Religiousness And Secularization Of Love In The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, the famous American novelist-F·Scott·Fitzgerald's masterpiece, narrates a beautiful love tragedy of Gatsby, an idealist who pursuits the religiousness of love in a commercialized society. The novel reveals the contradictoriness between classic love value of religiousness and modern secular society. This thesis attempts to approach it from the perspective of Max Scheler's phenomenology of feelings, probing to the deficit of love's spiritual worth in modern commercialized society by analyzing the love value of Gatsby and Daisy.1920s'America, called "the Jazz Age", witnessed the economic soaring. However, the traditional value was experiencing collapse, and new value order wasn't yet established. Hence, together with consumerism and materialism prevailing on the one hand, as well as pragmatism and individualism dominating people's behaviors on the other, traditional holy value was abandoned and the society was further secularized, people failing to believe in God any more. Accordingly, the conflict between the new value and the old one exercised more obvious influence on individuals, on the consequence, people's feelings were also in confusional state. In the aspect of love value, such trend of secularization was shown as the secularization of love, for instance, love was not longer unswervingly-loyal, but was related with fame, fortune, and family; love didn't satisfy the spiritual need of people any more, but the sensory need. Secularized love failed to endure beyond time, give deeper satisfaction, and sex was not in connection with love. Gatsby's tragedy is the embodiment of such value conflict during this period. Gatsby's love value embodies the love value of religiousness. His pursuit of love, in spirit and psychology respectively, resembles the devout disciple of religion. Just like religion experience, his love experience has overcome the oppositeness of subject and object (that is "love and being loved"), striving to realize the integral one of subject and object, which has the same characteristic of religion. Gatsby's love shares the same feature of mystery as religion, the love which is considered as common or matter of fact by strangers but is mysterious, brave and honorable for Gatsby. For this reason, Gatsby indulges himself with such love, with the sublimation of spirit. Religious sentiment can be found in Gatsby's love value, in his belief, love is strong and intense above everything else; For love, he can stake everything including social status, fame, spirit, time, fortune, etc. on it, what's more, he can even rebel against orthodox, change himself, discard ordinary life, till lose his life. Gatsby's love penetrates deeply into soul, rendering love sacred, eternal and with quality of sentiment, as a result, his love seems foolish in stranger's eyes. To some extent, such concentration on soul and the spirit of dedication is downright religious spirit.Daisy's love value is a kind of secularization of love value without the holy worth, which is ruled by social norm, social trap, family conflict and desire. Consequently, it is easy to cause innermost crisis and spiritual emptiness, consciously and unconsciously sinking into solitude. The one who holds the love value of secularization is callous and apathy, but he or she still needs, spiritually and psychologically, to perfect his or her love like religion follower. These characteristics are ascertained in Daisy's love: she often feels lonely, and although she knows well about the extramarital affair of her husband, for fortune and social status, she isn't willing to abandon her family; she yearns for true love, but has no courage to go after it; she is indifferent to life, who can even let her lover take blame of killing person for her.Gatsby's love tragedy demonstrates his despair for modern commercialized society. The improvement of material and development of industry and commerce don't promote spiritual value, on the contrary, social value order is in chaos. Traditional religious love value is discarded. The power of material overweights the power of spirit, so that people's spiritual world becomes wasteland.