The Damaged Psyche of Humanity
Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to
express the fragile psychological state of humanity in the twentieth
century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of World
War I challenged cultural notions of masculine identity, causing
artists to question the romantic literary ideal of a visionary-poet
capable of changing the world through verse. Modernist writers wanted
to capture their transformed world, which they perceived as fractured,
alienated, and denigrated. Europe lost an entire generation of young
men to the horrors of the so-called Great War, causing a general
crisis of masculinity as survivors struggled to find their place
in a radically altered society. As for England, the aftershocks
of World War I directly contributed to the dissolution of the British
Empire. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and
he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving. “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) demonstrates
this sense of indecisive paralysis as the titular speaker wonders
whether he should eat a piece of fruit, make a radical change, or
if he has the fortitude to keep living. Humanity’s collectively
damaged psyche prevented people from communicating with one another,
an idea that Eliot explored in many works, including “A Game of
Chess” (the second part of The Waste Land) and
“The Hollow Men.”
The Power of Literary History
Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the Western
literary canon, and he packed his work full of allusions,
quotations, footnotes, and scholarly exegeses. In “The
Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an essay first published in 1919,
Eliot praises the literary tradition and states that the best writers
are those who write with a sense of continuity with those writers
who came before, as if all of literature constituted a stream in
which each new writer must enter and swim. Only the very best new
work will subtly shift the stream’s current and thus improve the
literary tradition. Eliot also argued that the literary past must
be integrated into contemporary poetry. But the poet must guard
against excessive academic knowledge and distill only the most essential
bits of the past into a poem, thereby enlightening readers. The
Waste Land juxtaposes fragments of various elements of
literary and mythic traditions with scenes and sounds from modern
life. The effect of this poetic collage is both a reinterpretation
of canonical texts and a historical context for his examination
of society and humanity.
The Changing Nature of Gender Roles
Over the course of Eliot’s life, gender roles and sexuality
became increasingly flexible, and Eliot reflected those changes
in his work. In the repressive Victorian era of the
nineteenth century, women were confined to the domestic sphere,
sexuality was not discussed or publicly explored, and a puritanical
atmosphere dictated most social interactions. Queen Victoria’s death
in 1901 helped usher in a new era of excess
and forthrightness, now called the Edwardian Age, which lasted until 1910.
World War I, from 1914 to 1918,
further transformed society, as people felt both increasingly alienated
from one another and empowered to break social mores. English women
began agitating in earnest for the right to vote in 1918,
and the flappers of the Jazz Age began smoking and drinking alcohol
in public. Women were allowed to attend school, and women who could
afford it continued their education at those universities that began
accepting women in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers
created gay and lesbian characters and re-imagined masculinity and
femininity as characteristics people could assume or shrug off rather
than as absolute identities dictated by society.
Eliot simultaneously lauded the end of the Victorian era
and expressed concern about the freedoms inherent in the modern
age. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” reflects the feelings
of emasculation experienced by many men as they returned home from
World War I to find women empowered by their new role as wage earners.
Prufrock, unable to make a decision, watches women wander in
and out of a room, “talking of Michelangelo” (14),
and elsewhere admires their downy, bare arms. A disdain for unchecked
sexuality appears in both “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (1918)
and The Waste Land. The latter portrays rape, prostitution,
a conversation about abortion, and other incidences of nonreproductive
sexuality. Nevertheless, the poem’s central character, Tiresias,
is a hermaphrodite—and his powers of prophesy and transformation are,
in some sense, due to his male and female genitalia. With Tiresias,
Eliot creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by
the two genders coming together in one body.
