Context (AO3) Flashcards
Prohibition
The banning of alcohol in America - made illegal.
Gatsby makes his money through bootlegging.
The Jazz Age
1920s America
Characterised by flappers, music, parties, wealth.
Gatsby throws these parties in the hopes that it will attract Daisy.
post-WW1 and modernism
Daisy’s destructive nature as the femme fatale may be a synecdoche for the destructive nature of WW1 - men’s lives destroyed by death, injuries and PTSD.
The American Dream
Embodies freedom and capitalism - the idea that ‘anybody can make it’ (become wealthy or successful).
Was a false promise - 1/10 of 1% pf the wealthiest families in America made as much as 42% of the poorest families each year.
Daisy becomes a representation of the American Dream, with her desirability and her fakeness.
Daisy also represents the consumerist culture, with her showing off of wealth + she physically embodies the consumerist culture by being desired by men, increasing her ‘value’ (as Gatsby thinks)
Femme Fatale in literature
Women being the ‘siren’ - luring men in with voice and beauty, deceiving them so that they can kill them.
Eve in story of Genesis - the ‘temptress’ that listens to the devil and convinces Adam to take a bite of the forbidden fruit - being ‘man’s downfall’
Courtly love
The woman is divine/a goddess/unobtainable.
The man will do anything for the woman and worships the woman - characterised by suffering, pain and heartache.
The Holy Grail
Cup that Jesus drank from in last supper.
Caught his blood when he was on the cross.
Vanished.
Important motif in Arthurian Literature.
Has miraculous powers that provide happiness, eternal youth or infinite sustenance.
Knights would go on quests to find the Holy Grail but was never found. Desirable.
The Fisher King
In custody of the Holy Grail.
Grail seekers wounded him to obtain the Grail.
Suggests that even if you obtain the Grail, you are faced with misfortune.
Gothic genre
Charcaterised by blood, vampires, death.
Fanny Brawne
The woman who rejected Keats because he was poor.
Zelda
Rejected Fitzgerald initially because he was poor.
A few days after having another novel become a success, she married him.
Platonic ideal
Plato’s theory that only ideas encapsulate the true and essential nature of things
Love in the Renaissance period.
love and marriage seen as different parts of life - marriage was practical while love was an overpowering sexual force in poetry.
