A Comparison Of Love In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby And The Bible

“Love does not obey our expectations, it obeys our intentions.” –Lloyd Strom. These wise words relay one important message: love is intentional, which is rather obvious in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and the Bible. In Pride and Prejudice, readers see Mr. Darcy falling in love with a much lower class citizen, Elizabeth Bennett. In The Great Gatsby, the readers perceive Daisy to be in love with Gatsby who, though had money, obtained it by the wrong means (so believed by aristocrats in the nineteen-twenties). The Bible expresses to its readers that God sent his son to Earth to die for His people so they could spend eternity with Him. Elizabeth had flaws, but Darcy chose to look past those flaws.

“In Regency Britain a man gained a sense of his place in society through his birth, property, occupation and social rank. He knew precisely on which step of the social ladder he stood, and everybody judged his status at a glance by evaluating his clothing and manner of speaking.”(Morris). Darcy did not work for a living - most respectful gentlemen did not. Most gentlemen, as well as people in a higher class, in the eighteen hundreds (and even before that) inherited their money. Throughout the book, his superiority is evident with instances such as him dissuading Bingley, his close friend, to not have relations with Jane Bennet, Elizabeth’s sister, as well as Darcy making very clear to Elizabeth that she is in a much lower social stance during his first marriage proposal: “Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?” (Austen, 165). Daisy, just as Darcy, had an inheritance of money, which makes her high up on the social ladder. In the early twenties, the people with old money wanted to establish themselves as the new nobility in America. Even though Gatsby had money, he earned it himself, which was a disgrace to people like Daisy, who had inherited their money. They didn’t believe in the American Dream and believed it to be

Elizabeth, even though she is by no means poor, is in a lower class than Darcy, which was reason enough for Darcy to not associate with her. Another reason for Darcy’s judgement upon her family is the fact that Elizabeth’s mother came from a middle-class family. Gatsby, on the other hand, is in the same class as Daisy, money-wise. Gatsby’s money was not inherited, though. As stated before, the only way for one to obtain a respectable social standing back in the day is to have old money. So, Gatsby and Elizabeth are viewed by Daisy and Darcy as the same - beneath