Final Critique: Sample Introduction
English 10
Example Introduction
The American Dream is a notion of happiness or greatness created by social institutions and social movements. In this land of freedom, ordinary people are supposed to be able to strive for and achieve their goals through hard work, perseverance, and moral behavior. However, the ideals that society creates can be misleading and even unattainable. They appear to be utopian yet they are not always in the interest of the common person; instead, they form a “master narrative” that authoritatively rules over a society and suppresses individuality, possibly leading to damnation rather than salvation. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, the self-righteous magistrates create a rigid standard of life based on the ideal of pious simplicity. In this model, the townspeople are supposed to strive for religious wholeness, or the 17th-century Puritans’ idea of the American Dream. Since the founding forepersons escaped religious persecution to create a better community in America, the townspeople conform to the Boston colony’s unified quest for purity, putting aside their own individual aspirations. Whereas Hawthorne’s novel represents the American Dream as a religious expectation enforced by social institutions, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby depicts the dream as a consumer-centered social movement. The materialistic values of the characters in The Great Gatsby reflect the freedom, decadence, and self-expression of 1920’s America. The wealthy elite embody a dream that happiness can be achieved through affluence. In both texts, the main characters strive to overcome social adversity and pursue their own dreams, but in doing so, Hester twists and defies the Puritan ideal, while Gatsby follows and is engulfed by materialism. The end results for the two protagonists highlight the importance of being independent from society’s prescribed ideals. Rather than trying to assimilate into “the master narrative” of their respective societies, individuals must create their own American Dream or else face self-destruction.