Video Notes Flashcards
(5 cards)
Gatsby and Whoso
Similarities:
- Unattainable love, never achieve the love they yearn for.
- Both assumed to be about the real authors pursuit of high class women, Whoso = Anne Boleyn and Gatsby = Ginevra King
- “Graven with diamonds…for Caesars I am”
- “You want too much” - Daisy
Differences:
- Wyatt’s narrative is one of resignation (contrasts Gatsby’s quixotic determination)
- “As for me, helas, I may no more”, “the vain travail” and “wearied mind” suggest Wyatt’s narrative is coming to peace
- “ My life…it’s got to keep going up” (Gatsby) and “he did not know it was already behind him” (Nick), not being able to see the sense of doom in his desires
Gatsby and Garden of Love
Similarities:
- Both represent a loss of love from a time of innocence to a present of hard experience
- “Where I used to play on the green”, idyllic past and childhood
- “The officer looked at Daisy…in a way every young girl wants to be looked at” (Jordan), forged from a past that is no longer there
- “Tomb stones where flowers should be”, imagery of death destroying the love
- “After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me” (Nick), the consequences of love as melancholy
Differences:
- Blake mourns love in a religious/pastoral way, Gatsby’s is centred around Daisy and more superficially in the image of death
- “Priests in black gowns”, “binding with briars my joy and desires”, disdain for organised religion, love for religion in the purest and most direct sense, pastoral imagery destroyed
- The pursuit of love for both is hindered, however for Blake it’s organised religion, for Gatsby its social status and ‘old money’
- “A chapel was built in the midst”, “Mister nobody from nowhere”, both have greater forces at play to destroy their love
Gatsby and At An Inn
Similarities:
- Both present love as inconsistent, at one point present then not
- Both texts explore the notion of unrequited love
- Both texts bear contextual links - Hard and Florence Heneker, Gatsby and Daisy - Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre
Differences:
- At An Inn is never once physically realised, Gatsby pines for a time it was real
- Lingering regret in At An Inn , but Gatsby once had a relationship with Daisy
- “Yet the love light never shone between us there!” and “He kissed her curious and lovely mouth”
- At An Inn presents two figures as mutual lovers, whereas love is always one-sided in The Great Gatsby
- “Now we seen not what we aching are” and “He had committed himself to the following of grail”
Gatsby and La Belle Dame
Similarities:
- Love as a devastation and haunting effect
- “Alone and palely loitering”, “I’ve been sick all day” (George), absence of love
- Figures of love as ethereal
- “A faerys child” and Daisy’s “voice that men found difficult to forget”
- Both texts present characters as unfulfilled and yearning for someone or something
- “I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully…the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game”
Differences:
- Keats imagery of love and desire are firmly rooted in the world of medieval imagery ‘elfin grot’, whereas Fitzgerald’s love interests are rooted in the reality of the time
Gatsby and Nom Sum
Similarities:
- Both texts present love as permanently altering the state of one’s mind
- Repetition of “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion” in the last line of each stanza and “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath”
- However, Dawson’s narrative voice attempts (in vain) to change by finding the love of another, while Gatsby attempts to change himself
- “Betwixt her lips and mine there fell thy shadow” and of “Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang his platonic conception of himself”
Differences:
- Also Dawson’s narrative voice seems self-destructive as a consequence of love
- “I cried for madder music and stronger wine” and “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be right across the bay”
