Cities on Wheels and Other Mechanized Fantasies. The Wondrous Steampunk World of the Film Mortal Engines (2018)

This study develops a cognitive linguistic framework for analyzing multimodal metaphors in graphic novels, with a focus on Art Spiegelman’s Maus. While research on multimodal metaphor has advanced significantly in domains such as advertising, film, and political cartoons, graphic novels remain comparatively underexplored and are often examined primarily as trauma narratives. This study addresses that gap by proposing a replicable framework that identifies four principal units of analysis - visual motifs, verbo-pictorial interactions, layout, and sequential structures - and classifies them in relation to established levels of linguistic metaphor analysis. The analysis demonstrates that multimodal metaphors in Maus fulfill three interrelated narrative functions: they represent trauma and emotional experience as affective interiority, reveal power asymmetries through ideological critique, and structure memory and temporality through sequential and spatial design. By integrating insights from cognitive linguistics and comics studies, the article extends Conceptual Metaphor Theory into the domain of graphic novels. The framework not only illuminates how Maus realizes complex figurative meanings across visual and verbal modes but also provides a methodological foundation for future research on multimodal metaphor in long-form narrative media.

According to Tolkien, the profound significance of fantasy literature cannot translate to drama. After determining the three main aspects of Tolkien’s books - archetypal characters, eucatastrophe, and myth-creation - one wonders with the late master of fairy stories whether cinematic adaptation of The Lord of The Rings necessarily obscures the original medium’s religious value. Nevertheless, once we consider the influence film has upon a culture’s imagination, the translation process seems possible. Over time, the film adaptation can perpetuate a shared myth and encourage audiences to transcend the cinematic images, allowing them to contemplate the archetypes and eucatastrophe of the original written version.

Early in the 18th Dynasty, the Egyptian kings conquered their southern neighbors, the C-Group, Pan Grave, and Kerman populations of Nubia. After the conquest, there were significant changes in the material culture of the region, as evidenced by new Egyptian-style mortuary practices and the presence of Egyptian pottery in burials. This “Egyptianization” of the local population has been discussed by many scholars; however, discussions are generally focused on the burials of the Nubian elites who were integrated into the Egyptian administrative structure and who built elaborate Egyptian-style tombs. While many non-elite cemeteries were excavated in Lower Nubia during the UNESCO salvage campaign in the 1960s, only one, Fadrus, received any robust analytical treatment. Other cemeteries, while published, are rarely discussed in the literature. However, given the cultural variation present in Lower Nubia prior to the conquest, it should be expected that other cemeteries might have acculturated to different extents, or even resisted adopting Egyptian culture entirely. ,This dissertation makes use of recent methodological developments in the field of mortuary studies and new theoretical frameworks of cultural change to perform a quantitative and qualitative analysis of several cemeteries in the Princedom of Tekhet, a region excavated by the Sudanese Joint Expedition to Lower Nubia and the Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition. In order to better describe the nature of the material, this analysis adopts a cultural entanglement framework, which aims to archaeologically identify and highlight the creative potential of liminal spaces. As a model, it considers objects not only by their culture of origin, but also how they are used and how visual motifs and manufacturing processes can be “entangled” in colonial situations. Ultimately, the application of this framework aims to present a more nuanced picture of the changes in Lower Nubia during the 18th Dynasty.,The first part of this study involves reevaluating the dates of the tombs within the two concessions through the creation of an updated ceramic typology. The application of this typology demonstrates in many instances that the original dates assigned by the excavators were incorrect, and thus significantly alters our understanding of the socioeconomic changes brought about by the Egyptian occupation, particularly the time frame in which these took place. It seems evident that certain Nubian populations began burying their dead in Egyptianized fashion in the early 18th dynasty, not long after the conquest. The greatest number of Egyptianized burials date to the mid-18th dynasty, while evidence for late 18th dynasty burials are rare, suggesting that most of the Egyptianized cemeteries were no longer in use by that time. Changes to the economic and administrative system in the region were likely key players in these changes.,The second part of this study consists of a statistical analysis of the OINE and SJE tombs, following three main lines of investigation – changes in socioeconomic status over time, the effects of age and gender on burial treatment, and a search for evidence of cultural entanglement in the burial record. The analysis shows that there was significantly more variation, both intra- and inter-cemetery, than has previously been thought – different populations and individuals adopted aspects of Egyptian culture in varying ways. The continued existence of traditional Nubian-style burials alongside more Egyptianized cemeteries further emphasizes the fact that the Egyptianization of Lower Nubia involved a complex, culturally entangled web of individuals and groups, drawing on customs from different cultures as needed.

This article explores how the mythic, nineteenth-century American frontier is authenticated by postmodern forms of storytelling. The study examines accounts of William Cody’s extensive 1902–1903 Buffalo Bill’ s Wild West tours in the United Kingdom and the futuristic television series, HBO’s Westworld (2016–), which is set in an android-hosted theme park. Comparing the semiotics of the two examples indicates how over a century apart, the authentication of the myth involves repeating motifs of setting, action and character central to tourist fantasies. The research illustrates how some elements of the myth seem to remain fixed but are negotiable. It is suggested that both examples are versions of a ‘hyper-frontier’, a nostalgic yet progressive, intertextual retelling of the American West and its archetypal characters, characterised by advanced technology. The implications for tourism are that simulating the authenticity of the frontier myth creates doubts in its veracity paradoxically due to its lifelikeness.

There are very few archetypal characters being more important for European cultural tradition than the Biblical first woman – Eve. As evidenced by literary onomastic research, the very use of semantically loaded first names implies intertextual connectedness, fulfilling – in most cases – associative and symbolic functions. This reference to archetypal stories and heroes makes it possible to create a multitude of new semantic layers, but it also serves to keep their original sense in cultural and collective memory. In our contribution, we seek comparative analysis and interpretation of selected characters, bearing the name of Eve, in modern French, Canadian and Czech literatures. The study focuses on variants, shifts, and similarities that, to varying extents, refer to the first Biblical woman. Throughout both the national literatures, we observe forms of the pretext−posttext relation and concrete onymic functions of the name of Eve in the time span from the close of the 19th century to the present day.

The Tang dynasty poet Wang Changling 王昌齡 (ca. 690–ca. 756), renowned for his mastery of the jueju 絕句 (quatrain) form, has been praised specifically for having brought a lyric sensibility to the heptasyllabic quatrain: a poetic genre most closely associated with yuefu themes and technical complexity. To the extent that such praise is responding to something specific in Wang’s poems, they present a fine opportunity to investigate precisely how a lyric subjectivity is constructed on the basis of the limited poetic vocabulary afforded by stock themes, archetypal characters, and stylized surroundings. Noting that Wang is especially adept at using visual (and occasionally auditory) cues to convey the inner state of the personae that inhabit his quatrains, and taking into account the importance he apparently places on establishing a bodily presence within a given poem (as expressed in his attributive essay “Lun wenyi” 論文意 [On Writing]), this article performs a close reading of the perceptual cues featured in the five heptasyllabic quatrains, “Autumn in the Palace of Everlasting Faith” 長信秋詞. Borrowing the term focalization from recent theories of visual narrativity (most notably as applied by Mieke Bal), and applying it to these poems over the course of this close reading exercise, the essay demonstrates that the lyric power of these poems stems not from the communication of the poet’s inner state on the specific occasion that inspired his writing but from his use of the senses to construct a fluid, shifting, and permeable subjectivity—one that can, at moments, encompass the reader and the poet.

Reviewed by: Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation by Michael Aaron Kerner Chiara Francesca Ferrari (bio) Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation by Michael Aaron Kerner. Rutgers University Press. 2015. $90.00 hardcover; $29.95 paper; $29.95 e-book. 268 pages. First identified and coined by David Edelstein in his New York magazine article “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn,” the term “torture porn” refers to a series of horror films, primarily the Saw (2004–2010) and Hostel (2005–2011) series, that enjoyed significant popularity in the decade following the attacks of September 11, 2001.1 Aaron Michael Kerner’s Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation is an important work in film studies, as it represents only the second volume published so far on this topic.2 The first volume on the subject, Torture Porn: Popular [End Page 147] Horror after “Saw” by Steve Jones, was published in 2013 and differs from Kerner’s volume in a variety of ways, most notably in the choice of evidence discussed: Jones limits his analysis to film, but he includes international films beyond American production.3 Kerner, in contrast, focuses on US products and extends his study to television as well (24 [2001–2010], Dexter [2006–2013], and The Following [2013–2015]). While Jones explores the global appeal of torture porn, Kerner’s intention is to delineate torture porn as a precise post-9/11 phenomenon; therefore, his decision to explore domestic media exclusively resonates well with the book’s purpose. The monograph offers seven chapters that define and explore torture porn, including a commentary about the critical discourses that have developed about the genre, both within and outside of academia. The author provides in-depth discussion and examples from a wide variety of texts to illustrate generic tropes and visual motifs that pertain to torture porn. In doing so, Kerner locates torture porn within the established tradition of exploitation and slasher cinema while simultaneously addressing the contemporary specificity of the genre and its audience. Instead of commenting on the content of each single chapter separately, this review guides the reader through the major themes explored in the book, across different chapters, in the hope of offering a more cohesive analysis of the volume’s main ideas. First, Kerner’s argumentative premise stems from his desire to clarify how the denigration of torture porn by critics who claim that the subgenre lacks “any apparent redeeming moral qualities” originates from a “veiled prejudice against films that emphasize the spectacle or fail to adhere to conventional narrative structures.”4 Kerner situates the discourse of torture porn within the theoretical framework offered by Linda Williams in her work on body genres, hard-core pornography, and cinematic spectacle.5 Williams is instrumental for Kerner’s exploration of the unique visual elements of torture porn in relation to the process of physical engagement of the audience with the genre. Kerner identifies at least three factors that justify the connection between horror and pornography in torture porn films and television texts (in addition to the general focus on the body): the stylistic elements in the mise-en-scène (a long shot of an indoor—often constrained—space followed by a series of progressively closer shots that narrow the look on the tortured victim or, in the case of pornography, the male performer); the story-line format of torture and hard-core porn, which usually consists of episodic vignettes (as opposed to a more structured narrative); and torture porn’s assimilation of the practices of the hard-core pornography industry, which helps to explain the genre’s financial success.6 Second, Kerner points out the significance of torture porn in the social context of post-9/11 America. Specifically, the author illustrates how film series such as Saw and Hostel depict a fundamental contradiction in US society and expose how Americans “imagine [themselves] as agents of righteousness, the torchbearers of [End Page 148] freedom and democracy” while simultaneously acknowledging their “implicit or even explicit sanctioning of torture” (particularly as...

Purpose: This paper sheds light on how the film satirizes capitalist society through the theory of commodity fetishism by Karl Marx, paying particular emphasis to visual motifs and character interactions that reaffirm these commodified relationships. It situates these challenges within the frames of Weimar-era feminist discourse. The paper also explores how the protagonist Ossi, subverts gender norms to capture contemporary debates on women’s roles. She evokes the tensions between individual agency and societal constraints. Through the film’s intense representation of wealth, class, and gender, this paper reveals Lubitsch’s critique of economic relationships and social mobility during a tumultuous historical period. Methodology: This study employs film analysis as its primary method, using textual and discourse analysis to examine the film. The analysis is supported by a theoretical framework drawn from relevant literature and scholarly discussions that align with the topic of commodity fetishism and female agency. This analysis uses Karl Marx's concept of commodity fetishism as a framework to examine the lasting impacts of the film within the context of the economic and social structures of the Weimar Republic. Textual analysis facilitates the identification of the visual motifs and cinematographic techniques used by Lubitsch in relation to his portrayals of relationships and social comment. Each of these interpretative points inspects how the visuals accentuate themes of commodification and capitalist critique. This contextualization establishes the film within the broader socio-political context of Germany in the years following World War 1, addressing the cultural and feminist discourses of the Weimar Republic. Findings: The analysis indicates that Ernst Lubitsch's film The Oyster Princess employs humor to critique the social, economic, and gender dynamics pervasive in post-World War I Germany during the Weimar Republic. The film illustrates absurd patterns of commodity fetishism through its depiction of how human interpersonal relationships undergo manipulation. The analysis shows the transformation of human connections into transactions dictated by wealth and social standing, thereby prompting reflection on their convergence in an era of rapid change. Unique Contribution to Theory, Policy and Practice: This analysis of The Oyster Princess contributes to discussions on commodity fetishism by merging economic theory with visual and narrative elements. It shows how gendered perspectives deepen our understanding of commodification and agency and emphasize the interplay of class, power, and identity. The study promotes critical conversation on social inequalities, gender relations, and commodification. It emphasizes how these problems still impact modern society and how crucial it is to stop the commodification of human values to create a more just society.

Keith Morris Washington’s landscape paintings have received surprisingly little scholarly attention, and thus the present article aims to address that lack. Primarily, this article argues that in representing landscapes associated with lynchings, Washington’s paintings are a form of cultural memory that helps us apprehend the traumas of the southern past. Rather than presenting us with dead bodies of lynching victims, Washington paints the ‘texture’ of violence and memory in seemingly innocuous rural landscapes. Through his brushwork, framing and visual motifs, Washington reveals what I am calling the ‘after-burn’ of lynching: the way in which it circulates as a kind of haunting and memory that disturbs our gaze. While lynching scholarship has expanded in recent years, there is often a focus – as with other contemporary visual theories – on looking at lynching photographs; we are encouraged by a number of critics to apprehend death directly. This article suggests that Washington’s artwork provides us with another visual mode of apprehending lynching. In registering the texture of violence and memory, and through intimating the presence of corporeality, Washington enables a form of looking that does not re-victimize the victimized. Rather, his visual ethics allows us to both see and not see the deaths of (primarily) African Americans across the nation and region.

As petrocapitalism precipitates the sixth mass extinction, it is important to remember that this is not the first global ecocide. Under nuclear imperialism, the relationships between humans and archipelagic creatures were brutally shattered as fish and birds became irradiated. Close reading stories from Tahiti, Aotearoa, and Guåhan by Ra'i Chaze, Witi Ihimaera, and Craig Santos Perez, this chapter analyzes what new solidarities may be forged in times of multispecies societies' collapse. Drawing from Ma'ohi cosmogonic stories, the ancestral koru motif in Maori tattoo, and CHamoru mourning rituals, all three writers find strength and inspiration in transgenerational customary practices. This helps them better fight for the other-than-humans of the Pacific: while writing about the disappearance of endemic species, their style suggests the resilience of customary stories, visual motifs, and art forms honoring multispecies societies.

This article examines in Up the Yangtze and Last Train Home how Chinese Canadian filmmakers Yung Chang and Lixin Fan positioned themselves, framed the migrant issues and their subjects, and utilized two visual motifs in documenting China's migrant workers' labor and (im)mobility—the cruise ship and the train that transport both tourists and migrant workers. Chang and Fan blend participatory or interactive filmmaking with cinéma vérité cinematography and embed these two imposing motifs in the mise‐en‐scène to foreground the human subjects as marginalized, forgotten, and ignored masses against a highly territorialized economic landscape in contemporary China, an irony resulting from the so‐called “socialist market economy” that replaced the used‐to‐be egalitarian communist model. The author, while not intending to provide a full close reading of both films, bases the analysis of them on Bill Nichols' discussion on the modes of documentary and argues that the filmmakers' cinematography projects the train and the ship as means to mobilize human resources horizontally between the rural and the urban areas, but they failed thus far, within China's current economic structure and social hierarchy, to provide the migrant workers mobility to move upward and escape their stigmatized caste.

This paper re-examines Guru Dutt’s Mr. & Mrs. 55 (1955) as a cinematic site where the anxieties of postcolonial modernity, gender reform, and Hindu patriarchy intersect. Challenging the dominant view of 1950s Hindi cinema as an extension of Nehruvian modernist discourse, the paper argues that the film resists the homogenizing modernist project by reviving and reinforcing patriarchal cultural codes. The female protagonist, Anita (Madhubala), is interpreted as a reincarnation of the colonial memsahib, embodying a Westernized femininity that threatens the sanctity of Hindu domesticity and traditional gender roles. Through a close reading of narrative tropes, visual motifs, and spatial politics—especially the “other” spaces of tennis courts, swimming pools, and elite clubs—the paper shows how the film constructs the modern woman as a dystopic figure of postcolonial excess requiring moral and domestic containment. The satire of women’s emancipation and the film’s implicit repudiation of Hindu Code Bill reforms reveal cinema’s role in stabilizing patriarchal authority within a modernizing nation-state. The paper concludes that the memsahib archetype functions as a recurring cultural motif that reinscribes the ideal Hindu woman as domesticated, chaste, and spiritually superior.

“Impossible Narrative Voices”:

F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-proclaimed “profound admiration” (Life in Letters 137) of T. S. Eliot shines an important light on Fitzgerald's composition of The Great Gatsby. In October of 1925, Fitzgerald sent a copy of his novel to Eliot with the following inscription: For T.S. EliotGreatest of Living Poetsfrom his enthusiastic worshipperF. Scott Fitzgerald (Life in Letters 128) The following February, he commented to Maxwell Perkins that “T.S. Eliot for whom you know my profound admiration—I think he's the greatest living poet in any language—wrote me he'd read Gatsby three times + thought it was the 1st step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James” (Life in Letters 137).Eliot's influence on Fitzgerald surpassed general awe and inspiration; in fact, there are many indications that The Great Gatsby is in part an emulation of The Waste Land (1922). Several critics have already elucidated this literary relationship, such as Jeffrey Hart, who points out in his article “Rediscovering Fitzgerald” that “Fitzgerald studied The Waste Land … while he was working on Gatsby” and that “[t]he book both salutes Eliot and answers him” (208, 209). Careful readings of each text indeed reveal numerous similarities between The Waste Land and The Great Gatsby. Perhaps the most notable parallel is the presence of the “valley of ashes … the waste land” in Gatsby, home of George and Myrtle Wilson and setting for Myrtle's death (Gatsby 23, 24). Other intriguing echoes of The Waste Land include the water imagery that pervades The Great Gatsby. The “small, foul river” in the valley of ashes seems to be a counterpart of the “dull canal” in The Waste Land (Gatsby 24; Eliot 189). Nick lamenting Gatsby's death by the waters of Long Island Sound evokes Eliot's narrator who weeps by the waters of Leman. Imagery of water and color even suggest a similarity between Fitzgerald's Daisy and Eliot's hyacinth girl. When Daisy meets Gatsby at Nick's house, she appears “under the dripping bare lilac trees…. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops” (Gatsby 85). Similarly, Eliot's hyacinth girl returns “from the Hyacinth garden,” her “arms full, and [her] hair wet” (37, 38).Just as The Great Gatsby is indebted to The Waste Land, so too is The Waste Land indebted—“deeply … indebted,” to use Eliot's own words—to Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920). In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot credits Weston's book for “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem” (21). Weston, a lifelong scholar of grail texts, wrote From Ritual to Romance as a culmination of her studies of pre-classical, classical, and medieval myth. From her enormous breadth and depth of research, she drew the conclusion that the grail legends are not rooted in Christianity or British folklore, but in the secret rituals of pre-Christian fertility cults. The symbolism that Eliot adopted from Weston's book includes not only that of the grail quest, but of these fertility rituals as well. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot says of From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890–1915) that “anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies” (21).Themes of fertility, regeneration, and the quest are similarly important in The Great Gatsby. The quest motif in particular has received much attention from critics. Owing heavily to Nick's claim that Gatsby “had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149), most critics have concluded that Gatsby becomes an anti-hero who symbolically capsizes all romantic and honorable notions of a quest by pursuing wealth as a means to win back Daisy. In F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Essay, Edwin Moseley analyzes the novel as an “initiation and quest for the grail,” arguing that The Great Gatsby is “the initiation story of Nick Carraway and the story of Jay Gatsby's misdirected quest” (22). Robert J. Emmitt, in “Love, Death, and Resurrection in The Great Gatsby,” argues that “Gatsby's romantic quest, with its search for a grail and its parodic connotations of the Christian sacrifice, is a parable of the fate of idolatry, and a commentary on its particular American manifestations” (283). In their article “Sangria in the Sangreal: The Great Gatsby as Grail Quest,” D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper characterize Gatsby as a quester and conclude that the grail is “personified by Daisy Buchanan” (203). Similarly, in The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature, Kim Moreland calls Gatsby's story a failed romantic quest and Daisy “a false grail” (143).Indeed, The Great Gatsby is rife with symbols of a quest; however, each of the aforementioned arguments presupposes that the novel's quest motif is ironic, even “parodic.” It seems that none of these critics has considered that perhaps the quest motif has a much more serious, profound, and primeval significance than an ironic comment on contemporary American values.A close reading of The Great Gatsby unveils numerous allusions not only to the grail quest as Weston explains it in From Ritual to Romance but also to the specific mythical elements in which she believes the grail quest is rooted. Considering Fitzgerald's affinity for The Waste Land, he was undoubtedly aware that in the notes to the poem, Eliot states that “Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble” (21). While Fitzgerald's letters do not explicitly mention Weston's work as they do Eliot's, myriad allusions in the novel—along with Eliot's reference to Weston—suggest that Fitzgerald was indeed inspired by From Ritual to Romance and that the grail quest motif in The Great Gatsby, like that in The Waste Land, was influenced by Weston's work. This likely source opens up a new realm of possibility for the significance of the quest in The Great Gatsby and allows us to view Gatsby and Nick not as, respectively, an amoral and a superficial anti-hero, but as archetypal characters in an ancient ritualistic drama.According to Weston, the purpose of the grail quest was not the possession of a material object but, as in the rites of ancient fertility cults, an apotheosis in which the quester gains true knowledge of physical and spiritual life. If we read The Great Gatsby from this perspective, the idea that Daisy is a personification of the grail and that Gatsby plays the role of the quester seems erroneous. As to Nick's assertion that “Gatsby had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149), it is likely that Fitzgerald intended to draw attention to the grail quest motif in the novel, but not in the way that most critics have interpreted it. While there is a dearth of evidence to support the idea that Gatsby mimics the quester and Daisy the grail, abundant evidence exists to suggest an alternative theory: The Great Gatsby is the story of a quest; but not, however, the romantic version of the grail quest associated with King Arthur and Lancelot and the search for a holy relic, nor the quest of Gatsby as he seeks material wealth in pursuit of Daisy. Instead, it is the story of a quest undertaken by Nick Carraway, who seeks gnosis of mortality and divinity, with Gatsby fulfilling the role of the maimed Fisher King who inadvertently leads Nick to his apotheosis. Throughout the novel, thorough evidence verifies that while Gatsby may have “committed himself to the following of a grail” (emphasis added), he is not in fact following the grail. Instead, it is Nick who seeks the grail, and his quest for initiation echoes the rituals of the mystic life cults in which the grail quest is rooted.Before exploring the ways in which The Great Gatsby mirrors the elements of the grail quest presented in From Ritual to Romance, it is necessary to highlight certain aspects of Weston's argument. During her thirty years of studying grail texts, Weston came to doubt the common belief that the myth emerged from either Christianity or British folklore, finding that both explanations of origin proved to be paradoxical, isolated, and disjointed. After studying Frazer's The Golden Bough, she began to formulate an explanation of the grail myth's origins that could reconcile these incongruities. Intriguing similarities between the grail stories and the descriptions of the nature cults in Frazer's book led her to believe that the grail legend may be a record of a life ritual commonly practiced in pre-Christian times and covertly observed in the centuries following the spread of Christianity.The true nature of the grail, Weston claims, can be illuminated by examining the task of the grail quester and its expected results. Scrutinizing the three cycles of the legend that feature Perceval, Gawain, and Galahad as quester/heroes, Weston found that in the majority of existing grail texts, the hero's task is to heal the Fisher King from a debilitating illness or injury, thereby regenerating the king's wasted lands as a result.In most versions of the legend, the exact affliction of the king is quite mysterious. However, Weston discovered in the Sone de Nansai (1250–75) an explanation that she claims applies to all versions in which the king suffers. In this romance, the Fisher King slays the Pagan King of Norway but subsequently falls in love with his daughter, the pagan princess. He baptizes her, though she is not a true believer, then marries her, provoking God's wrath. As punishment for his blasphemy, “His loins are stricken by this bane / From which he suffers lasting pain” (Weston 22). But that is not the only consequence; the Fisher King's infirmity not only emasculates him but renders his lands infertile as a result. As such, it is necessary for the hero to heal the king and in so doing, to restore his lands to vitality.This theme can be traced to earlier literature, most notably to the Rig Veda, or The Thousand and One Hymns (ca. 1500–1200 BC). Written in ancient India and sacred to Hindus, this collection of hymns and praises of the mainly agrarian Aryan population is dedicated to Indra, the god responsible for the rains. More significantly, Indra is praised in the Rig Veda for the “freeing of the waters” (Weston 26); when the evil giant Vritra imprisoned the seven rivers of India and thus imposed drought and starvation on the people, Indra slew him, freeing the rivers from their captivity and restoring the lands back to life and fertility. Weston notes that Indra's accomplishment is the same for which Perceval and Gawain are exalted in grail legend.Like the ancient Aryans who worshipped Indra, most nature cults personified the seasons, weather patterns, vegetation, and other natural elements as divine figures that resembled humans and their experiences. Since these deities symbolized the natural processes of the earth, they were believed to progress from birth to death in the course of a year. One of the primary examples that Weston cites is the Phoenician-Greek god Adonis, who represented the spirit of vegetation. Adonis's annual disappearance into the underworld brought death and sadness to the land; when he returned again in the spring, restoring his reproductive energies to earth, there was tremendous cause for celebration among the nature cults: vegetation bloomed, animals gave birth, and rivers flooded the plains (Weston 40, 43–44).A significant element in the story of Adonis is his cause of death: the vengeful Ares, jealous of Adonis's love affair with Aphrodite, sends a wild boar to wound Adonis mortally in the thigh. Interestingly, Weston points out, scholars generally agree that Adonis's thigh wound is euphemistic for an emasculating injury that symbolizes earth's infertility, with which his death is associated (Weston 43–44). The story of Adonis, a divine youth beloved by a goddess, whose loss of reproductive abilities came to represent the degeneration of earth in autumn and winter, bears a remarkable resemblance to the Fisher King's loss of fecundity, and that of his lands, as punishment for his love of a pagan princess.A final critical point in Weston's argument is her discussion of the “central rite” that explains the mystery of the grail. She tells us that nature cult rituals consisted of two separate rites: public celebrations, in which feasting and other physical pleasures were enjoyed by all members of the cult, and mystery rites observed by only a select few, in which the benefits were individual, spiritual, and often “aimed at … the attainment of a conscious, ecstatic union with the god” (140). These rituals, Weston claims, lie at the very heart of grail legend, for the secret of the grail is “a double initiation into the source of the lower and higher spheres of Life,” the lower sphere being knowledge of human life upon earth, the higher sphere being an understanding of the spiritual forces of life (159). Just as the ancient initiates sought a union with the gods of the nature cults, who transcended earthly existence by bringing the divine gifts of water and vegetation to an ailing land, so the grail quester seeks the ability to heal the king—who, like the fertility gods, embodies humanity and its struggles—thus achieving gnosis of human life.A critical reading of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of From Ritual to Romance reveals numerous striking parallels not only between Gatsby and the Fisher King, but between Gatsby and Adonis as well. Furthermore, extensive evidence links Nick to both the quester in grail legend and to his predecessor, the initiate of the mystic life cults. In many compelling ways, the roles of Daisy and Tom, as well as the novel's setting and plot, further support this theory.To Weston, the Fisher King is “the very essence” of the grail story; he “stand[s] between his people and the land, and the unseen forces which control their destiny”—namely the drought that wastes his lands as a consequence of his illness and the rains that result from his salvation (136). Like the Fisher King, Gatsby's life stages seem to function with the forces of nature. Several of the novel's important events, especially those pertaining directly to Gatsby, occur at a change of seasons. Nick arrives in Gatsby's domain of West Egg around the time of the summer solstice; “with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees,” he feels “that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer” (4), and indeed his life takes a new turn when he meets Gatsby. The day that Daisy and Gatsby choose to reveal their affair to Tom—also the day of Myrtle's death—is “almost the last, certainly the warmest, day of summer” (114). Most importantly, the day on which Gatsby is killed holds “an autumn flavor in the air.” Gatsby's death is sprinkled with images of autumn: it is a “cool, lovely day” when Gatsby walks to his pool against the backdrop of “yellowing trees,” and his gardener tells him that he intends to drain the pool since “leaves'll be falling pretty soon” (153). When Gatsby's body is later discovered, “a small gust of wind” blows the mattress on which he floats, and around it revolves “a cluster of leaves” (162). The autumnal setting of Gatsby's death evokes the death of Adonis, predecessor to the Fisher King; in Cyprus, Adonis's death falls “on the 23rd of September, his resurrection on the 1st of October,” and his feast is celebrated on the autumnal equinox (Weston 46). Given Nick's references to the weather, it is likely that Gatsby's death also falls on or around 23 September, the day after what Nick calls “almost the last … day of summer.”Not only the timing but also the imagery of Gatsby's death highlights a fascinating similarity between Gatsby, Adonis, and the Fisher King. Gatsby is discovered floating on a “laden mattress” that “moved irregularly down the pool” like a bier carrying him to a watery grave (162). This scene resembles Weston's description of the “ceremonies of mourning for the dead god” Adonis, in which mourners “commit[ed] his effigy to the waves”; in some variations of the ceremony an effigy or head was borne “by a current … to Byblos” (Weston 47). Furthermore, in grail legend, the quester often upon at the grail a dead on a bier … or a king on a (Weston The of Gatsby's death scene mirrors these images of Adonis's and the grail king's a point also by Jeffrey Hart, who argues that the Gatsby himself by dead leaves in his death by like the dead fertility god of the of the Fisher King in rains that his Adonis's annual death and resurrection the that life to the Gatsby's immediately the his to Adonis and the Fisher King, it that in Gatsby's death we of The setting of Gatsby's is in the and in a the a and by a of Gatsby's wet to the As the the of are the dead that the falls to which to with this the mythical of Gatsby's As as Gatsby is to the forces of the earth, it is natural that his resurrection to the lands on which the of Long Island only a Nick the of the that Gatsby's death: As my emerged from the into only the of the the at The of the on the of the to me for a while into her and as her her into with a and its are by this which is by Gatsby's death and the that the day of his as the of both the Fisher King and Adonis and life back to their own Gatsby's with the him to the Fisher so his with water the Weston tells us that “the Grail is in the close of either on or the or on the of an important and that “the presence of either or is an important feature in the Adonis As many critics have already out, water images The Great on the is by This of water symbolism can be with the notable presence of the grail motif by reading Gatsby as the Fisher King and not the the Fisher King whose is in the close of Gatsby's physical to Long Island Sound is in descriptions of his much like a Gatsby's home is to de in with a on … and a Gatsby's is from the across from which “the of Egg the we a double to the grail Gatsby's is not only the but also as a its on the Gatsby's is often by its as is Gatsby him, Nick says that have the that Gatsby from the of Nick Gatsby, in his mythical wealth and his on the Gatsby's was story that in a at but in a that like a and was up and down the Long Island Gatsby's in his and Nick explains that in the I his from the of his or the on the of his while his two the water of the over of In the of the is with out at a Gatsby's on the of and and and Nick himself and of as “a of at the “the had and floating in the Sound was a of a to the of the The imagery that Fitzgerald when Nick later Gatsby's who include who was last summer up in … the … … S. … the and the and says Weston, a of which explains the significance of the of Fisher King However, a more specific origin of the can be found in Robert de of (ca. the text to of the Weston explains that the of that holy and his in the certain of the into the of a with the a mystic of which the was as though in other versions of the story “the is as a This story of of the mystic between Gatsby and the Fisher King. If we read the descriptions of Gatsby's we a of any description of Gatsby too a mystic against of and and to a Gatsby's a and who and their “on the of Gatsby's are as of the for certainly they are among the the feast is Gatsby, like the of Gatsby's some of the most compelling evidence Gatsby to the Fisher King and Like Adonis, Gatsby becomes the of it is that rites of the Adonis cults, which Weston numerous versions of grail legend, are also practiced at Gatsby's belief that Adonis each autumn and came back to life each was cause for and celebration by rites of a very specific nature. to The of the the birth and death rites of the Adonis cults “the of and the of and (Weston 46). Weston some intriguing of these that “the most notable feature of the ritual was the to that is the who for and him to his all Furthermore, very these was that of the hair in of the an that also to the of the cults. in grail legend, we upon the grail king on a when the injury to that by Weston notes “the presence of a or in the grail as well as “the of a who has her hair as a result of the … of the Fisher of these bears a to at Gatsby's “the of and the of and Gatsby's feature “a of and and and and and and and The as the the earth from the … the of a and “by the had In the small of the there is as the later Nick the and of a in which “a … had for some and to the already of the Gatsby's house, when the has its we are of a from a in She had a of and the course of her she had that was very was not only she was there was a in the she it with and then up the again in a The down her The presence of this resembles the in the Adonis rituals and in grail Furthermore, of the who has her in grail legend and the who their hair in the nature cult rituals is the presence at Gatsby's of with in new In these may be as but a of the and the of the may to the at the however, when with the numerous other allusions presented in this these images cult ritual grail also in her explanation of the origin of the grail to a ritual of the as they worshipped their god Indra, of the in this of and … are as in the same These presented as and as Weston on to that “the of notably of what we may as a to natural is among we a parallel to feature of Gatsby's in who a in the of an was on the in the … a great of or the for a of the of the or the the people were all over the while bursts of the summer A of who out to be the in a in The similarity between the who to Indra, predecessor of Adonis and of the Fisher King, and the who in celebration of the that is a to Gatsby's be nor can it be is to read Gatsby as a can Gatsby's be as an of the of the a of and for Nick feels at point in the that “the scene had into and The significance that Nick evokes the of and of the nature the and of the may but they are on the of their god (Weston 46). Gatsby, whose energies are to “the of a and (Gatsby becomes the god of these who his his his him in their for were him from those who had found that it was necessary to in this secret that Gatsby is a a even a are in of and more than of Gatsby's to a being further Gatsby's role as counterpart to Adonis and the Fisher becomes even when we the love affair between Gatsby and Daisy and its his Gatsby the affliction of Adonis and the Fisher King, who emasculating as punishment for

F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-proclaimed “profound admiration” (Life in Letters 137) of T. S. Eliot shines an important light on Fitzgerald's composition of The Great Gatsby. In October of 1925, Fitzgerald sent a copy of his novel to Eliot with the following inscription: For T.S. EliotGreatest of Living Poetsfrom his enthusiastic worshipperF. Scott Fitzgerald (Life in Letters 128) The following February, he commented to Maxwell Perkins that “T.S. Eliot for whom you know my profound admiration—I think he's the greatest living poet in any language—wrote me he'd read Gatsby three times + thought it was the 1st step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James” (Life in Letters 137).Eliot's influence on Fitzgerald surpassed general awe and inspiration; in fact, there are many indications that The Great Gatsby is in part an emulation of The Waste Land (1922). Several critics have already elucidated this literary relationship, such as Jeffrey Hart, who points out in his article “Rediscovering Fitzgerald” that “Fitzgerald studied The Waste Land … while he was working on Gatsby” and that “[t]he book both salutes Eliot and answers him” (208, 209). Careful readings of each text indeed reveal numerous similarities between The Waste Land and The Great Gatsby. Perhaps the most notable parallel is the presence of the “valley of ashes … the waste land” in Gatsby, home of George and Myrtle Wilson and setting for Myrtle's death (Gatsby 23, 24). Other intriguing echoes of The Waste Land include the water imagery that pervades The Great Gatsby. The “small, foul river” in the valley of ashes seems to be a counterpart of the “dull canal” in The Waste Land (Gatsby 24; Eliot 189). Nick lamenting Gatsby's death by the waters of Long Island Sound evokes Eliot's narrator who weeps by the waters of Leman. Imagery of water and color even suggest a similarity between Fitzgerald's Daisy and Eliot's hyacinth girl. When Daisy meets Gatsby at Nick's house, she appears “under the dripping bare lilac trees…. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops” (Gatsby 85). Similarly, Eliot's hyacinth girl returns “from the Hyacinth garden,” her “arms full, and [her] hair wet” (37, 38).Just as The Great Gatsby is indebted to The Waste Land, so too is The Waste Land indebted—“deeply … indebted,” to use Eliot's own words—to Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920). In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot credits Weston's book for “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem” (21). Weston, a lifelong scholar of grail texts, wrote From Ritual to Romance as a culmination of her studies of pre-classical, classical, and medieval myth. From her enormous breadth and depth of research, she drew the conclusion that the grail legends are not rooted in Christianity or British folklore, but in the secret rituals of pre-Christian fertility cults. The symbolism that Eliot adopted from Weston's book includes not only that of the grail quest, but of these fertility rituals as well. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot says of From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890–1915) that “anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies” (21).Themes of fertility, regeneration, and the quest are similarly important in The Great Gatsby. The quest motif in particular has received much attention from critics. Owing heavily to Nick's claim that Gatsby “had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149), most critics have concluded that Gatsby becomes an anti-hero who symbolically capsizes all romantic and honorable notions of a quest by pursuing wealth as a means to win back Daisy. In F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Essay, Edwin Moseley analyzes the novel as an “initiation and quest for the grail,” arguing that The Great Gatsby is “the initiation story of Nick Carraway and the story of Jay Gatsby's misdirected quest” (22). Robert J. Emmitt, in “Love, Death, and Resurrection in The Great Gatsby,” argues that “Gatsby's romantic quest, with its search for a grail and its parodic connotations of the Christian sacrifice, is a parable of the fate of idolatry, and a commentary on its particular American manifestations” (283). In their article “Sangria in the Sangreal: The Great Gatsby as Grail Quest,” D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper characterize Gatsby as a quester and conclude that the grail is “personified by Daisy Buchanan” (203). Similarly, in The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature, Kim Moreland calls Gatsby's story a failed romantic quest and Daisy “a false grail” (143).Indeed, The Great Gatsby is rife with symbols of a quest; however, each of the aforementioned arguments presupposes that the novel's quest motif is ironic, even “parodic.” It seems that none of these critics has considered that perhaps the quest motif has a much more serious, profound, and primeval significance than an ironic comment on contemporary American values.A close reading of The Great Gatsby unveils numerous allusions not only to the grail quest as Weston explains it in From Ritual to Romance but also to the specific mythical elements in which she believes the grail quest is rooted. Considering Fitzgerald's affinity for The Waste Land, he was undoubtedly aware that in the notes to the poem, Eliot states that “Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble” (21). While Fitzgerald's letters do not explicitly mention Weston's work as they do Eliot's, myriad allusions in the novel—along with Eliot's reference to Weston—suggest that Fitzgerald was indeed inspired by From Ritual to Romance and that the grail quest motif in The Great Gatsby, like that in The Waste Land, was influenced by Weston's work. This likely source opens up a new realm of possibility for the significance of the quest in The Great Gatsby and allows us to view Gatsby and Nick not as, respectively, an amoral and a superficial anti-hero, but as archetypal characters in an ancient ritualistic drama.According to Weston, the purpose of the grail quest was not the possession of a material object but, as in the rites of ancient fertility cults, an apotheosis in which the quester gains true knowledge of physical and spiritual life. If we read The Great Gatsby from this perspective, the idea that Daisy is a personification of the grail and that Gatsby plays the role of the quester seems erroneous. As to Nick's assertion that “Gatsby had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149), it is likely that Fitzgerald intended to draw attention to the grail quest motif in the novel, but not in the way that most critics have interpreted it. While there is a dearth of evidence to support the idea that Gatsby mimics the quester and Daisy the grail, abundant evidence exists to suggest an alternative theory: The Great Gatsby is the story of a quest; but not, however, the romantic version of the grail quest associated with King Arthur and Lancelot and the search for a holy relic, nor the quest of Gatsby as he seeks material wealth in pursuit of Daisy. Instead, it is the story of a quest undertaken by Nick Carraway, who seeks gnosis of mortality and divinity, with Gatsby fulfilling the role of the maimed Fisher King who inadvertently leads Nick to his apotheosis. Throughout the novel, thorough evidence verifies that while Gatsby may have “committed himself to the following of a grail” (emphasis added), he is not in fact following the grail. Instead, it is Nick who seeks the grail, and his quest for initiation echoes the rituals of the mystic life cults in which the grail quest is rooted.Before exploring the ways in which The Great Gatsby mirrors the elements of the grail quest presented in From Ritual to Romance, it is necessary to highlight certain aspects of Weston's argument. During her thirty years of studying grail texts, Weston came to doubt the common belief that the myth emerged from either Christianity or British folklore, finding that both explanations of origin proved to be paradoxical, isolated, and disjointed. After studying Frazer's The Golden Bough, she began to formulate an explanation of the grail myth's origins that could reconcile these incongruities. Intriguing similarities between the grail stories and the descriptions of the nature cults in Frazer's book led her to believe that the grail legend may be a record of a life ritual commonly practiced in pre-Christian times and covertly observed in the centuries following the spread of Christianity.The true nature of the grail, Weston claims, can be illuminated by examining the task of the grail quester and its expected results. Scrutinizing the three cycles of the legend that feature Perceval, Gawain, and Galahad as quester/heroes, Weston found that in the majority of existing grail texts, the hero's task is to heal the Fisher King from a debilitating illness or injury, thereby regenerating the king's wasted lands as a result.In most versions of the legend, the exact affliction of the king is quite mysterious. However, Weston discovered in the Sone de Nansai (1250–75) an explanation that she claims applies to all versions in which the king suffers. In this romance, the Fisher King slays the Pagan King of Norway but subsequently falls in love with his daughter, the pagan princess. He baptizes her, though she is not a true believer, then marries her, provoking God's wrath. As punishment for his blasphemy, “His loins are stricken by this bane / From which he suffers lasting pain” (Weston 22). But that is not the only consequence; the Fisher King's infirmity not only emasculates him but renders his lands infertile as a result. As such, it is necessary for the hero to heal the king and in so doing, to restore his lands to vitality.This theme can be traced to earlier literature, most notably to the Rig Veda, or The Thousand and One Hymns (ca. 1500–1200 BC). Written in ancient India and sacred to Hindus, this collection of hymns and praises of the mainly agrarian Aryan population is dedicated to Indra, the god responsible for the rains. More significantly, Indra is praised in the Rig Veda for the “freeing of the waters” (Weston 26); when the evil giant Vritra imprisoned the seven rivers of India and thus imposed drought and starvation on the people, Indra slew him, freeing the rivers from their captivity and restoring the lands back to life and fertility. Weston notes that Indra's accomplishment is the same for which Perceval and Gawain are exalted in grail legend.Like the ancient Aryans who worshipped Indra, most nature cults personified the seasons, weather patterns, vegetation, and other natural elements as divine figures that resembled humans and their experiences. Since these deities symbolized the natural processes of the earth, they were believed to progress from birth to death in the course of a year. One of the primary examples that Weston cites is the Phoenician-Greek god Adonis, who represented the spirit of vegetation. Adonis's annual disappearance into the underworld brought death and sadness to the land; when he returned again in the spring, restoring his reproductive energies to earth, there was tremendous cause for celebration among the nature cults: vegetation bloomed, animals gave birth, and rivers flooded the plains (Weston 40, 43–44).A significant element in the story of Adonis is his cause of death: the vengeful Ares, jealous of Adonis's love affair with Aphrodite, sends a wild boar to wound Adonis mortally in the thigh. Interestingly, Weston points out, scholars generally agree that Adonis's thigh wound is euphemistic for an emasculating injury that symbolizes earth's infertility, with which his death is associated (Weston 43–44). The story of Adonis, a divine youth beloved by a goddess, whose loss of reproductive abilities came to represent the degeneration of earth in autumn and winter, bears a remarkable resemblance to the Fisher King's loss of fecundity, and that of his lands, as punishment for his love of a pagan princess.A final critical point in Weston's argument is her discussion of the “central rite” that explains the mystery of the grail. She tells us that nature cult rituals consisted of two separate rites: public celebrations, in which feasting and other physical pleasures were enjoyed by all members of the cult, and mystery rites observed by only a select few, in which the benefits were individual, spiritual, and often “aimed at … the attainment of a conscious, ecstatic union with the god” (140). These rituals, Weston claims, lie at the very heart of grail legend, for the secret of the grail is “a double initiation into the source of the lower and higher spheres of Life,” the lower sphere being knowledge of human life upon earth, the higher sphere being an understanding of the spiritual forces of life (159). Just as the ancient initiates sought a union with the gods of the nature cults, who transcended earthly existence by bringing the divine gifts of water and vegetation to an ailing land, so the grail quester seeks the ability to heal the king—who, like the fertility gods, embodies humanity and its struggles—thus achieving gnosis of human life.A critical reading of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of From Ritual to Romance reveals numerous striking parallels not only between Gatsby and the Fisher King, but between Gatsby and Adonis as well. Furthermore, extensive evidence links Nick to both the quester in grail legend and to his predecessor, the initiate of the mystic life cults. In many compelling ways, the roles of Daisy and Tom, as well as the novel's setting and plot, further support this theory.To Weston, the Fisher King is “the very essence” of the grail story; he “stand[s] between his people and the land, and the unseen forces which control their destiny”—namely the drought that wastes his lands as a consequence of his illness and the rains that result from his salvation (136). Like the Fisher King, Gatsby's life stages seem to function with the forces of nature. Several of the novel's important events, especially those pertaining directly to Gatsby, occur at a change of seasons. Nick arrives in Gatsby's domain of West Egg around the time of the summer solstice; “with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees,” he feels “that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer” (4), and indeed his life takes a new turn when he meets Gatsby. The day that Daisy and Gatsby choose to reveal their affair to Tom—also the day of Myrtle's death—is “almost the last, certainly the warmest, day of summer” (114). Most importantly, the day on which Gatsby is killed holds “an autumn flavor in the air.” Gatsby's death is sprinkled with images of autumn: it is a “cool, lovely day” when Gatsby walks to his pool against the backdrop of “yellowing trees,” and his gardener tells him that he intends to drain the pool since “leaves'll be falling pretty soon” (153). When Gatsby's body is later discovered, “a small gust of wind” blows the mattress on which he floats, and around it revolves “a cluster of leaves” (162). The autumnal setting of Gatsby's death evokes the death of Adonis, predecessor to the Fisher King; in Cyprus, Adonis's death falls “on the 23rd of September, his resurrection on the 1st of October,” and his feast is celebrated on the autumnal equinox (Weston 46). Given Nick's references to the weather, it is likely that Gatsby's death also falls on or around 23 September, the day after what Nick calls “almost the last … day of summer.”Not only the timing but also the imagery of Gatsby's death highlights a fascinating similarity between Gatsby, Adonis, and the Fisher King. Gatsby is discovered floating on a “laden mattress” that “moved irregularly down the pool” like a bier carrying him to a watery grave (162). This scene resembles Weston's description of the “ceremonies of mourning for the dead god” Adonis, in which mourners “commit[ed] his effigy to the waves”; in some variations of the ceremony an effigy or head was borne “by a current … to Byblos” (Weston 47). Furthermore, in grail legend, the quester often upon at the grail a dead on a bier … or a king on a (Weston The of Gatsby's death scene mirrors these images of Adonis's and the grail king's a point also by Jeffrey Hart, who argues that the Gatsby himself by dead leaves in his death by like the dead fertility god of the of the Fisher King in rains that his Adonis's annual death and resurrection the that life to the Gatsby's immediately the his to Adonis and the Fisher King, it that in Gatsby's death we of The setting of Gatsby's is in the and in a the a and by a of Gatsby's wet to the As the the of are the dead that the falls to which to with this the mythical of Gatsby's As as Gatsby is to the forces of the earth, it is natural that his resurrection to the lands on which the of Long Island only a Nick the of the that Gatsby's death: As my emerged from the into only the of the the at The of the on the of the to me for a while into her and as her her into with a and its are by this which is by Gatsby's death and the that the day of his as the of both the Fisher King and Adonis and life back to their own Gatsby's with the him to the Fisher so his with water the Weston tells us that “the Grail is in the close of either on or the or on the of an important and that “the presence of either or is an important feature in the Adonis As many critics have already out, water images The Great on the is by This of water symbolism can be with the notable presence of the grail motif by reading Gatsby as the Fisher King and not the the Fisher King whose is in the close of Gatsby's physical to Long Island Sound is in descriptions of his much like a Gatsby's home is to de in with a on … and a Gatsby's is from the across from which “the of Egg the we a double to the grail Gatsby's is not only the but also as a its on the Gatsby's is often by its as is Gatsby him, Nick says that have the that Gatsby from the of Nick Gatsby, in his mythical wealth and his on the Gatsby's was story that in a at but in a that like a and was up and down the Long Island Gatsby's in his and Nick explains that in the I his from the of his or the on the of his while his two the water of the over of In the of the is with out at a Gatsby's on the of and and and Nick himself and of as “a of at the “the had and floating in the Sound was a of a to the of the The imagery that Fitzgerald when Nick later Gatsby's who include who was last summer up in … the … … S. … the and the and says Weston, a of which explains the significance of the of Fisher King However, a more specific origin of the can be found in Robert de of (ca. the text to of the Weston explains that the of that holy and his in the certain of the into the of a with the a mystic of which the was as though in other versions of the story “the is as a This story of of the mystic between Gatsby and the Fisher King. If we read the descriptions of Gatsby's we a of any description of Gatsby too a mystic against of and and to a Gatsby's a and who and their “on the of Gatsby's are as of the for certainly they are among the the feast is Gatsby, like the of Gatsby's some of the most compelling evidence Gatsby to the Fisher King and Like Adonis, Gatsby becomes the of it is that rites of the Adonis cults, which Weston numerous versions of grail legend, are also practiced at Gatsby's belief that Adonis each autumn and came back to life each was cause for and celebration by rites of a very specific nature. to The of the the birth and death rites of the Adonis cults “the of and the of and (Weston 46). Weston some intriguing of these that “the most notable feature of the ritual was the to that is the who for and him to his all Furthermore, very these was that of the hair in of the an that also to the of the cults. in grail legend, we upon the grail king on a when the injury to that by Weston notes “the presence of a or in the grail as well as “the of a who has her hair as a result of the … of the Fisher of these bears a to at Gatsby's “the of and the of and Gatsby's feature “a of and and and and and and and The as the the earth from the … the of a and “by the had In the small of the there is as the later Nick the and of a in which “a … had for some and to the already of the Gatsby's house, when the has its we are of a from a in She had a of and the course of her she had that was very was not only she was there was a in the she it with and then up the again in a The down her The presence of this resembles the in the Adonis rituals and in grail Furthermore, of the who has her in grail legend and the who their hair in the nature cult rituals is the presence at Gatsby's of with in new In these may be as but a of the and the of the may to the at the however, when with the numerous other allusions presented in this these images cult ritual grail also in her explanation of the origin of the grail to a ritual of the as they worshipped their god Indra, of the in this of and … are as in the same These presented as and as Weston on to that “the of notably of what we may as a to natural is among we a parallel to feature of Gatsby's in who a in the of an was on the in the … a great of or the for a of the of the or the the people were all over the while bursts of the summer A of who out to be the in a in The similarity between the who to Indra, predecessor of Adonis and of the Fisher King, and the who in celebration of the that is a to Gatsby's be nor can it be is to read Gatsby as a can Gatsby's be as an of the of the a of and for Nick feels at point in the that “the scene had into and The significance that Nick evokes the of and of the nature the and of the may but they are on the of their god (Weston 46). Gatsby, whose energies are to “the of a and (Gatsby becomes the god of these who his his his him in their for were him from those who had found that it was necessary to in this secret that Gatsby is a a even a are in of and more than of Gatsby's to a being further Gatsby's role as counterpart to Adonis and the Fisher becomes even when we the love affair between Gatsby and Daisy and its his Gatsby the affliction of Adonis and the Fisher King, who emasculating as punishment for