Othello Flashcards
Intro
True love is ambiguous and can be interpreted differently
sterotypically means a faithful, pure love
In lit, failure of true love has become a tradition e.g Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights
Gatsby - tragic structure shows Gatsby losing true love
pre -1900 peotry - lament for a lost love
Critcisms of rigid social structures and superficiality
P1 (Gatsby) - true love is rarely acheived as it is built on illusion that cannot last as reality breaks it down
AO2 ‘Daisy tumbled short of his dreams…because of the colossal vitality of his illusions’ - tumbled is a parallel to fall short of but feels more intense - dissapointment
AO2 ‘She used to understand. We’d sit for hours-‘ - past tense shows love has been lost to time and can’t be achieved - reality has broken down illusion
AO2 ‘he was running down like an overwound clock - similie - fruther engages not allowing true love to last
AO4 Theme of time typical to modernist writing due to its superiotity to people
AO3 Plato’s Theory of Forms - perfect form of everything but is in another world so not humanly possible to be acheieved - like Gatsby can’t achieve his platonic love for Daisy
P1 - (La Belle Dame) - speaker is misled by idyllic illusion of true love
AO2 ‘a faery’s child’ - purity + innocence idealised in women
‘her foot was light and her eyes were wild’ - juxtaposition shows illusion of outside perfection that is not the reality
AO2 juxtaposition continues in setting ‘relish sweet and honey wild and manna dew’ - semantic field of sweetness contarsts later isolation of ‘on the cold hill side’
AO2 cyclical in structure with ‘no birds sing’ true love can never be achieved in reality as the concept is just idealised
AO3 Keats in love with Fanny Browne but couldn’t marry her
AO5 Laura Jordan ‘Keats struggled to reconcile his boysih conception of women as goddesses with the mature notion of their realities’ - similar to speaker
AO4 Both authors sceptical to true love being achieves as illusion can never truly be acted out in a cruel reality
P2 (Gatsby) - Fitzgerald arguing true love cannot be achieved due to humanitys desire for status and wealth
All the characters seek to better their circumstance in one way or another and see love can aid this
AO2 ‘Her voice is full of money’ - metaphor - Gatsby is drawn in by her wealth
AO3 1920s developing consumerist culture that encouraged American Dream and the accumulation of wealth + goods
Increased consumption refelct in individuals mindeset causing more infidelity
AO2 ‘Sprees’ - euphemisitc - love is commodifided and thus true love cannot be achieved with this mindset
AO5 Marxist ciriticsm - exploitation of capitalism that alienates indovidua;s from true selves and encourages them to think as consumers
AO2 Class also makes love unattainable - ‘mingled her dark blood withe the dust’ - Valley of Ashes reclaiming her after trying to climb social ladder - inter class relationships can’t happen
P2 (Whoso) - class also prevents speaker from achieving true love
AO3 Wyatt rumoured to be Anne Boleyn’s lover and poem inetrpreted as her pursuit for her - class division
AO2 ‘in a nett I seke to hold the wynde’ - metpahor - futility of pursuit as love unacheievbable
AO2 ‘faynying I followe’ - exhaustion of pursuit
AO2 ‘graven in Diamondes plain’ - woman also trapped by her class and marriage that means she cannot be with her true love
AO4 could also be interprted like Gatsby speaker is allured by her wealth
AO4 Courtly love
P3 (gatsby) - true loves ambiguity means achievement for some can be different to others interpretations
AO2 restricted narration of Nick who is pessimisitic of love
‘they’re a rotten crowd…you’re worth the whole damn bunch put together - disillusionment on true love or loyalty as all been betrayed
AO3 Fitzgerald at the the time was contemplating certainty of romance due to Zelda’s affair
AO2 Nick also detached from any romantic feeling - ‘and so I drew up the girl beside me’ - conjunction feels like an afterthought
by removing Nick’s pessimissim could be argued that Gatsby did feel as though he acheievd true love for a bit
AO2 ‘smiled like a weatherman, like an ecstatic patron of reccurent light’ - similies show fufilment and happinness wiyh images of light
still doesn’t last however
P3 (Sonnet 116) - AO4 shakespeare goes even further and agrues true love can both be achieved and can last
come from a collection of love poems dedictaed to the fair youth thought to be Henry Wriosthley
AO2 ‘ever fixed marke’ - meptaphor - true love can last as long as it doesn’t ‘alter when alteration finds and remove with the remover’
AO2 Volta on ‘Lov’s not Times fool’ - personfication humanises time so love can overcome it and be everlasting
AO2 half rhyme on last two lines breaks conventional strcuture - breaking literary convention to prove true love can be achieved and last in literature
AO5 Peter Daley - ‘love doesn’t change like a fixed foot compass caught up in physical change but is stablised by true love’
