Love is a complicated emotion. In light of this claim, explore how Shakespeare and Fitzgerald present love in the Sonnets and The Great Gatsby. Consider Rattigan’s The Browning Version in the course of your response.

In these three texts love is shown to be the most unruly of emotions; a passionate, intense affliction of desire; it is misunderstood, abused and turbulent. Yet it can be genuine and lasting. Novel, play or poetry, it has occupied writers for centuries. Western literary tradition began in Ancient Athens with poems such as The Odyssey and The Iliad, which encompass vivid depictions of love and hatred. Aeschylus developed ideas of dialogue and drama and Sophocles introduced irony. During The American Dream Fitzgerald was moved to portray the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values. Greed, cynicism and the empty pursuit of pleasure evidenced this. His novel is driven by Gatsby’s love for Daisy, Tom’s convenient marriage and lust for Myrtle. More recently, The Browning Version, a modern re-enactment of Agamemnon, explores Millie’s adulterous love for Hunter. The essence of love is not just “the desire to possess what is beautiful”2, nor is it simply seeking joy for your lover or being self-sacrificing in nature. It is the “marriage of true minds”3 and thus, the three texts largely fall short of representing true love.
In both texts love is presented as misunderstood as the writers conflate it with obsession. An example of this can be seen with Carraway’s description of Gatsby’s “unwavering devotion”4 to Daisy. This encourages him to buy a house “just across the bay” from her as a means of serving his own obsession. His nervous manner of speech, indicated by the use of dashes when he says “here’s a lot of clippings – about you”, represents his cautious approach to her, but also demonstrate his rather unorthodox behaviour. However, it is vital not to confuse his fixation with her as true love; it is merely superficial desire, lacking the components of true love such as selflessness. Equally, love is presented as obsession in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, this time through the use of idealised language, as he begins praise without hesitation by “compar(ing) thee to a summer’s day”5. Shakespeare and Fitzgerald revel in using imagery of summer delights to describe love. For instance, summer is personified as the “eye of heaven” with a “gold complexion” and the reference to the “darling buds of May”. The speaker’s infatuation allows him to transform summer into the standard by which love should be judged.