Preview

Ebb and the Great Gatsby

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1472 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Ebb and the Great Gatsby
Assessment two.
Love, hope and morality are ongoing and developing universal concepts that have the ability to imprison or liberate individuals. The interpretation and perceived value of experience of these concepts is dependent on the values and events of the time. Without a greater knowledge of the past, present and wider world, we often accept the two dimensional thoughts and perspectives of the time we inhabit. We can only fully reveal the value of experiences by comparing their differences.
‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning are a series of Petrarchan sonnets conveying love hope and morality. Composed in 1845 to 1846 England and published in 1850, the contextual integrity of the sonnets reflect the traditional values of courtly love at the time but also societal change and the modernisation that the industrial revolution brought with it. This was the time of the Victorian era, a time of ongoing societal evolution.
Published in 1925 American, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ is set in 1922, a time period commonly referred to as the ‘the Roaring twenties’ or the ‘jazz age’. This period in American history reflects the extremities of both romanticism and materialism, as well as a time of prosperity and the classic ‘American dream’ due to the conclusion of world war one. Love, hope and morality are reflected through the naivety of the time.
Although a time of great societal change, 1840’s England still held traditional values that are often associated with this period as being prudish, old fashioned and repressed. Elizabeth Barrett Browning pushed the boundaries of her time as it was previously unheard of that females would write about idealised love. With the increase of feminism Barrett Browning gained her popularity. The sonnets show her journey of accepting the love she has received. She states in sonnet thirteen “I cannot teach my hand to hold my spirits so far from myself—me-- that I should bring the proof

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Victorian context shapes her perception in the evaluation of love and the role of women. In the construction of her poems, ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ structured inspiration derives from Romantic prose, whilst pertaining to the strict form. Allowing for a focus on the thematic concerns of her poems rather, Barrett Browning’s poems emphatically explore the progression of the highly idealised love of herself and Robert Browning. Rejecting the social expectations of her context through her presentation to Browning of her deeply personal poems, her poems provide insight to the female perception of courtly love. Through this alone we can see that Barrett Browning is an example herself of changing values as she rejects social conventions of her era by using the sonnet form, which was dominated by males at the time, whilst women tended to be limited to the novel form. She uses this form to present and express to Robert Browning the extent of her love.…

    • 906 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The 1920’s was a decade full of careless spending, lavish lifestyles and the American dream. Anyone from anywhere could make it in life if they just worked hard enough. The 1920s proved to be a prosperous time for many, in fact so many people thrived in this decade that almost everyone thought that they would eventually grow to be very rich themselves. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby the sumptuous lives of the wealthy and the economic boom in America shaped the characters, plot, and setting of the novel. The effortless spending of the time influenced the lives of the characters as well as the background of the story.…

    • 947 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” the narrator, Nick Carraway, moves to West Egg to work as a bond trader in Manhattan. He grew up in a prominent family. He came from an old money family in Chicago. He attended Yale University and is known as a very well rounded man. This novel is based off of the 1920’s era. It was named the Roaring Twenties after the Great War when the United States underwent a change in radical and social reform. During this period, society was torn apart due to the clash between old and new money. The Great Gatsby reflects the American society during this period and undoubtedly depicts the difference between traditional and corrupted values. The Great Gatsby is a great depiction of the Roaring Twenties because of greed, parties, and fast women.…

    • 448 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ was written during the 19th Century in the period known as the Victorian era. This was a period where the role of women was very limited and their position was within the home. This era is commonly associated with a society that was staid and conservative. The sequence appropriates the male voice and shifts it to a feminine voice, communicating the love story between Elizabeth and Robert Browning. The poems are intensely personal, exploring the power of love, the absence of love and making sense of the turbulent emotions involved with love.…

    • 1075 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ridge Scholarship Essay

    • 819 Words
    • 4 Pages

    On the surface, The Great Gatsby reads as a story of thwarted love between a man and a woman. The real theme of the novel, however, encompasses a highly symbolic meditation on 1920’s America as a whole, and, in particular, the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess. Fitzgerald portrays the 1920’s as an era of decaying social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music—epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby himself hosts every Saturday night—resulted ultimately in the corruption of the…

    • 819 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Study Guide Great Gatsby

    • 714 Words
    • 3 Pages

    On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all of its action takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a circumscribed geographical area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era…

    • 714 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” is a chronicle of its times. Times of prohibition, bootleggers and economical prosperity, but also the times of people still recalling the World War I, those who try to forget its horror and compensate all the harms suffered, with the life full of luxury. The period of 1920s, so called Roaring Twenties, is the time when the United States experienced cultural revolution. The lifestyle changed and the old values, such as morality disappeared, replaced by money and corruption. As the one who lived in that era, F. S. Fitzgerald became a strong critic of his contemporary’s lifestyles. One of the major themes of the novel is the criticism of the society for its trend to waste everything.…

    • 668 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    gatsby & ebb essay

    • 667 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Our interest in the parallels between the great Gatsby and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry is further enhanced by consideration of their marked differences in textual form-…

    • 667 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    David Trask once said, commenting on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby that "The Great Gatsby is about many things, but it is inescapably a general critique of the 'American Dream' and also of the 'agrarian myth' - a powerful demonstration of their invalidity for Americans of Fitzgerald's generation and after." Fitzgerald defiantly breaks down the societal boundaries of the 1920's and creates a new societal example.…

    • 666 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Great Gatsby is a novel that is treasured as a renewable book in American literature collections. Read among a variety of age groups, it holds testament to its honorary title. The missive of the how the pursue of American dream can lead to consequences and decoration are not only evident in the star characters, but in the relevance of modernity, drama, and composition in F. Scott- Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.…

    • 765 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Both The Great Gatsby and Enduring Love explore the theme of obsession within their novel based around the idea of love for someone or something; an obsession which eventually leads to pain and ruin. The Great Gatsby is set in America, from spring to autumn in 1922. Published in 1925, Fitzgerald’s novel creates an impression of the wealth and prosperity of the ‘Jazz Age’. Nick explains how ‘Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores’, this shows how Gatsby’s ideal ‘American dream’ is corrupt…

    • 283 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The novel 《The Great Gatsby》written by Scott Fitzgerald is often classified as a masterpiece about American dream,and it is believed to be written in 1925. It is a time that the entire America was under the strong influence of the Roaring twenties,and as we know, Scott Fitzgerald is a distinguished representative of the Lost generation in America. As a result, this novel is influenced by the thoughts of the lost generation.The essential thought of the lost generation is loneliness and disillusion in spirt, is to emphasize its own set of values rather than their elders. It strongly stresses the importance of personal characteristic and freedom or personal liberation, or in other words, hedonism and self-indulgent spree. In the novel,Scott Fitzgerald…

    • 812 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925 talks about the decline of the ‘American Dream’ and how it is not what everyone would like to thinks it is. This story is a huge drama all about love, loss and heartbreak that brings readers through a story that is fascinating and amazing. Fitzgerald shows readers how greed, false love, and jealousy ruined the idyllic American Dream.…

    • 847 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Barrett Browning was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian Era. She wrote a total of forty-four sonnets displaying her changing mentality on life which in turn conveys her changing representation of love and hope. As the sonnets progressed, she begins to portray love as a necessity and a requirement for her existence and due to her rough past, love has provided her with hope. Therefore, Browning’s illustration of love is directly proportional to that of hope.…

    • 924 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The second to last and most famous sonnet of the collection, Sonnet 43 is the most passionate and emotional, expressing her intense love for Robert Browning repeatedly. Elizabeth says in the second to third lines that she loves Browning with every aspect of her soul. She then goes onto say that she loves him enough that it meets the needs of every day and every night in lines 5 and 6. Through lines 7, 8, 9 and 11 Elizabeth repeats the phrase, "I love thee..." to build intensity and show emphasis. Line 7 says that she loves him "freely," or willingly, as men who try and reach "Right," which in this case could mean righteousness, or in correlation with the previous word "freely" it may mean freedom. Line 8 means that she loves him, as it says, purely, without any want for praise. It is interesting that line 9 says that she loves him as passionately, or intensely, as she experienced her old griefs or sufferings, and with a faith as strong as a child's. This helps to transition into line 11, expressing she loves him as much as she used to love the saints as a child. And the last three lines state that she loves him with all of her life and, God willing, she'll continue to love him that deeply in the afterlife. It is not surprising that this sonnet is so passionately written, as it helps to show how her love for…

    • 401 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays