This essay examines the theme of lust and desire in two landmark works of early twentieth-century American literature: Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). Drawing on close readings and secondary criticism, the paper argues that both novels portray desire not as a double-edged pleasure but as an inherently empty and self-destructive force. Gatsby's blind pursuit of Daisy ends in death and erasure, while Ethan Frome's longing for Mattie leads to a fate worse than death — a life stripped of all possibility. Together, the two works form a compassionate yet bleak commentary on the senseless suffering desire inflicts on humanity.
The paper demonstrates comparative literary analysis: two texts are placed in dialogue around a single theme, with each novel's evidence reinforcing and complicating the overall thesis. The writer uses direct quotation strategically — one passage from each novel anchors the argument about desire's pointlessness — then supplements those readings with scholarly interpretation to deepen the claim.
The essay opens with a broad claim about desire in modern literature before narrowing to Wharton and Fitzgerald. It then devotes a two-section block to each novel (close reading followed by symbolic/critical interpretation), keeping the two analyses parallel in structure. A brief conclusion synthesizes the shared finding without introducing new material. Works Cited follows MLA format.
Though the twentieth century can hardly lay an original claim to the use of lust and desire as major themes in literature — these are major driving forces behind human attitudes and behaviors, after all, and this has been reflected in art and literature since humanity first painted on cave walls — these topics did develop a certain unique flatness and unsatisfactory quality in the modern period. The impossibility of sated desire and the disappointment of lustful longing achieved became the common ultimate development of many works, in a curiously cynical way and without the grandeur of earlier tragedies that carried a similar message. This was especially true of certain American novelists writing at the turn of the century.
Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, though separated by a decade or two in their respective prominence, were two such authors. Desire can be seen in both of their works as a destructive force — a common element in many literary periods and genres — but it is also portrayed as somewhat base and meaningless. Though the pursuit of desire is full of passion and meaning in the moment, it is ultimately entirely pointless and bereft of purpose. Both authors put forth this bleak view of desire in a way that manages to remain free from cynicism, and is instead enormously human and touching. Rather than laughing at or merely commenting on this supreme foible of the human condition, these authors expose it as a compassionate commentary on the senseless tragedy and pain that pursuits as meaningless as those of sexual lust specifically, and desire in general, bring to humanity.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is unquestionably best known for his novel The Great Gatsby. This work defines the Jazz Age of the 1920s in America, which was typified by easy money and lax morals. This world provides the perfect setting for Fitzgerald's tale of love, greed, and corruption — and most of all, the vain pursuit of desire. In Edith Wharton's far bleaker tale, written in 1911 but set in the late nineteenth century in a small, wilderness-bound farming community in New England, desire operates just as powerfully without the glitz and overt greed. Ethan Frome can also be read as an exposition of both the potency and the pointlessness of desire. These two works are very different in their style, their characterizations, and in many of the conclusions they seem to draw regarding human nature, and yet they both arrive at a similar view of desire as essentially empty and fruitless.
Nick Carraway, the naive and innocent narrator of The Great Gatsby — who is both less naive and less innocent by the novel's close — experiences firsthand how empty desire is, and how foolish the pursuit of it can make a human being. Jay Gatsby, who comes from humble origins, has his heart set on the upper-class Daisy, the full extent of whose snobbery he cannot truly fathom until it is too late. Though she seems to love him and adores his new wealth, he cannot transform himself into the type of person Daisy would spend her life with. He does try, however; after a physical affair begins, Nick notes that the former "caravansary" of Gatsby's life falls "in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes" (Fitzgerald 90). Gatsby is willing to create or sacrifice anything to win his desire.
The great irony of this novel — what would make it something approaching the tragic if it were not all so pointless and smoothly, if irrevocably, resolved — is the fact that Gatsby is entirely blind to Daisy's inability to truly love him and live with him. Critics have noted a theme of blindness throughout many of the events and images of the novel. One goes so far as to draw a direct comparison between the image of the large eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg on an advertisement for an oculist who never came to town and the "false promise of Daisy's moneyed voice" (Samuels 786). Gatsby is so blinded by the oversized nature of his own desire that he fails to see its lack of true return in Daisy's eyes. Daisy shares a lust and a certain amount of love with Gatsby, but her desires and his are not only different — they are mutually exclusive. The nature of Daisy's desires ultimately precludes Gatsby's.
Another scholar focuses on a key moment at the end of the novel that is often overlooked in many analyses. After Gatsby's death, Nick erases an unidentified "obscene" word that has been scrawled on Gatsby's doorstep. This can be seen as a necessary step before Nick's comment at the beginning of the book — that "Gatsby turned out all right in the end" — can truly be fulfilled (Fitzgerald 6; Will 125–7). That is, the lust and desire that had so obscenely ruled Gatsby's life must be eradicated in order for him to become the symbol of American dreams that Nick seems to interpret his character as. According to this interpretation, Gatsby is pure and idealistic, corrupted only by his desire. This corruption leads to his destruction, and to the destruction of Nick's world and worldview.
Desire, in The Great Gatsby, turns out to be the empty pursuit of one's own end. The novel's imagery reinforces this reading at every turn: the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, the hollow parties at Gatsby's mansion, and the ash heaps of the Valley of Ashes all suggest a world in which longing substitutes for meaning rather than producing it. Fitzgerald's achievement is to render this emptiness with enough warmth and beauty that the reader feels the seductiveness of the illusion even as its fatal shallowness is being demonstrated.
The idea that desire leads to destruction is not new. But it is refreshed in The Great Gatsby and Ethan Frome, where Fitzgerald and Wharton show desire not only leading to destruction, but having no intrinsic value of its own along the way. In these novels, desire is not the double-edged sword of pleasure and destruction that it is so often seen to be. The allure of desire fools many characters into a false sense of happiness, but this happiness is seen as ultimately doomed and hollow from the very outset, and is proved as such by each novel's end.
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