Allison Dell Otto
Taken as a triptych, T. S. Eliot’s poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Sweeney Erect,” and “The Waste Land” offer a compelling, disturbing set of theses regarding the possibilities of the interpersonal in the nascent Modernist age. The three poems, all written during or shortly after World War I, reflect the disillusionment and cynicism often found in works of the literary Modernist tradition. In particular, the possibility of meaningful interpersonal connection is markedly tenuous in the narratives contained in these works. “Prufrock” offers the first glimpse into Eliot’s apprehension about interpersonal relationships and focuses primarily on the disappointment of heterosexual romance. In “Sweeney Erect,” the interpersonal is maimed by violence and inhuman disinterest devoid of warmth or compassion. “The Waste Land,” the most expansive and the knottiest of the three poems, similarly presents a troubling mix of violence, hopelessness, and detachment in its portrayal of human connection. Set against the backdrop of the urban industrial landscape in the wake of a demoralizing, world-shaking war, this trio of poems depicts individual characters and their relationships with others as violent, unsettling, inhumane, and ultimately monstrous.
In Monster Culture in the 21st Century, theorists Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui explain, “Monster narratives…represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change…They can be read as a response to a rapidly changing cultural, social, political, economic, and moral landscape” (1-2). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen adds that “The monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals,’ ‘that which warns’” (4). In “Monstrosity,” James Eli Adams writes, “Monsters are always with us. Whatever obscure psychic needs and anxieties monsters address, monstrosity more obviously helps to define the manifold meanings we attach to the idea of the human” (776). That is to say that the monsters we invent tell us about our specific historical context, our fears of the impending future, and who we think we are as humans. By examining the ways in which the interpersonal relationships drawn by Eliot are monstrous and by subsequently reading the relationships through the lens of contemporary monster theory, we gain not only a greater understanding of the poems themselves but also of Eliot’s situatedness in a particular historical moment, his perspective on what it means to be human, and his fears about the future. Published at the advent of the Modernist movement, these poems “present a snap-shot of humankind on the thin line between the bestial and the fully human and suggest the complex but fragile situation of human beings in the modern world” (Brooker 437).
As is characteristic of much of Eliot’s poetry, the narrative of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” can be read in myriad ways. Is this a story of a man who has a wife but has lost interest in her and dreams of other women? Is Prufrock a loner, a virgin, what in contemporary culture we might refer to as an “incel,” who fantasizes about women but is too afraid (or, paradoxically, repelled) to approach one? Is the “you” (1) of the poem an already existing female partner or a potential future companion, or is Prufrock simply resorting to conversation with his own psyche in the depths of his loneliness? The poem has been read in all of these ways. However, in any of these cases, the negative state of the interpersonal is the same–and it is emphatic in its bleakness.
Prufrock is anxious and depressed, and he simultaneously desires and is disappointed by the female sexual or romantic company available to him. S. M. A. Rauf notes that Prufrock’s “love of women is stale, lacking the warmth of affection…[and] sterile” (4). Prufrock chastens, “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’” (11), and readers may get a whiff of his annoyance at a woman’s “nagging” (ostensibly caring or thoughtful) inquiry. His view of real-world women is barbed with a judgment and dissatisfaction that can only be called misogynistic. “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” he notes, in a tone that seems to mock what he sees as women’s faux intellectual conversation (13-14; 35-36). The particular disenchantment he experiences when confronted with the reality of women is best expressed in the lines, “Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]” (63-64). Here, the lamplight reveals the reality behind the fantasy–the arresting fact of a women’s body hair when the adorned, porcelain-like fantasy arm is given a closer look. When he tries to get up the courage to approach a woman, be it wife or stranger (“‘Do I dare?’ and ‘Do I dare?’” [38]), his inner voice cries, “[They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’]…[They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’]” (41, 44). Prufrock’s disdain for the women he encounters is entangled with and thickened by his fear of their judgment of him.
The second half of the poem describes what Prufrock imagines might happen if he were to go through with a sexual act or emotional connection with a woman. He asks repeatedly, “And would it have been worth it, after all” (87, 99) and “Would it have been worth while” (90, 100, 106) if he had, after meals and tea and conversation, “force[d] the moment to its crisis?” (80). Also, though the setting is a bedroom, it remains unclear if this biting “off the matter with a smile” (91) refers to having sex or simply confiding in a woman in intimate conversation. But the imagined woman’s response to either endeavor is clear and is emphasized by its repetition. Twice he envisions his female companion adjusting a pillow, throwing off a blanket, turning away from him to look out the window and saying, “‘That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all’” (97-98, 109-110). He fears intimacy in part because of the threat of her dejection, her rejection, her disappointment in him. These “Would it have been worth while” musings are followed by a stanza whose first word is the resounding, decisive, “No!” (111).
After this moment, Prufrock retreats to a world of fantasy, and real-life women do not appear again until the final line of the poem where they reemerge only to figure death. The fantasy women to whom he escapes are mermaids, and they (perhaps ideally) will not communicate with him. He lingers (129) near, hears, and watches them but “[does] not think that they will sing to [him]” (125). These mermaids who sing to each other but do not burden him with their “nagging” and arm hair like the women of the real world are objects of voyeuristic fantasy. And alas, the fantasy is destined to be interrupted. In the final line of the poem, Prufrock laments that those pestering “human voices wake us, and we drown” (131). Through the course of the poem, Prufrock narrates his misogynist, pessimistic exploration of the possibility of sexual or emotional connection with women and finally deems it undesirable and impossible. His attitude toward human women, which is at first laced with a kind of longing, grows more monstrous toward the close of the poem. In the end, it is characterized purely by disdain and hatred.
This cynicism regarding the interpersonal possibility takes a darker turn in 1919’s “Sweeney Erect.” An unsettling poem, “Sweeney” describes a man shaving, ignoring the fact that the sex worker with whom he has presumably just had intercourse is having a seizure on the bed behind him. Jewel Spears Brooker writes, “It is not immediately clear what is going on in this poem, but it is clear that violence is in the air” (428). In a kind of zoomorphosis characteristic of monster literature, Eliot likens Sweeney’s body to an “orang-outang” (11) and paints him as a sort of primal man of the modern age, Neanderthal-like, unempathetic, hardened perhaps by urban industrial labor or by war. The description of the woman on the bed comes from Sweeney’s perspective and is disturbingly violent and ugly. He describes her as “This withered root of knots of hair / Slitted below and gashed with eyes, / This oval O cropped out with teeth: / The sickle motion from the thighs” (13-16). The woman, the so-called “epileptic on the bed” (31), then begins the seizure during which she “[j]ackknifes upward at the knees” (17), her hands “clawing at the pillow slip” (20); she shrieks (30) and “Curves backward, clutching at her sides” (32). The fit she experiences is intensely violent, and even the description of her body is infused with language of a murderous threat, with words like “slitted,” “gashed,” “sickle,” and “jackknife.” Importantly, it is Sweeney who is holding a razor, testing it against his leg as she writhes, unattended. His wielding of the razor (a straight razor certainly has a phallic signification) suggests that he has done her some harm in this scene, or that he has caused her fit through an act of sexual violence. This situation is apparently routine for Sweeney, who seems to be a “regular” at the brothel (evinced by the fact that he is shaving there in the morning), unmoved by her brutal suffering; as he condescendingly, coarsely notes, he “[k]nows the female temperament” (23).
The view of heterosexual sexual relationships in “Sweeney Erect” is pessimistic, to say the least. And in a rare glimpse of women’s relationships with each other, it is Doris, presumably another sex worker, who brings the smelling salts and brandy to revive or comfort Sweeney’s victim (who goes conspicuously unnamed, relegating her to passive objecthood). Notably, though, Doris is in no hurry and exhibits no surprise or perturbation at the upsetting scene. She simply pads (42) in on bare feet, having taken the time to wrap herself in a towel and collect the “sal volatile” (43) and pour the brandy after hearing the screaming coming from Sweeney’s room. The other women in the brothel are even less sympathetic. With irony, Eliot describes the sex workers who, upon hearing the violent seizure, “Find themselves involved, disgraced, / Call witness to their principles / And deprecate the lack of taste” (34-36). Mrs. Turner, probably the madame of the brothel, only “intimates / It does the house no sort of good” (39-40). Her lamentation at the event is economic rather than humane. Sweeney has done some violence to the woman on the bed and then responds to her with disdain and disinterest. His cool, contemptuous disregard is mirrored by the women in this scene, who might have been compassionate allies of the epileptic. In the cold, monstrous, Modernist theatre of “Sweeney Erect,” there is no possibility of empathy, care, or interpersonal tenderness.
In his tour de force, “The Waste Land,” Eliot delivers the most multifaceted appraisal of human relationships. The alternating voices of the poem, which often are not clearly distinguished, frequently can make it hard to tell who is speaking to or about whom. That said, the first relationship we encounter in the poem is a pleasant one. “[W]e stopped in the colonnade, / And went on in sunlight…And drank coffee, and talked for an hour…And when we were children…he took me out on a sled, / And I was frightened. He said, Marie, / Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. / In the mountains, there you feel free” (9-17). But that glimmer of interpersonal warmth and connection quickly dissipates, giving way to the frigid world of the “Unreal City” (60, 208), where clairvoyants deal tarot cards of drowned sailors, hanged men, and “crowds of people, walking round in a ring” (43-56). It is as though that first interpersonal moment exists in the Romantic landscape of the past where there are sunlight and warm coffee, children sledding together and comforting each other, and where freedom is accessible through a connection with nature and the outdoors.
In the Unreal City of modernity, people are isolated and detached, with eyes fixed on their own feet, and relationships with other people are either one-sided, callous, or downright violent. One speaker calls out to someone he knows named Stetson, asking him about the “corpse [he] planted last year,” trying to make conversation with a series of comments and questions, but Stetson never responds (69-76). Another speaker cries to an unknown someone, “‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. / ‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / ‘I never know what you are thinking’” (112-14), again without any response or reciprocation. In what Judith Myers Hoover calls “the grim spiritual desert of ‘The Waste Land,’” characters are calling out for other people, but not finding the connections they seek, like talking to the static at the other end of a telephone.
In a moment of actual human interaction, two women converse at a bar. But as was true of the women in “Sweeney Erect,” their treatment of each other is largely unempathetic and chilly. Their dialogue reinforces sexist expectations of how women should look for their (cruel) husbands and portrays a petty competition between women for male attention, rather than comradery or commiseration (139-170). Furthermore, their conversation is repeatedly punctuated by the interruption of a booming male bartender yelling, “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS [sic] TIME” (141ff.). Even when relationships between women (somewhat surprisingly) emerge in Eliot’s poetry, they are represented as trivial, uncompassionate, and constantly penetrated by the patriarchy in the form of internalized misogynist values and the literal voice of the bartender.
The heterosexual relationship fairs no better in “The Waste Land.” Perhaps the most disturbing scene in the poem is one that depicts an impersonal, aggressive sexual encounter between a typist and a “carbuncular” (231) young clerk who visits her apartment. “[S]he is bored and tired,” the scene’s narrator, Tiresias, observes (236). He
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.” (237-242)
The sex here is one-sided and even makes itself available to a reading of sexual violence or rape. When the “assault” is over, the typist, seeming somewhat traumatized, remarks that she is “glad it’s over” (252), smoothes her hair, and puts on a record in a daze. Sex, here, is an ugly, mechanical, impersonal embarrassment.
Thus, romantic love, compassionate friendship, and reciprocal, fulfilling sex are all strikingly absent in “The Waste Land,” as they are in “Prufrock” and “Sweeney Erect.” In their place, Eliot illustrates interpersonal moments as monstrosities characterized by cold detachment, hopeless misanthropy, and misogynistic violence. Cohen argues that the monster “is born at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment–of a time, a feeling, and a place” (4). So, what unique historical crossroads inspired Eliot to produce this interpersonal monster in his poetry? The first two and a half decades of the twentieth century witnessed the ravages of World War I, the entrenchment of industrialization and the alienation and inequality it bred, and the growth of divisive and terrifying nationalisms. Eliot’s poetry contains monstrous forms of interpersonal disconnection that illuminate his fears about the impact those historical realities would have on the human species and our ways of relating to one another.
Eliot was deeply influenced by the violence of World War I, its monstrous death toll, and its effect on the soldiers who made it home, like his thoroughly traumatized brother-in-law Maurice. Brooker explains: “In wartime London . . . violence reached into every corner of civilian life, coloring and intensifying all aspects of personal life,” and he tells us that Eliot referred to the war as “‘the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the mind of man could conceive’” (424-426). She continues, “Violence has an indelible effect on intellectual and imaginative life, shaping one’s understanding of human nature, forcing reflection on the human propensity to wound and destroy” (426). Indeed, the unfeeling, razor-wielding Sweeney, for one, is a clear product of an imagination grappling with the human capacity for violence. The unimaginable violence of the war had called into question the innately noble “great man” that Romanticism had celebrated, and Sweeney—the “insensitive and brutal beast”—is the monster that threatens to take his place in the twentieth century (Brooker 437).
The stronghold that industrialism had gained previous to the publication of these poems exacerbated the bleakness and alienation of English life under the war. The scene between the typist and the clerk in “The Waste Land” neatly embodies that historical moment’s fears of how industrialization might affect people and their romantic and sexual relationships. The impersonal, intimacy-lacking, mechanical sexual encounter between these two characters eerily suggests that their bodies, souls, and ways of engaging with each other have been infected with the cold and machinic qualities of urban industrialism. Tellingly, the two are only referred to by the names of their occupations, which suggests that they lack identity beyond that of “worker.” Arianna Frick writes that Eliot’s
portrayal of the typist and clerk suggests that sex is no longer for recreation, or even for procreation, but the recurring action of machinery preprogrammed and degraded […]. Eliot would later critique the “tendency of unlimited industrialism…to create bodies of men and women…detached from tradition, alienated from religion.” Given this context, it is likely that Eliot’s poem is criticizing the demoralizing effects of industrialism. (22-23)
Prufrock also feels like a product of this degrading industrialism. Importantly, Prufrock’s narrative takes place in the isolating urban landscape, or as Hoover calls it, “the living death of the city” (15). She writes, “Prufrock’s solitary fate, of course, is more the rule than the exception in the cold and anonymous hell of city life” (16). When we read Eliot’s poetry as at least in part a critique of industrialism, Prufrock’s interpersonal monstrousness can be viewed as a result of the “the spiritual alienation” (Hoover 14) and isolation of urban life and the “emptiness and alienation of industrialized gender roles” (Frick 24) that many (especially in the Romantic tradition) viewed as threatening to relationship-building, marriage, and meaningful family life.
Upon close inspection, we can also see in these poems the looming presence of the nationalisms that Eliot would have seen growing like a malignancy around him in the years immediately following the war. The massive death tolls of the war and the Spanish flu epidemic and the growing nationalist movements that promoted “racial purity” both focused new and special attention on the importance of reproduction. Thus, the women and sex itself in these poems are dehumanized, demoralized, and mechanical, as sexuality was increasingly figured in national and nationalist narratives as the domain of mass-production and politics. Furthermore, as Puoneh Saeedi argues, nationalisms and the segregationist, separatist rhetoric their supporters employed splintered masses of people, who may have once seen themselves as more unified, into isolated, distrustful factions. “The apocalypse portrayed by Eliot comes in the wake of … the rupture of universal unity,” and the “disunity felt by human beings towards their surroundings” in urban industrialized society (Saeedi 9). Eliot’s characters and their non-relationships with each other reflect that fracturing.
In a word, characters like Sweeney, Doris, Prufrock, the typist, and the clerk, as well as their interpersonal interactions, are uncanny. They appear to be human but eerily lack human warmth, empathy, and feeling. They are machine-like, coolly contemptuous, and detached. Their relationships are soulless, mechanical, and tinged with indifferent violence. They look like us—but a dark, unnerving version of us. Brandy Ball Blake and L. Andrew Cooper write, “Some of the most terrifying monsters are those with primarily human attributes. They emphasize the similarity between the monstrous and the human, and thus they comment on the behaviors of humankind” (4). The characters and interpersonal (dis)connections that Eliot imagines in these poems are monstrous and they are human. Many monsters do not look like humans and are meant to warn us about the dangers of difference. But humanoid monsters force us to reflect on who we are as humans, especially in the face of intense historical change. “The uncanny is a kind of haunting proximity,” explain Levina and Bui. The monster is a funhouse mirror, casting back a vision of who we are and who we might become.
The scenes of the interpersonal in these poems are void of sympathy, of fraternity, of all the qualities that the Romantics put forth as constituting humanness itself. Men and women are intensely isolated here, and the relationships they do engage in are creepily uncanny in their lack of human warmth. “This picture of human nature is inseparable from Eliot’s personal attempt to understand his own moment in history—not in the abstract, but in the bedroom of his flat, in his office at Lloyd’s Bank, in shell-shocked London,” contends Brooker (437). The urban industrial post-war landscape to which Modernism responds, ominously dotted on the horizon as it was by the rise of nationalisms, threatened to produce a disturbing kind of interpersonal relationship that provoked fear and hopelessness. Eliot’s characters and their (dis)engagement with each other “straddles the human and subhuman” and portends the proliferation of disconnection and alienation (Brooker 429). When we read the interpersonal relationships in these texts as monstrous, they can be seen as embodying and amplifying the cultural moment between Romanticism and Modernism and the historical moment between the two world wars, as well as the fears that accompany those moments. The collected “body” of the interpersonal here, (e.g, the physical manifestation of the interpersonal in the sexual encounters in “Sweeney” and the typist scene) “incorporates the fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy” of that cultural and historical moment in the way that Cohen argues the monster’s body always does (4).
Eliot’s poems and the monstrosities contained within them respond to the changing world and explore the fear of how war and urban industrialism transforms human beings and our ways of relating to one another. Some of these characters literally call out for connection; some seek relationships and desire sex. But they also operate like shells of humans, assaulting one another and treating each other with disdain, contempt, and frightening indifference. In the final section of “The Waste Land,” Eliot writes, “We think of the key / each in his prison” (414). Alone and alienated, the post-war industrial subject imagines the interpersonal but cannot connect. These characters exist at a cultural and historical crossroads: wanting or at least being programmed to seek the kinds of human connection that Romanticism promised and celebrated, but performing like Modernism’s robotic, isolated cogs in the post-war industrial capitalist machine. Thus, the monstrous interpersonal relationships in these poems embody the anxieties about human isolation that circulated in Eliot’s Modernist moment, our capacity for violence, the deterioration of traditional values, and the corresponding inevitable transformations in sex, love, and friendship. Like all good monsters, the uncanny interpersonal in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Sweeney Erect,” and “The Waste Land” reveals a great deal about what we think it means to be human and warns us of the consequences of losing that humanity.
Works Cited
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