Lust and Desire in American

Lust and Desire in American Literature: An Examination of the Great Gatsby and a Streetcar named Desire

Lust is one of the most basic and primal of human urges and motivations, and as such it is hardly surprising that it is one of the most common themes in literature. Though often repressed to one degree or another in certain time periods and societies, other eras have allowed for freer representations of human sexuality and the lengths to which sexual desires will drive human action; in these latter periods, lust often becomes virtually synonymous with other types of desire including monetary greed and the desire for possession and control. This type of amalgam of sexual and non-sexual desire is clearly seen in two of the greatest works of American literature to emerge from the twentieth century, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Though the two works are very different, their view of lust and desire is highly similar in that both become uncontrollable and eventually lead to destruction.

This is somewhat ironically referenced in A Streetcar Named Desire, when Blanche reflects that the opposite of death is desire (Williams scene 9). This is the belief she has held, and that the play seems to hold, regarding her desire -- it is the most basic thing keeping her alive. Yet at the same time, it is her inability to control her desire that causes her to lose total control over her entire life. It is her desires, first for sexual gratification and human contact and second for the illusions of gentility and beauty, that cause her (or help her) to lose the family plantation, her job, and eventually even Mitch. Blanche's desire might be the only thing keeping her alive, but at the same time they destroy her life.

A strong similarity is found here in The Great Gatsby. Though in many respects the characters of Blanche Dubois and Jay Gatsby are incredibly dissimilar, in this one regard they are the same. For most of his life, Gatsby has been driven by his desire for Daisy, and the desire for wealth that is a part of winning the girl of his past and of his dreams. He has been consumed with this desire to the point that Nick, the novel's narrator, feels sure that Daisy must have fallen short of the image that Gatsby had built up of her: "It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion" (Fitzgerald Chapter 5). His desire for Daisy, then, had consumed everything else, to the point that all of his accomplishments and all of the wealth he had amassed were little more than illusory, even in Gatsby's own perception -- though desire had driven his life, it also became the means by which his life was made un-enjoyable and meaningless.

It also, of course, leads almost directly to his death through a series of coincidences and misinterpretations, just as Blanche's desires and the pattern of her attempts to attain them end up carrying her off to an asylum, presumably for the rest of her life. Both Gatsby and Blanche allow themselves to be entrapped by desires that aren't really greed, as they seem to have deeply heartfelt and meaningful purposes at their very cores, but these purposes and the characters' methods for attaining them are so tragically misguided and all-consuming that they ultimately doom the two to failure and destruction, if not death. It is true that desire is the opposite of death, perhaps, insofar as desire and the pursuit of it is evidence of life, but at the same time desire leads perpetually to extinguishing itself.

The fulfillment of desire, that is, means the eradication of desire -- by its very definition, desire is gone once its object has been attained. This plays out differently for the two characters described above; Gatsby does briefly attain his desire -- i.e. Daisy -- but also learns that, through her own decision, he will never really possess her. This dual event of fulfillment and permanent rejection is symbolically paired with his death, and the complete randomness yet strange inevitability of the death as far as the storyline of the novel goes makes it all the more tragic. Blanche never really attains her desire, and in fact can be seen as destroying it utterly when Mitch leaves her, and this final rejection is enough to break her. Unable to attain her desires, Blanche suffers a complete break from reality that effectively destroys her, as well, yet she continues living in a tortured illusion of fulfillment.

The matter of pure lust -- that is, sexual desire -- is not actually best exemplified in the characters of Blanche Dubois and Jay Gatsby, but rather by Stanley and Stella Kowalski and Tom Buchanan in these respective works. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley and Stella find a strange form of happiness in their almost animalistic sex; Stella returns to Stanley time after time following his physical abuse, and it is suggested that this is primarily for her primal attraction for him -- and his for her. This lust consumes them, and they have no vision of the better life that Blanche, misguided though she may be, sustains throughout her increasing degradation. They are not destroyed by their lust as utterly as Blanche is by her desires, but the stagnation and brute ugliness of the lives they live, which is heightened by their obliviousness to the situation, is a destruction of another sort.