Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets from the Portuguese (1846) I
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Responder to obtain a deeper knowledge regarding browning’s desire to
love and be loved.
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Former illness and family tragedy positioned her to view love as an
unexpected gift. Her insecurities towards love are influences by a
woman’s role in the Victorian era and the patriarchal values of the time.
Browning challenges the conventional role of woman and gives her self a voice
through a traditional male literacy form.
Evident in: Petrachan sonnet structure- In the octave, Browning adheres to the
traditional (abba) structure, when reflecting upon her past, however changes to cdcd,
in the sestet emphasizing her challenge to patriarchal control
 Manifests transformation of gender roles
 Challenges strict convention on woman- anatypical scenario for a woman in
the Victorian era.
Distortion of iambic pentameter
 reflects the distorted and inharmonic patterns of browning’s life
 affected this unexpected love
Browning’s desire for lovePast tense, Browning alludes to the Ancient Greek poet “Theocritus”.
-historical referencing allows Browning to draw a comparison with Theocritus’ wise
words to adjectives such as ‘sweet’ and ‘dear’.
Such a comparison is further emphasized through the assonance and elongated
sentences of sweet years, the dear and wished for years.
 These devices manifest Browning’s desire to experience such feelings,
however unable to do so, due to past experiences.
 Browning’s insecurities about love, reflect the values of the Victorian era,
where difficulties had escalated for women because of the common goal to be
the ‘ideal woman’ during the reign of the British monarch Queen Victoria.
love
Mythological allusion to Homars Illiad, where Athena pulls Achilles by the hair,
evident, through ‘drew me backward by the hair’,
 highlighting her desire for love.
 divine intervention of the gods in helping her find love.
 The allusion suggests that there is something heroic and brave about her
relationship with Robert Browning allowing her to connect to him spiritually,
however does highlight his ultimate control. Furthermore, it removes
Browning psychologically and physically from her father's domination, and to
her husbands.
Uncertainty of new found love
‘silver answer rang’
 silver is a symbol for awareness ands strength
 highlighting Browning’s and Robert’s strong spiritual connection, however
also her uncertainty, being only silver and not yet gold, as gold is a symbol of
immutability and perfection.
IN STARK CONTRAST
F Scott Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby represents women in 1920’s America as
superficial, liberated objects of desire, Framed within a 1920’s American world,
where the American Dream has been transformed from a pure ideal of security into a
convoluted scheme of materialistic power.
Daisy, Gatsby’s love object represents the upper class woman, as she is repeated
associated with the colour white. Her materialism and corruption is however evident
through her name ‘Daisy’, where the yellow core of a daisy flower is a symbol of
decay, emphasizing her innate lack of spirituality and corrupt persona as a result of
the superficial values of a 1920’s woman. In Comparison, Myrtles corruption is
shown through her personification of a 1920’s flapper, evident through the colour
and sound imagery, ‘cream coloured chiffon‘ and ‘rustl[ing].’ Here one is able to
draw comparisons to daisy who wears white and ‘ripples’, however Myrtle can
only wear the secondary crème.
This starkly contrasts to Browning who is held back by the stereotypical conservative
woman, which has ultimately caused her wariness of love.
Fitzgerald utilizes Nick’s first person narrative to describe Jordan through
adjectival diction associated with air such as rippling’ and ‘fluttering’
emphasizing her transient nature and lack of moral grounding.
Jordan acts carelessly, selfishly and immorally with her freedom. Nick tells the
reader about the time she ‘left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down
and then lied about it’ as well as her cheating in a golfing tournament, by moving
her ball ‘from a bad lie in the semi final round’. Fitzgerald here, cleverly
repeats the word “lie” to emphasizes her ongoing deceitful nature. One can
therefore see the difference in context, where Browning focus’ on truth and real
love as opposed to the lies and materialistic woman in the great Gatsby.
The new found freedom of a 1920;s woman is shown through Gatsby’s, Myrtle,
who openly uses her sexuality in an attempt to rise above her social class.
Her lack of constraint is captured in the metaphorical reference to her as fire
‘continually smouldering’.
 Myrtles uses her sexuality to obtain material gains, however through her
infidelity, is violently extinguished where her ‘left breast [swung] loose like a
flap’ after she had been hit by Gatsby’s car.
Through the use of simile, Fitzgerald compares her sexuality to an empty object.
 Here, Fitzgerald shows his readers that women who are careless, immoral and
subsequently lack substance will only end in disruption.
Elizabeth Barret Browning’s sonnets from the Portuguese XXII, explores
Browning’s hope for a realistic relationship with partner Robert Browning; her
ideas of love and hope ultimately challenge the idealism of relationships in the
Victorian era.
Browning values a love which is grounded in the real rather than the popular
Petrarchan ideal of her time which placed women on a pedestal.
Evident through word ‘erect’, alluding to john Donne’s poem ‘valediction
forbidding mourning’.
 Donne compares the love he shares with his wife to a compass, representing
himself as the lead, highlighting the authority of males.
 Browning challenges this ideology through the use of collectives, emphasizing
the equality in Robert’s and her relationship.
Donne expresses his poetry through a transcendent and heavenly love.
differs to Browning’s sonnet through her religious metaphor, ‘angels would press on
us’.
 emphasises their realistic, pragmatic love.

Browning’s satisfaction with her relationship to browning is further expressed
through the motif of silver.
Browning uses the symbol of the golden orb
 highlights power and perfection through the rich colour imagery and
ongoing circle.
 Browning however highlights that she is content with a ‘silver’
relationship, where silver is a symbol for strength and reality, symbolic of
her realistic love with Robert Browning.
Browning emphasizes her new found strength through the classical allusion
to Icarus.
failed ambition: shown through ‘wings break[ing]’
 symbolic of the harsh life she has experienced with her brothers death
and her patriarchal father’s oppression.
highlights the strength that her past experiences and relationship has given her
rhetorical question what bitter wrong could the world do to us, that we should not
long be here contented?.
Hence as we can see, the text explores the context of the Victorian era through
Browning’s ideals of love and hope in her relationship.
Texts do reflect concerns and values of their composers. Both Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s Sonnet 1 and Sonnet 14 from Sonnets from The Portuguese as well as F
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reflect the context and values of their respective
times. Both texts represent love, hope and spirituality through their exploration of role
of women, as well as the importance of real love as opposed to the corrupting forces
of ideal love.
F Scott Fitzgerald reflects his society's consumerist values and corruption of the
American dream, shown through Gatsby’s unrequited and ideal love for daisy, which
contrasts to Browning’s hope for a realistic love with Robert.
Gatsbey’s love is seen to be tainted by corrupt values.
Shown through enormous yellow spectacles that stare out over the valley of ashes.
 This billboard is a symbol for the eyes of god, reflective upon societies lack of
spirituality
 focus on a modern materialistic god.
 This symbol is however ironic, in that glasses are symbols for clear vision
however is contrastive to the blinded society of such a context.
This is however contrastive to sonnet one, where Browning’s vision allows her to
approach this new love cautiously and with intellect.
Gatsby’s artificial love for Daisy is further represented through a flash back in
which his focus is not on Daisy, but ‘to a secret place above the trees’,
 his heightened position is reflective of Gatsby’s ideal dream, showcasing him
a figure of heroic idealism.
Gatsby’s confusion of love with material desires
is shown through the cosmological imagery of ‘struck upon a star’,
 emphasizing his and Daisy’s intangible and out of reach love
 reflective of his imagination and idealism.
Gatsby’s hope for love
is shown through the visual imagery of Daisy [blossoming] for him like a flower’,
 simile: the responder is able to understand that such a love is temporal.
This is however different to Browning’s sonnets in that she places hope on a realistic
love rather than one that is imaginative and idealistic.
The physical embodiment of the American dream
shown through the opulent language used to describe Gatsby’s ‘fine flannel’ and
‘silk’ shirts. Daisy repeatedly states, ‘they’re such beautiful shirts…. ‘iv never seen
such beautiful shirts before’, in a crying tone.
 Gatsby’s shirts equate to wealth and success and are the epitome of the jazz
age. Daisy is not crying about the love she’s lost, its about the wealth she
could have had, representing the superficiality of their love, and focus on a
consumer God.
The text hence revealing that love and hope were secondary to the context of wealth
in the 1920’s.
The idea that happiness can be obtained through materialism is evident through, “He
paid a high price for living to long with a single dream”. The colloquial idiom of
‘high price’ coupled with the monetary jargon connotes the emphasis on
materialism and it being part of the equation to gaining happiness.