The following Connections essay was written by Gabi Evans who attended FAHS from 2013 to 2017. In her final year Gabi was a most effective Vice-President of our School Council.
Happiness is a key theme that appears in the following four texts: ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink’ by Alice Munro, ‘Heavenly Creatures’ by Peter Jackson, and ‘Brief Encounter’ by David Lean. What appears to be society’s main definition of the noun happiness is ‘a mental state of wellbeing characterised by positive emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy; good fortune.’ According to research, though, happiness is the frequent experience of positive emotions and the infrequent experience of negative emotions. To some extent in these four texts, the actions of the characters teach the audience about the idea of happiness. The portrayal of happiness is, to some degree, similar across the four texts.
Happiness is depicted rather similarly in each text. In ‘Brief Encounter’, two people, each comfortably married with children, meet and we effectively see sparks fly. From the audience’s view, there is a very evident difference in how these two people, Alec and Laura, act when they are separated and when they are together. Apart, they are content with their plain normal lives. Together, they are more thrilled and energetic about life and clearly experience a rise in their positive emotions. We see Alec and Laura contemplate the prospect of having a life together which would surely be more exciting and fulfilling. However, doing so would involve abandoning their old lives. This is something that particularly Laura cannot bring herself to do, as she believes that the mess of splitting her family up is ‘too great a price to pay for the happiness we have together.’ Both Laura and Alec therefore return to their spouses as though nothing significant had occurred that day. Laura says that ‘Self-respect matters, and decency’. I believe that this suggests that the reason for her not divorcing- and therefore finding greater happiness- was a combination of wanting to act in a fashion that is socially acceptable as well as doing what feels right to her personally. This idea of the desire to be socially acceptable negatively influencing one’s ability to find greater happiness is also found in ‘The Great Gatsby’. Gatsby believes that he will have happiness if he can be with Daisy Buchanan, his past lover. It is evident that they do share a special bond and Daisy, who is usually rather dull and emotionless, is far more vibrant around him. At first, Gatsby tries to gently persuade Daisy into leaving her abusive husband to be with him but he ends up trying to pressure her into it, ‘…tell him you never loved him.’ Like Laura, Daisy refuses to consider the option of getting a divorce in a quest to have more happiness in her life. Both ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Brief Encounter’ were set in the early to mid-1900’s and the social stigma of divorce was huge. Both texts portray that there was a societal expectation that people would try to keep marriage together at all costs, and often at the cost of their individual happiness. The film and novel are connected through the idea that they both convey a kind of theory about there being a mathematical formula for overall happiness: your total positive emotions less your negative emotions. Neither Daisy or Laura divorced their husbands. While doing so would have certainly resulted in a gain in their positive emotions, the social stigma of the action would elicit negative emotions that would cause the gain in their overall happiness to be greatly reduced if not non-existent. ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Brief Encounter’ have a connection that prompts the audience to understand that perhaps happiness isn’t so much a thing that you have or haven’t got but rather a quantity that you have more or less of. From these texts, we can learn that your quantity of happiness is dependent on both your positive and negative emotions. In accordance to this, for an action to increase your overall happiness it must cause your positive emotions to increase more than it causes your negative emotions to increase. Just because an action increases your positive emotions doesn’t necessarily mean it will lift your overall happiness significantly, because any increase in negative emotions could balance or cancel these out and hence the overall happiness level could stay unchanged, or decrease. This is applicable to today’s society where we discuss ‘pros and cons’ a lot regarding decision making. There is a silent belief that a good decision is one where the pros outweigh the cons. A good decision therefore represents an action where happiness has been generated. This is because from the mathematical formula that is expressed in these two texts: if the rise in your positive emotions outweighs the rise in your negative emotions then a lift in overall happiness will be experienced. From my evaluation of the connection between ‘Brief Encounter’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ we can comprehend that happiness is affected by both positive and negative emotions. This teaches us that to experience the greatest happiness in our own lives, we need to act to reduce or eliminate the sources of our negative emotions as much as we need to work to enhance our positive emotions. We cannot ignore the things that make us upset or concerned because they will still be sitting in the corner of our minds, the negative emotions they produce cancelling out our positive emotions and restricting our amount of potential maximum happiness. This is very significant for society because hiding your negative emotions and not dealing with them is unhealthy, potentially leading to depression and other mental illnesses. Until rather recently, a commonly held belief in society was that you should hide your negative emotions and conform to societal expectations as much as possible. The connection between these two texts highlights that the sooner this belief disappears from society the better, and helps generate awareness that happiness is affected by both positive emotions and negative emotions. Therefore dealing with your issues is incredibly important for maximum happiness levels to be achieved. The connection also reminds people that society is far more accepting of difference now than it used to be, and this is something that we must be grateful and happy for.
The actions of characters in ‘The Moon Over the Orange Street Skating Rink’ and in ‘The Great Gatsby’ connect the two texts through teaching the audience about the idea of happiness in quite a different way. In the former, the two main characters Sam and Edgar are cousins who live together as adolescents in a boarding house in Gallagher, a Canadian prairie town. Despite their poor living conditions, they aren’t miserable. The popular local attraction is the skating rink and they cannot afford the admission cost. However, Sam and Edgar come up with a way, albeit slightly dangerous, to avoid the entry fee and get into the rink. Their plan involves Callie, a young social outcast living at the boarding house with whom they form a strong bond. The happiness that stems from their success in overcoming an obstacle teaches the audience that obstacles don’t have to take away from our happiness. They have the potential to do this if we let them stand in our way, but they also have the potential to produce positive emotions such as a sense of accomplishment if we find a way to overcome them. The way that Sam and Edgar act shows us that we choose our happiness through choosing our perception of life. We can choose to see obstacles as barriers that take away from our happiness or we can choose to see them as challenges that, by being overcome, can add to our happiness. This idea of choice influencing our happiness acts as a connection between Munro’s story and ‘The Great Gatsby’. The latter is narrated by Nick Carraway, a main character. Nick’s actions cause the audience to question his reliability as the narrator, as he says things that contradict themselves – “…I’m inclined to reserve all judgements….” and “a cruel body” for example This then forces the audience to choose how they personally see the characters because they have doubt in the accuracy of Nick’s judgements. ‘The Great Gatsby’ is like one of those books where you decide at the end of each chapter about what the character’s next action is going to be. This is because throughout ‘The Great Gatsby’ you must make decisions, although they are about the personalities of the characters rather than the plot. As reader, you can choose to make positive judgements of characters or choose to make negative judgements and dislike them. Your judgements of each character can trigger positive emotions whilst reading which could add to your overall happiness, or on the contrary, negative emotions which could subtract from your overall happiness. It is up to you as the reader to decide at the conclusion of ‘The Great Gatsby’ whether Gatsby’s death and the aftermath of this event is just plain tragic or whether it portrays a message that you can use to positively influence your life. The actions of Nick Carraway in ‘The Great Gatsby’ causes the audience to make their own decisions about the novel which then teaches us that the novel is what we decide to make it. Depending on how we choose to view the characters and how we interpret the ending affects the emotions that are produced by reading it which then affects our happiness. This teaches us that perspective is a huge factor in one’s happiness, a message which reinforces a commonly held idea in society that ‘You are as happy as you choose to be.’ This is significant because this concept has almost become clichéd in society and the actions of Edgar and Sam in ‘The Moon Over the Orange Street Skating Rink’ and Nick Carraway in ‘The Great Gatsby’ prompts the audience to remember that there is always an element of truth behind clichés, and this idea of you choosing your happiness through the choices you make is certainly one that is very valuable and not to be dismissed or overlooked. Sam and Edgar choose to see the obstacle of the expensive ticket cost at the skating rink with the positive perspective of it being a challenge and therefore they choose to add to their happiness.
To some degree, happiness is portrayed in a similar way across the texts. In the film ‘Heavenly Creatures’ the actions of the two main characters – Pauline and Juliet – show that a moment of complete happiness can be reached when you are completely absorbed in a moment and nothing else at all seems to matter. When they are together, they appear to have high levels of happiness as they are fully absorbed by each other’s presence and everything else in their world seems to fade into insignificance; ‘I idolised her’. This fits with the theory – your level of happiness is your positive emotions less your negative emotions – that resulted from the earlier analysis of ‘The Great Gatsby and ‘Brief Encounter’, because if you are completely absorbed in a moment then your negative emotions are eliminated from the equation and your happiness is equal to your positive emotions. However, the actions of the characters in ‘Heavenly Creatures’ portrayed that it is possible to become greedy for never-ending happiness and nothing good can come from this. Pauline and Juliet became addicted to their intense happiness and they also became exceptionally narrow-minded – all they could think about was guaranteeing a future together which they believed would be of life-long happiness. However, the decisions of their parents put their plans of a future together at risk. Because everything else in their lives had gradually become rather insignificant and they had become the biggest part of each other’s life, this caused them both great despair. They couldn’t think of anything except how they could lose each other and their happiness, and their tunnel vision caused them to believe that Pauline’s mother was the one standing in the way of their pursuit of happiness. Their determination to have happiness distorted their minds to think they could have happiness if they eliminated her, the source of negative emotions, from the equation; ‘Only the best people fight against all obstacles in the pursuit of happiness’. Ironically, Pauline and Juliet murdered Pauline’s mother in the pursuit of happiness and the action resulted in the loss of all the happiness they had, as they were separated for life. This teaches us that the pursuit of happiness can be dangerous as we can lose our common sense as well as sight of the bigger picture through becoming very narrow-minded. It also illustrates that happiness is an elusive thing. Happiness is essentially the by-product of trying to make choices that boost your positive emotions as much as possible. There are so many factors that can influence your emotions, and these factors differ from day to day, week to week, year to year and therefore as your emotions vary, so will your happiness. This is significant because it teaches people to keep variety in their lives to keep sane because focusing all your energy into one source can lead to extreme emotions but doing so can also lead to extreme disaster. ‘Heavenly Creatures’ connects with ‘The Great Gatsby’ as this latter text also portrays that the pursuit of happiness might not be worthwhile. Gatsby wants happiness and he believes that if he can have his former love Daisy, he will have it. His pursuit for happiness influences him in all his decisions; he allows Daisy to drive his car because he wants to make her enjoy every moment with him. She crashes into and kills Myrtle Wilson and, as a consequence, Gatsby is killed by Myrtle’s husband. This demonstrates that completely prioritising your pursuit for happiness is dangerous; it can negatively influence your decisions and make you forget that while temporarily your negative emotions may disappear when you are absorbed in something, they do not disappear forever. The pursuit of something that is possible is healthy; however, pursuing happiness is foolish as it is not a physical thing that you can get and keep forever. There is a popular belief in the American Dream in society, and ‘Heavenly Creatures’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ prove this concept to be complete rubbish. The American Dream revolves around success being reached through having a life where you have the right to ‘ the pursuit of happiness.’ Gatsby, Juliet and Pauline each had the right to pursue happiness but having this right did not lead any of them to success. This teaches us that happiness is not something you can just strive for and get as though it is a physical thing. Rather, it is a kind of by-product of making decisions that boost positive emotions. These findings are significant as they remind us to lead lives where we don’t get too absorbed and greedy about just one thing; it is important to pursue multiple things so that if one aspect of life is falling apart or not going so well, we can have happiness in other areas of our life and not overreact and make drastic decisions.
From the connections between ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘Brief Encounter’, ‘Heavenly Creatures’ and ‘The Moon Over the Orange Street Skating Rink’ I can establish that happiness is elusive; it is difficult to find, catch and achieve. Therefore, pursuing happiness is essentially pursuing the impossible, as happiness is rather like a shadow. A shadow is something that is there because of sunny weather or bright light and it cannot be chased. Happiness is also the by-product of something positive – positive emotions – and it cannot be chased either. Increasing the brightness can increase the quality of the shadow, just like increasing the positive emotions in your life can increase your happiness. If it is the sun causing the bright light, we can’t control any increases or decreases in the quality of the shadow, just like in life we can’t control everything. But we can make the decision to move around to reduce the effect of a decrease in the brightness, just like we can make a decision that reduces the negative emotions. Happiness is a theme that links these four texts together and the portrayal of this theme throughout the texts demonstrates that happiness is a very complex matter that we should consider when making decisions as our choices influence it, however we shouldn’t get too wound up about it as ‘too much of one thing is never a good thing’ and pursuing it is foolish because it is not something that can be captured. This is significant because there is a lot of emphasis on finding happiness in society, and there is a common belief that it is something you have or haven’t got. From these texts, we can draw the conclusion that this isn’t the case and while we all may want happiness, a life spent pursuing it is most likely a life wasted and quite likely one of unhappiness, because ultimately in their pursuits of happiness, Gatsby, Juliet and Pauline ended up losing all of the snippets of happiness they had as by-products of the good lives they previously lead.
From evaluating the link of happiness between the texts, it is clear that happiness is heavily influenced by emotions and is affected by both negative and positive emotions. Most people want happiness; however, the ultimate pursuit of happiness portrayed in ‘Heavenly Creatures’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ demonstrated that this isn’t a journey that reaches the destination because happiness isn’t a destination; society’s common belief that ‘life isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey’ is actually rather correct regarding happiness. One can experience varying levels of happiness while on the journey of life, but happiness isn’t a thing that can be achieved like a destination can be reached.