Analyse TWO differences between Browning’s and Fitzgerald’s portrayals, making two detailed reference to your prescribed texts.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the selected love sonnets; I, XIII, XIV, XXI, XXII, XXVIII, XXXII, XLIII by Elizabeth Barrett Browning explore texts in time which involve portrayals in varying contexts through the experience of idealised love, hope and mortality. The portrayals of Barrett Browning and Fitzgerald explore the differences of idealised love and time throughout both texts with the use of symbolism, imagery, irony and characterisation to emphasise these differences. The Great Gatsby set during the Jazz age is an exemplification of the failure and tragedy of the American Dream as well as the fragmented world where love struggles to survive. This contrasted to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love sonnets set in the wake of the Romantics, making the sonnets in many ways typically Victorian with their tone of gloom and sorrow as well as their feeling of the force and intensity of their passion as the love grows and develops.
Time within The Great Gatsby exposes how Gatsby is trying to re-incarnate the past by showing to Daisy that he has created an affluent life for himself, thus hoping she will be with him in the future. This illusion creates a sense of irony in the story because Gatsby who has the money to possess and attract anything or anyone, cannot have or buy the thing he most wants and desires; his past love for Daisy. Gatsby’s nostalgia for his old self and the love that is symbolised is like Fitzgerald’s portrait of America’s nostalgia for its lost values. Like Gatsby, America seems to have everything in the midst of the blooming 20’s, but has lost something along the process. Even in the midst of Gatsby’s corrupt world there lies a hope in his love for Daisy. This hope is symbolised by the