How was Ambition explored in books published before the mid-20th century
My uncle always told me:
“Ambition is like water. Humans need it to survive and too little will weaken and kill you. In contrast, too much of it will make you drown.”
I believe that this statement applies to every single individual, ambitions are crucial to living a life. An ambitious attitude is capable of leading anyone to triumph and satisfaction, regardless of what is put in front of them. Having ambitions would also enable you to stay on the right path, however, once it becomes an obsession, it will share similar characteristics of a parasite. Benefitting from your mishaps and will try its best to make its host go astray.
If we allow our minds to be overcome, obsessed or controlled by our ambitions and goals, it could lead to our suffering. Continuous guilt may overcome us for the acts that we may have committed to achieving that goal. Whether they may be murders or injustice to secure your power. Or maybe longing for your true love for years, doing all that hard work to reach her social status to marry her, shaping your whole life around that goal. And at the end taking the blame for her crime and ending up in your grave without acquiring the soulmate you were obsessed to gain.
How would you feel?

Being too invested in your ambitions can pollute your minds and start controlling your body; making you do things that you could never have done if you were in your right mental state.
‘Macbeth’, by William Shakespeare, demonstrates how the lust of power can release someone’s inner devil. Shakespeare showcases the theme of ambition negatively, especially throughout the latter half of the play.

At the beginning of the play, the witches begin the scene with predictions that Macbeth will find it difficult to differentiate between right and wrong throughout the rest of his life. I sense that this foreshadowing that Shakespeare uses, is to establish Macbeth’s future to the audience. When Macbeth thinks he hears a voice while killing Duncan, it foreshadows insomnia that will plague Macbeth and his wife hence presenting the consequences of ambition, or in this case obsession.
After reading Macbeth, I believe that Lady Macbeth is more ambitious than Macbeth and has fewer moral ethics. There have been several factors that have been a driving force to converting Macbeth’s hidden ambition into an obsession. For instance, it was Lady Macbeth’s constant egging that encouraged Macbeth to overcome his guilt that he was experiencing and act on the prophecies. She goads her husband into the act, by attacking his manhood and mocks him for his “heart so white.”
Macbeth’s ambition causes him to murder many close friends, which gradually leads to his downfall. For instance, Macbeth murders Duncan, who had been a guest in his castle. Furthermore, Macbeth orders his men to kill Banquo and his son, one of his closest friends, as he poses a threat to the power he possesses. By letting his ambition corrupt his morals by murdering Macduff’s family and other individuals, Macbeth sets the stage for his downfall.
Shakespeare uses vivid imagery in Macbeth that presents to the audience the dangers of getting obsessed with your goals and ambitions. Hallucinations are a very important motif that Shakespeare uses throughout the play; it not only shows the dangers of ambition but also the mental effect this uncontrolled ambition does to the character.

“Is this a dagger which I see before me?”
This is an important quote from act 2 scene 1 and is an example of hallucination that Shakespeare uses as a warning for the sin that Macbeth was about to commit. When Macbeth was about to kill Duncan, he saw a dagger floating in the air. It was covered with blood and pointed toward the king’s chamber, where Macbeth was heading, the dagger seemed to represent the crime on which Macbeth was about to commit.
Macbeth then sees another hallucination that looked like Banquo’s ghost sitting in a chair at a feast. The ghost of Banquo essentially warns Macbeth that his ambition for power has corrupted his mind and has made him immoral. Due to the overdose of guilt that he was feeling, his ambition soon turned into his weakness which consequently led to insanity. Lady Macbeth too faces insanity and starts to sleepwalk and think her hands are stained with the blood of Macduff’s family. All these hallucinations and blood that Shakespeare showcases symbolises a sign of the guilt and how weak the character is feeling. Lady Macbeth eventually commits suicide as a consequence of her horrendous acts.

This can occur to anyone in anytime when they are experiencing guilt, hallucinations just as uncommon as they sound, take part in many people’s lives when they have done something wrong and are guilty or are missing someone desperately. I have come across hallucinations throughout my lifetime. The one that’s had the most profound impact on me had been when I accidentally killed my fish by bumping into the fish feed container and letting all the fish feed distribute across the tank without realising. I would often see my Angelfish just lying dead everywhere I go. It took me almost three months to overcome that guilt that had been rock solid in my heart.
Macbeth has been a good life-teaching book for not only me but other fanatics of Shakespeare. Shakespeare tries to establish through this play, the outcomes of what an uncontrolled ambition can do to someone. Being a very ambitious person myself, I must admit that I have let a few of my ambitions lose control. Of course, none of them triggered outcomes like Macbeth had suffered, however, that was only because I had the aid of my parents, who helped me overcome the outrage I was experiencing. It was almost unbearable to see me be trumped by my classmates in preschool at a bike race. Oh, how I practised so much for that race, having nearly been roadkill at a road next to the preschool, I even sabotaged Taylor’s tricycle by poking a hole in one of the tyres. But she still won. I don’t know how or why. I was feeling vengeful and could have done something so bad if I wasn’t comforted by my parents. Shakespeare demonstrates to us how if the people in your surroundings are just as immoral and obsessive as you are in that situation, you will too end up like Macbeth. Without any help from your loved ones at such a time, will leave you astray and you would never be able to stop the agony you will be causing to you and your surroundings.
Another important quote that makes this point more convincing is:
“It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood “
This quote from Macbeth is important because it essentially indicates to us how he believes that he won’t be able to stop killing people who come in his way after his first murder of Duncan. This quote is also an example of blood imagery that we tend to see throughout the play.
Fitsgerald, on the contrary, takes a different approach at showcasing ambition in The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby revolves primarily around the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, trying to live the ‘American Dream’ by reuniting with Daisy, the love he had lost some years earlier and shaped his life around her, which soon turns into an obsession. The American Dream can be defined as the belief that anyone, regardless of their race, social class, gender, or nationality, can be successful in America if they do hard work. Something that may be considered living the American dream in the early-mid 20th century would have been having a nice house, being wealthy and married, with two kids.
The story begins in the year 1922 and provides us with some background about WWI. The 1920s were a particularly tense time in America, especially due to the Great Depression, which made many Americans believe and try to achieve the American Dream to live a life full of contentment and success.

Later in the book, we learn about Gatsby’s past where he supposedly had nowhere near the wealth he did later in his life. This was the point which initially made it more convincing for me that Gatsby was in pursuit of the American Dream, and for him, the American Dream would be personifying Daisy.
In chapter four, we learn about Gatsby’s goal to win Daisy back. Despite being a millionaire and living in a lavish mansion, Gatsby desires only Daisy now to live in complete happiness, to live the American Dream. So, in Chapter 5, when Daisy and Gatsby reunite and begin an affair, I was thinking that he would eventually achieve his goal of not only Daisy but also the American Dream because I could sense how ambitious he was to achieve this dream.
However, in Chapters 7 and 8, everything comes crashing down: Daisy refuses to leave Tom, Myrtle is killed by Daisy, Gatsby then takes the blame for Daisy’s crime and then George breaks down and kills him and then himself. Furthermore, we discover around the end of the story that Gatsby didn’t even achieve all his wealth through hard work as the American Dream would stipulate. Instead, we learn that he was a fraud and earned his money unfairly.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
The last line of The Great Gatsby was one of the most significant and the most complicated line of the book because this one sentence can be interpreted in different ways and talks about the human nature and life. It took me days to decipher the actual meaning of this sentence, of course, I got the context of what Fitsgerald was trying to say here but to this day I’m still not completely sure. The word ‘borne’ was the word that was initially giving the sentence multiple meanings. Which is why I had to interpret the line in two different ways:

After searching up the word “borne” to get a proper definition, I found multiple aspects to the meaning of the word. If Fitsgerald used ‘borne’ as a word for burden. Then the last line would mean that our past is like an anchor or a weight and no matter how hard we would try to go forward in life, everything we do will instantly turn into our past, and this past cannot be altered or done over again as Gatsby attempted to do.
Many people want to recapture an idealized past or want to fix that mistake they had made before but when this ambition to recapture the past turns into an obsession, it could lead to the suffering of one’s life, just as it led to Gatsby’s. I felt like this interpretation of the sentence corresponded with me. Doing those minor mistakes in the past has always led me to reminisce about them and curse myself, I always desired to just go back to the moment my past self was about to make that mistake and urge him to not be a numbskull and use his brain. How I wish I could tell my past-self before the English exam to not spend so much time on the poem and instead begin from the short story. Minor mistakes like these have often led me to imagine if I could change my past. But this sentence from Fitsgerald has certainly taught me that the past can never be changed or done over because it is an anchor, you can’t move that anchor forward with your boat, either leave it and move forward with ease or be held back with the anchor and be led to misery.
On the contrary, there is a positive interpretation of this sentence. For example, if Fitsgerald used “borne” as the “to give birth” aspect and the phrase “so we beat on” in an active and physical perspective, then the idea of beating on may represent human nature. The idea of beating on is the optimism and perseverance that humans have in their nature, humans will try to give an unyielding response to the ever-strong current trying to pull their boat back. In this interpretation, we are battling against our fate and despite the constant current pulling us back, with resilience and perseverance, we move forward as much as we can.
Charles Dickins, in Great Expectations, tries to establish that ambition and self-improvement is something many aspire for, but sometimes, ambition can create issues and goad one into actions they never knew they would do, as demonstrated in Macbeth.
After some research, I discovered that “pip” is a small seed in a fruit, something that starts as something diminutive and then develops and grows into something new. It then may seem that Pip’s name was intentionally used by Dickins, as Great Expectations is a bildungsroman, essentially a story of the growth and development of the protagonist. Dickens presents ambition rather positively, unlike Shakespeare and Fitsgerald. He presents ambition as something capable to improve oneself generating both positive and negative results.

Pip’s early ambitions focus on elevating his social class in society so that he would be able to be deemed worthy of Estella, the girl who he dearly loves and shapes his life around, also shown in The Great Gatsby. However, he turns himself into the complete opposite of the once kind Pip. He becomes unkind to those who were always the kindest to him in his rough times, such as Joe. He then ends up ruining himself financially.
I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard, to look at my coarse hands and my common boots. … They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages.
For the first time, when Pip was alone, he started to notice the difference in his hands and the attire he wore, which clearly distinguished the social class between him and Estella. Estella criticised Pip’s behaviour and his attire as coarse and common. Pip never noticed nor did he care about his behaviour and clothing in comparison to Miss Havisham’s affluent household. However, Estella’s criticism tore a hole in his heart. When he started to see through Estella’s eyes, Pip could see him and his family as inadequate and ordinary.
“I wanted to make Joe less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my society and less open to Estella’s reproach.”
This points out how conservative Pip was beginning to get that he wanted his role model, Joe, to start changing his attire and his behaviour to look reputable in front of Estella. He wanted to pass his knowledge of being a gentleman and his education on to Joe, but it was not entirely out of the goodness of his heart. Pip started to become ashamed of Joe’s lack of education and wanted him to be a gentleman too so that maybe his family would have a better reputation in front of Estella. After Pip started to become wealthy and closer to becoming a gentleman, he began to think of himself above Joe. This quote is an example of what being too ambitious can do to you. In a deontological perspective, being arrogant as Pip is acting is considered immoral. Philosopher, Immanuel Kant believed that ethical actions follow universal moral laws such as not lying. Being modest is encouraged in deontology and being a teenage philosopher myself, I have always tried to stay modest. To reiterate, this quote gives us a prime example of how being too ambitious can ruin your moral ethics, for instance, judging your own family and wanting them to change solely to achieve your goal.
“Yes, Pip, dear boy. I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec’lated and got rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth. I worked hard that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy! Do I tell it fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, for you to know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman — and, Pip, you’re him!”
This quote shows us how it was because of Pip’s small charity that he gave Magwitch, an escaped prisoner, something to live for as well as impacting his mentality positively. It is because of Pip that Magwitch grew so rich through honest and fair labour. It was also because of Magwitch’s gratitude and generosity that Pip became so successful and affluent. He was going to fulfil his dream of becoming a gentleman, however, it ended up being a disappointment after he found out that Magwitch was his benefactor this whole time, as indicated by the previous quote.

In addition, he also learns that all those gentlemen living in lavish mansions and those wealthy women walking along with a foot tall poodle pretentiously, owe their wealth, ego and their polished manner to those who are not-so-wealthy, having to suffer physically and do labour.
As you might have guessed, the moral of the story is that affection, kindness and loyalty are more important than ambitions such as social advancement, wealth, and class. Dickins tries to demonstrate to us how ambitions are vital for everyone to live, however, we should never forget who we are and should always be loyal, affectionate and kind to everyone, as kindness can change a person’s life forever. For instance, it was because of Pip’s kindness to Magwitch, why he became a gentleman and how Magwitch’s life drastically changed from an escaped convict to an honest and fair hard-working man.
Macbeth, The Great Gatsby and Great Expectations all oppose to being too immersed in your ambitions as they always lead to negative outcomes if you are without the aid from your loved ones. Great Expectations was probably the book that was the most different out of the three, more positively. It encourages having ambitions, which Macbeth and The Great Gatsby do not specifically point out. However, they all agree to not be too immersed in your ambitions.
These books during my reading journey have laid a significant impact on me, both entertaining and educating me about the dangers of ambition, providing me with a life masterclass of how not to fall down the cliff of morality and ethics.
