Lust and Desire in American Research Proposal

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.

Lust is seen as equally base and destructive in The Great Gatsby.Tom Buchanan's philandering is ultimately the cause of Gatsby's death, as Mr. Wilson believes Gatsby is the man that has been sleeping with his wife, through the mix up of cars that occurs as they pass by his service station. Without Tom's stepping out with Mrs. Wilson, Gatsby wouldn't have been shot so senselessly. At the same time, Tom manages to survive his lust, but his relationship with Daisy has been irrevocably altered by the events of the novel. It also destroys Mrs. Wilson; it is essentially her lust that causes her to run after Tom's car (with Gatsby driving) -- without her continued affair with Tom, she wouldn't be fleeing from a rightfully jealous husband or towards the car of her lover, and thus wouldn't have been struck and killed by it. Her lust destroys her directly, and contributes to the destruction of Gatsby, Tom, Daisy, Mr. Wilson, and even Nick in the severe disillusionment he experiences in the novel and his altered life course that is the result.

Lust and other non-sexual (or not entirely sexual) desires operate in different ways in these works of literature, but all desires ultimately lead to destruction, through either their fulfillment or their eternal un-attainability. These works deal with certain desires in ways more explicit than previous generations of English literature had been permitted, and the result is even more drastic and graphic results. The destruction that these desires lead to is almost always senseless and unnecessary, yet seems equally inevitable. Ultimately, these works display the essential weakness of the human….....