Article --- Kumamoto, "Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby": The marriage trope
Article: Kumamoto -- Jerz: American Lit II (EL 267)
Thus the chicken trope unmasks the cowardly Tom and Daisy's "conspiring together" to re-establish the unbreakable, unholy alliance of marriage, cash, and status--a fundamental cause of Gatsby's tragedy.
The bit about marriage being an "unholy alliance" really caught my attention while reading Kumamoto's essay.
Oh, and I wasn't sure what was meant by "trope," so I checked it out at Wikipedia:
A trope is a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words, i.e. using a word in a way other than what is considered its literal or normal form.
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In literature, a trope is a familiar and repeated symbol, meme, theme, motif, style, character or thing that permeates a particular type of literature. They are usually tied heavily to genre.