “the golden girl”, Sonnet XIV insists that the lover should not love her for “her smile –her look-her way/Of speaking gently” but only “for love’s sake”. While Gatsby defines love as taking possession of Daisy, that he is going to look after her from now on, Sonnet XXII insists that it is the two souls together who “stand up erect and strong”. Ironically, though EBB’s Sonnets are the much earlier text and TGG comes from a supposedly liberated era as typified by the flapper golfer Jordan Baker, the Sonnets give a far stronger portrait of woman as having the right to her own aspirations and identity. EBB marks in Sonnet I that this sequence, though rooted in the male-dominated tradition of love poems and pastoral poems going back to Theocritus, is to be her own story, reflecting “The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,/Those of my own life”, and in Sonnet XIII remarks “Nay, let the silence of my womanhood/Commend my woman-love to thy belief”. It says much about the flawed nature of Gatsby’s aspirations that Daisy is portrayed as a weak, indecisive figure, far too conscious of her own appeal, a spoilt girl who moves from her father’s control to Tom’s, swept up in her fling with Gatsby only to drift back to Tom’s protection. In contrast EBB posits that love and aspirations and the forging of an identity must be based on a “dauntless, voiceless fortitude”.
Aspirations and identity are largely explored by EBB in terms of her idealised portrayal of mutual, unconditional and ecstatically erotic love that includes a strongly religious dimension. The Sonnets XXII and XLIII are the strongest representations of this. In Sonnet XXII the paired lovers are, as so often in these Sonnets, “souls” whose “lengthening wings break into fire/At either curved point”, angels whose fulfilment is intensely physical and here on earth, content to forge “A place to stand and love in for a day,/With darkness and the death hour rounding it.” If money and material possessions provide the metaphors for love and aspirations in TGG, angels, religion, saints, birds and the great Sonnet tradition of Petrarch and Shakespeare provide the language for love in EBB. Given EBB’s Christian framework even death is not seen as the end of the lovers but certainly only the death-hour can limit their love, whereas in TGG social conventions and practicalities (“Poor boys don’t marry rich girls”) have the final say. Daisy’s frantic cry “You want too much” and her insistence that she “loved Tom too” suggest Gatsby’s aspirations are hopelessly anachronistic in such a materialistic world. Even the song Fitzgerald inserts into the story, providing a romantic backdrop to Gatsby and Daisy’s first meeting after five years, give a jarringly cynical tone to their encounter (“In the meantime, in-between time, Ain’t we got fun”, “The rich get richer And the poor get- children”.)
The Sonnets provide a narrative of love. In the first poem the speaker who has lived dominated by “melancholy” and a “shadow” at first mistakes the entry of a new force into her inner life as the arrival of Death. This pairing of Death and Love dramatises the way love is experienced as a force beyond our control that can reshape us. EBB uses a sparse simple vocabulary, largely monosyllabic, rich in alliteration and rhyme, to weave her story. It is in many ways a timeless view of love, of our aspirations to love, as a profound experience, the same in Petrarch’s age or Shakespeare’s age as in mid-nineteenth century England where EBB wrote the sequence. Shakespeare writes “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s Day/Thou art more lovely and more temperate”; EBB “And wilt thou have me fashion into speech/The love I bear thee, finding words enough” – in diction (the archaic “thou”), cadence, style, EBB sounds like an echo of Shakespeare – the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution seem never to have happened – a far-cry from Fitzgerald’s acute sense of modernity and the need to ape the slang and speech of his own time. Nevertheless, EBB pours individual experience and individual perceptions into this highly traditional frame. Her ecstatic appeal to the lover to repeat over and over “Thou dost love me” provided there is also a silent love present in the soul is heartfelt and real. Likewise, the Sonnets “And wilt thou have me fashion into speech” and “My letters! All dead paper, mute and white” present the paradox of her being both inside and outside the experience, both living this love and recording it. In Sonnet XIII she laments “I cannot teach/My hand to hold my spirit so far off/From myself” to reveal a love hidden “out of reach”. (Typically this is line 7-8 of this sonnet, where EBB often places a key revelation, a first volta before a second volta in the final line, demonstrating the way that, though her diction is Shakespearian, her use of sonnet form is highly original.) EBB presents the core of love, of our deepest aspirations, as a “silence” and this gives a paradoxical nature to her writing. Interestingly, Nick as the narrator of TGG is also “both within and without” the narrative, observing it all from the outside, like the stranger he imagines looking up at the lighted windows of Myrtle’s New York apartment.
A comparison of TGG and EBB’s Sonnets suggests how aspirations, especially those like love, require strong individuals capable of standing apart from materialistic social values and able to bring an intense individuality into their dreams. Thus EBB when she met Browning had already endured years of illness and the grief of loss and through her writing had forged a strong sense of herself. In contrast, the characters of Fitzgerald are like one-dimensional clones born of advertising jingles, love songs and consumerism. When the going gets tough, such vacuous souls as Daisy retreat “back intro their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together”. EBB’s religious sensibility seems to offer a firmer foundation for the growth of aspirations and an identity. It provides her with a vocabulary with which to think love whereas the characters of TGG seem mute, stranded inside their own cliches and the fake monumentalism of an America that imagined itself “a fresh, green breast of the new world”. It is the same green as the light at the end of Daisy’s dock that Gatsby leans out his arm towards, even though the real world of the novel seems divided between the vacuous playgrounds of the rich and the desolate Valley of Ashes presided over by the spectacles of Dr T J Eckleburg. Fitzgerald reminds us over and over of the grimness of the world where EBB seems to want us to aspire to something real and attainable - “the level of everyday’s/Most quiet need”, a love that is given “freely”, “purely” and “with passion”.
TGG and the Sonnets present very different perspectives on identity. In TGG most of the characters lack any strong identity but emerge more as constructs of their society and its obsession with appearances. Gatsby remains for the reader a series of puzzles as Nick sifts through the range of stories about him. How did he come to make his money? Are his stories about service in World War One true? Did he go to Oxford? Part of the structure of the book is to let us know in advance that Gatsby has vanished already and that the narrator Nick, our one guide to the book’s “hero”, is disturbed and puzzled by his inability to fix the identity of Gatsby. Likewise Daisy has at best a shadowy identity. In the book’s closing pages Nick admits his inability to understand “whatever it was” that holds Tom and Daisy together and what, if anything, is the core of his mysterious “second cousin”. Ultimately we are left with the sense that Nick admires the mystery that is Gatsby just as he feels a strong distaste for the inner emptiness of Daisy – he doesn’t “have the stomach” for such people. It is precisely the narrator Nick with his clear-sighted honesty, his lack of pretensions about himself, who emerges as having the strongest identity in the book.
In the Sonnets EBB emerges as a strong decisive identity who has endured her griefs and her “shadow” to be transfigured by love. Sonnet XXVIII, tracing the story of her love through the pile of love letters from Robert, gives an economical and powerful image of her own transformation from doubting individual to one who has experienced the intimacy of lovemaking and so discreetly remains silent on the contents of the last letter. Her honest appraisal of herself is also evident in Sonnet XXXII where she compares her no-longer-young body with an “out-of-tune worn viol”. Whereas Daisy’s identity is all in appearances and the glamour of her physical charms EBB rather sees love, even physical love, as based more on the soul’s intensity (“great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat.”)The “master-hands” of the genuine lover knows how to bring her to life and she accepts that to judge by outward appearances is to wrong the nature of love.
Both TGG and the Sonnets of EBB explore aspirations and identity through the portrayal of an intense idealised romantic love. Gatsby’s devotion to Daisy is extreme and absolute – it was the sole purpose of his life from the moment he met her and for her he makes himself into a recluse-celebrity millionaire whose mansion can take her breath away. The love EBB celebrates is likewise absolute. Sonnet XXI portrays it as an unlimited abundance – “Who can fear/Too many stars . . .Too many flowers. .?” – in terms similar to what one finds in TGG. While the Sonnets trace a growing confidence in the mutuality and reality of love, in several places the narrator of TGG suggests that the boundless dream of love in Gatsby’s heart is doomed to shrink as it comes up against the social reality of Daisy – as Nick suggests after the first meeting of Gatsby and Daisy “there must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams”. Fitzgerald carefully ends the third last chapter of the book with Gatsby standing outside the Buchanans’ house, anxious about Daisy but “watching over nothing”, as if both Daisy and the dream are suddenly “nothing”.
While there are parallels between the two texts their differences are what really deepen our understanding of aspirations and identity. At a simple level TGG offers a multiplicity of characters, viewpoints and plots to develop a complex, admiring but despairing view of the aspiration for “intense life”. The Sonnets focus on one relationship only, seen entirely from inside that relationship as it unfolds. EBB’s view of love is clearly shaped by her own living of it as well as by her intensely spiritual approach to life. Fitzgerald’s more cynical and worldly view reflects both his own life and loves and the society for whom he writes. Set together, the two texts suggest both the possibility of realising one’s aspirations for intense life and the risk of losing one’s aspirations and identity through socially-conditioned materialism and cowardice.
Fitzgerald explores aspirations and identity chiefly through the central figure of Jay Gatsby. Gatsby himself is an elusive and problematic figure we are made to view through a series of lenses, above all through the admiring but cynical and …show more content…
world-weary gaze of Nick Carroway.
Gatsby’s aspiration to win Daisy and achieve the perfect life, abolishing five years of life and reclaiming the Daisy he fell in love with as a young officer, is a bold plan Nick can’t help but admire. From his opening “Gatsby turned out all right in the end” to his closing words spoken to Gatsby across the sweep of his lawn, “They’re a rotten crowd . . .You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together”, Nick makes it clear that to him Gatsby is special, the shining star, out there above the rest because of his “extraordinary gift for hope”, a self-made man “who had come a long way to this blue lawn”, to be so close to his “dream”. While Nick would settle for a pragmatic affair with the careless new-age woman Jordan Baker or where others like Tom Buchanan cynically use people, leaving a trail of damage behind them, Gatsby
holds out for his dream and all he has done was aimed step by step at achieving that dream. Fitzgerald crafts for us a deeply ambivalent figure – a gangster, a crook, the man who purchases a huge mansion and throws extravagant parties that he does not attend himself, a man who shapes his own image from clothes and cars to accent and language, yet who maintains an almost boundless innocence, willing to believe that Daisy has only to say “I never loved you” to Tom for all to be right. When Nick comments “You can’t repeat the past” and Gatsby says “incredulously”, “Why of course you can!” we gain a sense of his overweening belief in the power of his endeavours. What is especially tragic is that Gatsby has selected as the object of all his passion a confused young woman whose “artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery”. When EBB and TGG are read together what stands out immediately is how artificial the people in TGG are (except for Nick who is too cynical to risk unreserved unqualified love) compared to the sincerity and openness of EBB.
Gatsby’s aspirations and identity are deeply flawed – Fitzgerald hints throughout – both because they are built on a spoilt rich girl who lacks the daring needed to give substance to Gatsby’s dream and, more importantly, because they suffer from “the vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” dreamed up by a deeply-corrupted, money and appearances-obsessed society. Gatsby’s logic is ‘Daisy rejected me because I lacked money, very well I will make money, it doesn’t matter how and then, dazzled by my wealth and all wealth creates, she will fall into my arms’. Fitzgerald uses the bizarre image of Daisy weeping into the shirts (“I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts”) to capture the warped values of US 1920’s society. Likewise in the subplot involving Myrtle Wilson, Myrtle rejects her husband since he couldn’t buy the suit he was married in and seems drawn to Tom first of all by his clothing. Her affair itself is betrayed by the diamond-studded dog-collar she leaves lying about in the garage. The vacuous edge of all the main characters – Daisy, Tom, Myrtle, Daisy, even Gatsby – is captured in their lack of any vocabulary to talk about their inner life or to show their love. Whether it’s Gatsby’s “Absolutely”, Daisy’s “I’m awfully glad to see you again”, Tom’s confession of how much he cried seeing “that damn box of dog-biscuits sitting there on the sideboard” after Myrtle’s death, none of the major actors in the drama of the book has a vocabulary of love, relying entirely on the magnificent gestures of things, vaulted ceilings, cascading flowers, billowing curtains to cloak in outward splendour emotions that seem rote-learned and half dead.
When TGG is read in comparison with EBB’s Sonnets, the flawed nature of American 1920’s aspirations becomes apparent. EBB in the Sonnets writes both a narrative of a real love affair, the story of her growing love for Robert Browning, and a personal, spiritualised portrayal of her aspirations for what a shared, fulfilled love should be. While Gatsby is drawn to Daisy by her good looks, her smile, her voice that is “full of money”, her status as “the golden girl”, Sonnet XIV insists that the lover should not love her for “her smile –her look-her way/Of speaking gently” but only “for love’s sake”. While Gatsby defines love as taking possession of Daisy, that he is going to look after her from now on, Sonnet XXII insists that it is the two souls together who “stand up erect and strong”. Ironically, though EBB’s Sonnets are the much earlier text and TGG comes from a supposedly liberated era as typified by the flapper golfer Jordan Baker, the Sonnets give a far stronger portrait of woman as having the right to her own aspirations and identity. EBB marks in Sonnet I that this sequence, though rooted in the male-dominated tradition of love poems and pastoral poems going back to Theocritus, is to be her own story, reflecting “The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,/Those of my own life”, and in Sonnet XIII remarks “Nay, let the silence of my womanhood/Commend my woman-love to thy belief”. It says much about the flawed nature of Gatsby’s aspirations that Daisy is portrayed as a weak, indecisive figure, far too conscious of her own appeal, a spoilt girl who moves from her father’s control to Tom’s, swept up in her fling with Gatsby only to drift back to Tom’s protection. In contrast EBB posits that love and aspirations and the forging of an identity must be based on a “dauntless, voiceless fortitude”.
Aspirations and identity are largely explored by EBB in terms of her idealised portrayal of mutual, unconditional and ecstatically erotic love that includes a strongly religious dimension. The Sonnets XXII and XLIII are the strongest representations of this. In Sonnet XXII the paired lovers are, as so often in these Sonnets, “souls” whose “lengthening wings break into fire/At either curved point”, angels whose fulfilment is intensely physical and here on earth, content to forge “A place to stand and love in for a day,/With darkness and the death hour rounding it.” If money and material possessions provide the metaphors for love and aspirations in TGG, angels, religion, saints, birds and the great Sonnet tradition of Petrarch and Shakespeare provide the language for love in EBB. Given EBB’s Christian framework even death is not seen as the end of the lovers but certainly only the death-hour can limit their love, whereas in TGG social conventions and practicalities (“Poor boys don’t marry rich girls”) have the final say. Daisy’s frantic cry “You want too much” and her insistence that she “loved Tom too” suggest Gatsby’s aspirations are hopelessly anachronistic in such a materialistic world. Even the song Fitzgerald inserts into the story, providing a romantic backdrop to Gatsby and Daisy’s first meeting after five years, give a jarringly cynical tone to their encounter (“In the meantime, in-between time, Ain’t we got fun”, “The rich get richer And the poor get- children”.)
The Sonnets provide a narrative of love. In the first poem the speaker who has lived dominated by “melancholy” and a “shadow” at first mistakes the entry of a new force into her inner life as the arrival of Death. This pairing of Death and Love dramatises the way love is experienced as a force beyond our control that can reshape us. EBB uses a sparse simple vocabulary, largely monosyllabic, rich in alliteration and rhyme, to weave her story. It is in many ways a timeless view of love, of our aspirations to love, as a profound experience, the same in Petrarch’s age or Shakespeare’s age as in mid-nineteenth century England where EBB wrote the sequence. Shakespeare writes “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s Day/Thou art more lovely and more temperate”; EBB “And wilt thou have me fashion into speech/The love I bear thee, finding words enough” – in diction (the archaic “thou”), cadence, style, EBB sounds like an echo of Shakespeare – the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution seem never to have happened – a far-cry from Fitzgerald’s acute sense of modernity and the need to ape the slang and speech of his own time. Nevertheless, EBB pours individual experience and individual perceptions into this highly traditional frame. Her ecstatic appeal to the lover to repeat over and over “Thou dost love me” provided there is also a silent love present in the soul is heartfelt and real. Likewise, the Sonnets “And wilt thou have me fashion into speech” and “My letters! All dead paper, mute and white” present the paradox of her being both inside and outside the experience, both living this love and recording it. In Sonnet XIII she laments “I cannot teach/My hand to hold my spirit so far off/From myself” to reveal a love hidden “out of reach”. (Typically this is line 7-8 of this sonnet, where EBB often places a key revelation, a first volta before a second volta in the final line, demonstrating the way that, though her diction is Shakespearian, her use of sonnet form is highly original.) EBB presents the core of love, of our deepest aspirations, as a “silence” and this gives a paradoxical nature to her writing. Interestingly, Nick as the narrator of TGG is also “both within and without” the narrative, observing it all from the outside, like the stranger he imagines looking up at the lighted windows of Myrtle’s New York apartment.
A comparison of TGG and EBB’s Sonnets suggests how aspirations, especially those like love, require strong individuals capable of standing apart from materialistic social values and able to bring an intense individuality into their dreams. Thus EBB when she met Browning had already endured years of illness and the grief of loss and through her writing had forged a strong sense of herself. In contrast, the characters of Fitzgerald are like one-dimensional clones born of advertising jingles, love songs and consumerism. When the going gets tough, such vacuous souls as Daisy retreat “back intro their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together”. EBB’s religious sensibility seems to offer a firmer foundation for the growth of aspirations and an identity. It provides her with a vocabulary with which to think love whereas the characters of TGG seem mute, stranded inside their own cliches and the fake monumentalism of an America that imagined itself “a fresh, green breast of the new world”. It is the same green as the light at the end of Daisy’s dock that Gatsby leans out his arm towards, even though the real world of the novel seems divided between the vacuous playgrounds of the rich and the desolate Valley of Ashes presided over by the spectacles of Dr T J Eckleburg. Fitzgerald reminds us over and over of the grimness of the world where EBB seems to want us to aspire to something real and attainable - “the level of everyday’s/Most quiet need”, a love that is given “freely”, “purely” and “with passion”.
TGG and the Sonnets present very different perspectives on identity. In TGG most of the characters lack any strong identity but emerge more as constructs of their society and its obsession with appearances. Gatsby remains for the reader a series of puzzles as Nick sifts through the range of stories about him. How did he come to make his money? Are his stories about service in World War One true? Did he go to Oxford? Part of the structure of the book is to let us know in advance that Gatsby has vanished already and that the narrator Nick, our one guide to the book’s “hero”, is disturbed and puzzled by his inability to fix the identity of Gatsby. Likewise Daisy has at best a shadowy identity. In the book’s closing pages Nick admits his inability to understand “whatever it was” that holds Tom and Daisy together and what, if anything, is the core of his mysterious “second cousin”. Ultimately we are left with the sense that Nick admires the mystery that is Gatsby just as he feels a strong distaste for the inner emptiness of Daisy – he doesn’t “have the stomach” for such people. It is precisely the narrator Nick with his clear-sighted honesty, his lack of pretensions about himself, who emerges as having the strongest identity in the book.
In the Sonnets EBB emerges as a strong decisive identity who has endured her griefs and her “shadow” to be transfigured by love. Sonnet XXVIII, tracing the story of her love through the pile of love letters from Robert, gives an economical and powerful image of her own transformation from doubting individual to one who has experienced the intimacy of lovemaking and so discreetly remains silent on the contents of the last letter. Her honest appraisal of herself is also evident in Sonnet XXXII where she compares her no-longer-young body with an “out-of-tune worn viol”. Whereas Daisy’s identity is all in appearances and the glamour of her physical charms EBB rather sees love, even physical love, as based more on the soul’s intensity (“great souls, at one stroke, may do and doat.”)The “master-hands” of the genuine lover knows how to bring her to life and she accepts that to judge by outward appearances is to wrong the nature of love.
Both TGG and the Sonnets of EBB explore aspirations and identity through the portrayal of an intense idealised romantic love. Gatsby’s devotion to Daisy is extreme and absolute – it was the sole purpose of his life from the moment he met her and for her he makes himself into a recluse-celebrity millionaire whose mansion can take her breath away. The love EBB celebrates is likewise absolute. Sonnet XXI portrays it as an unlimited abundance – “Who can fear/Too many stars . . .Too many flowers. .?” – in terms similar to what one finds in TGG. While the Sonnets trace a growing confidence in the mutuality and reality of love, in several places the narrator of TGG suggests that the boundless dream of love in Gatsby’s heart is doomed to shrink as it comes up against the social reality of Daisy – as Nick suggests after the first meeting of Gatsby and Daisy “there must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams”. Fitzgerald carefully ends the third last chapter of the book with Gatsby standing outside the Buchanans’ house, anxious about Daisy but “watching over nothing”, as if both Daisy and the dream are suddenly “nothing”.
While there are parallels between the two texts their differences are what really deepen our understanding of aspirations and identity. At a simple level TGG offers a multiplicity of characters, viewpoints and plots to develop a complex, admiring but despairing view of the aspiration for “intense life”. The Sonnets focus on one relationship only, seen entirely from inside that relationship as it unfolds. EBB’s view of love is clearly shaped by her own living of it as well as by her intensely spiritual approach to life. Fitzgerald’s more cynical and worldly view reflects both his own life and loves and the society for whom he writes. Set together, the two texts suggest both the possibility of realising one’s aspirations for intense life and the risk of losing one’s aspirations and identity through socially-conditioned materialism and cowardice.