A comparative study on the fragility of human bonds in The way of the world and The great Gatsby

Abstract

This study offers a comparative analysis of emotional fragility in William Congreve’s *The Way of the World* and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s *The Great Gatsby*, drawing on Marxist literary criticism and New Historicism. It contends that love, trust, and loyalty in both texts are structurally produced within socio-economic systems that privilege wealth, status, and social performance. Through close reading, the analysis demonstrates how material conditions, class hierarchies, and processes of self-fashioning mediate intimacy, rendering emotional bonds conditional and unstable. In Congreve, marriage operates as a strategic negotiation embedded in aristocratic property relations, while in Fitzgerald, romantic desire is shaped by capitalist aspiration and the illusion of social mobility. By placing these texts in dialogue, the study reveals a transhistorical pattern in which socio-economic structures systematically undermine emotional stability, reframing intimacy as contingent upon external systems of value rather than individual sincerity.