Love and Obsession Flashcards
(9 cards)
La Belle Dame and Gatbsy - Key Idea
In both poems, men are enslaved by an idealised woman
- Both use courtly love imagery, and flower imagery
La Belle Dame and Gatbsy - La Belle Dame
- fixated on her idealised beauty - ‘full beautiful, a faery’s child’ elevated to a spiritual, fantasy realm - shift from sadness to enchanting imagery
- Courtly love allusion: incremental partial repetition creates the image of a knight in a medieval setting, suggesting a timeless tale of courtly love
- Structure: 12 quatrains in ballad form, connecting to the mythic content
- “I saw a lily on thy brow’ - death and purity
- ‘and nothing else saw all day long’ - utterly enthralled, just like Gatsby’s idea of a mind that can never romp again
La Belle Dame and Gatsby - Gatsby
- Just like the courtly lover he creates a grandiose display of affection (parties, mansion for daisy) - ‘This fellow’s a regular Belasco’ - broadway producer known for the realism of his sets, suggesting the extent of Gatsby’s facade
- ‘pale…dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes’ - sick with love, mirroring ‘desolate and sick’ in LBD - typical courtly love trope
- flower imagery: dreamlike chapter 5: at his lips touch she blossomed for him like a flower’ is structurally juxtaposed with harsh reality of chapter 6 as he stands around ‘crushed flowers’ - ultimately he realises ‘what a grotesque thing a rose was’
- ‘and when he kissed that girl, he knew his mind would never romp again like the mind of god;
la Belle dame and Non sum qualis: main point
- obsession leads to pain and suffering
- mental, versus physical
- speaker in LBD is physically suffering and close to death left alone on the hillside, with pain of obsession manifesting itself in physical suffering, whilst in non Sum Qualis the speaker lives a normal life and desperately tries to numb pain
La belle dame and non sum qualis: La Belle Dame
Pain is physical: ‘alone and palely loitering’ depicting aimlessness and isolation, whilst ‘haggard and woe begone’ conveys suffering
‘the sedge hath withered from the lake and no birds sing’ - reflected in natural world.
- no sense of physical pleasure whatsoever, heartache manifests itself in physical pain
La Belle Dame and Non sum qualis: non sum qualis
- the pain is mental anguish
- repetition of ‘desolate and sick’ suggests that he is a slave to his love for cynara
- the last line of each stanza serves as a refrain, reflecting the cyclical nature of his love
- ‘flung roses, roses riotously’ mimics his confused mental state
- ‘betwixt her lips and mine there fell thy shadow Cynara’ - her influence infiltrates everything he does, with shadow suggesting darkness and the unconscious mind
- emphatic sounds like ‘ah’ and ‘yea’ are used
- Furthermore, unlike the lady who’s presence is completely gone in LBD, Cynara’s presence lingers - causing profound grief due to unattainable love
Non Sum Qualis and Gatbsy - main point of comparison
In both obsession is connected with excess - whilst in NSQ excessive behaviour is used to try and forget Cynara, Gatsby indulges in excess to try and build the perfect facade for Daisyto try and win her back
Non Sum Qualis and Gatsby - Non Sum Qualis
- The poem embodies the speaker’s miserable lament whilst indulging in expensive pleasures such as food and wine - this focus on self-indulgence is typical of Decadence
‘I cried for madder music and more wine’ - he recounts excessive emotionalism and behaviour in order to forget Cynara but these efforts create an image of hysteria and madness
- the structure reinforces this - every 4th line reminds him of his desolation, with every 6th providing a guilty justification
- ‘Bought red mouth’ - he uses prostitutes to forget her
- To numb the pain, he seeks pleasure through indulgence, but Cynara remains in his mind, thus creating a dichotomy between her absence and presence
Non Sum Qualis and Gatsby - Gatsby
- Gatsby transfigures money into love to win back Daisy, ‘her voice was full of money’
- from a marxist perspective, Fitzgerald points us towards the conspicuous consumption of America
- ‘every 5 crates of oranges and lemons arrived…every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of purples halves’ - used and discarded, not used for actual substance but for alcohol - accelerating moral badness.
‘And on Mondays eight servants… toiled all day…repairing the ravages of the night before’
‘After that I lived like a long rajah… collecting jewels, chiefly rubies’ - uses material wealth to fulfil his loneliness and sad past - ‘he came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour’
- ‘your place looks like the World’s Fair’ - artificial imagery - suggests a facade - almost a sense of purposelessness
- Fitzgerald’s critique of modern America: ‘the transition from libertine to prig was so complete’ - deconstructs American Dream, liberty subverted into an excuse for moral decay
