The Fatality of the Couple in The Great Gatsby and Othello

Romance and Tragedy, two themes becoming one, which delightfully compliment one another. In many romantic tragedy’s there is a past theme, which is laid out, so that the downfall is always due to an excess of love or passion and the couples are doomed down by some impediment. I will be examining the Fatality of the couple in two romantic tragedies, Shakespeare’s Othello, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Researchers have long assumed that the reasoning for the fatality of the couple is due to the era of time which the story takes place, for Instance, one eminent scholar Martin Orkin assumed in "Othello and the 'Plain Face' of Racism”, his seminal work on Race in Othello, which states that there is ample evidence of the existence of colour prejudice in the England of Shakespeare's day. As Jordan himself puts it, “dark mood of strain and control in Elizabethan culture” (qtd. in Orkin 167). Another leading critic, Ornstein, argued that in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby “out of the shifting of opportunities from the West to Wall Street, Fitzgerald creates an American fable which redeems as well as explains romantic failure. ” (Ornstein 35). Ultimately, when it came to the issue of the fatality of the couple in the two works the basic assumption was that love played the most significant role in the fatality of the couples. A new body of research shows that there are many factors which contribute to the fatality of the couple, I argue that the fatality of the couple in the two works is merely based on the themes displayed in the play and the narrative because, ultimately the impediments that causes the tragic downfall of their relationships is jealously, love and race. On a closer inspection I will use these themes as a means...

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