WOMEN IN THE POETRY OF T. S. ELIOT MACMILLAN STUDIES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE
Anne Wright LITERATURE OF CRISIS, 1910-22
Tony Pinkney WOMEN IN THE POETRY OF T. S. ELIOT Holger Klein with John Flower and Eric Hornberger THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN FICTION Eric Warner VIRGINIA WOOLF: A CENTENARY PERSPECTIVE Harold Ore! THE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT OF REBECCA WEST Women in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot A Psychoanalytic Approach
Tony Pinkney
M MACMILLAN © Tony Pinkney 1984 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1984
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First published 1984 by THE MACMILLAN PRESSLTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughoutthe world
ISBN 978-1-349-06668-1 ISBN 978-1-349-06666-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/9789-1-349-06666-7
A cataloguerecordfor this book is available from the BritishLibrary.
Reprinted 1993
Excerptsfrom Collected Poems 1909-62,Four Quartets, Selected Essays, Murder in theCathedral and The Family Reunion, all by T. S. Eliot, are reprinted by permissionof HarcourtBraceJovanovich,Inc.; copyright 1932,1935,1936, 1950by Harcourt BraceJovanovich, Inc.;copyright 1939, 1943, 1960,© 1963,1964by T. S. Eliot; copyright 1967, 1971, 1978by Esme ValerieEliot. In memory of our dear son Raymond Minow Pinkney Contents
Preface IX
Acknowledgements Xl
List of Abbreviations Xll
1 Theoretical Preliminaries: Klein, Winnicott and Psychoanalytic Aesthetics 1
2 Wrestling with the Devil of the Stairs : Early Poems to Prufrock 18
3 Carving: Hulme, Pound, Stokes and Sweeney 58
4 Not Waving but Drowning: The Waste Land to Eliot's D~ma ~
5 Stiffening in Conclusion: 'Gerontion' and the 'Objective Correlative' 132
Notes 147
Index 153
Vll Preface
Early in Murder in the Cathedral we hear that 'Several girls have disappeared / Unaccountably' . But this tantalising hint, promising a narrative at least as interesting as that more resplendent 'disappearance' which is Beckett's martyrdom, is never quite developed. Two vivid lines later in the text seem to belong to it:
We have seen the young man mutilated, The torn girl trembling by the mill-stream.
And there is a final obscure allusion to 'the push into the canal'. 'We are not ignorant women', declare the Women of Canterbury, whose speeches these are; and they do indeed seem to know more than they are willing to tell. As we attend to their long choruses, we may well come to feel, for a brief, vertiginous moment, that the play's 'official' religious narrative is perhaps only a Formalist 'motivation of the device' for their catalogues of deprivation and daily pain or for those more lurid visions of 'the savour of putrid flesh' which terrorise them. It seems as if the energies of the text lie not so much in Beckett as 'In the guts of the women of Canterbury' .1 Such a foregrounding of the role and tribulations of women in Eliot's work will be the aim of this study, which will also invoke the psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein and D . W. Winnicott in an attempt to render those disappearances a little less 'unaccountable'. Delving behind the Oedipus complex into the most primitive phases of relationship between infant and mother, Klein and Winnicott focus critical attention on the commanding importance of representations of the mother and the female body in Eliot's texts. These two analysts have not, as far as I know, been systematically used in literary criticism before, yet both have powerful claims on the attention of feminist criticism. Though my account of Eliot's verse is loosely chronological, I do not have a psychoanalytical narrative to tell. 'Hysteria' opens and
IX x Preface
'Gerontion' closes my dealings with the poetry, in defiance of chronology, and my discussions are grouped thematically, as my chapter headings suggest. It has seemed more fruitful to use psychoanalysis to 'open up' the texts, to focus on the apparently marginal and to defamiliarise the well known, than to submit both poetry and drama to a teleology handed down by theory in advance. I have throughout aimed to be suggestive rather than exhaustive, and my own critical preference is decidedly for the intricate dialectic of the 'schizoid' rather than the more suave schematisations of the 'depressive position', for reasons I discuss at length below. This book derives ultimately from Moira Megaw's decision many years ago to lock my copies of Leavis away; I am grateful to her both for that and for her teaching. lowe a long intellectual debt to Robin Jarvis and also to myoId Thumbscrew associate Julian Pattison, whose incisive comments have cleared away much literary-critical lumber for me. Thanks too to Graham Whybrow, fellow Winnicottian, whose suggestion that Othello's handkerchief is a 'transitional object' has yet to be explored. I am deeply grateful to Terry Eagleton for his practical help and stimulating teaching during the writing of this work; to him lowe both the chance recommendations that directed me to Klein and Winnicott and the sustained encouragement that led me to persevere with them. To my wife, Makiko Minow, lowe the support, patience and continuing intellectual exchange which alone allowed me to complete this book. We dedicate it to the memory of our son Raymond, whose arrival made infant-mother psychoanalysis so exciting to me and whose death leaves it now so bitter and painful.
T.P. Acknowledgements
The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use ofcopyright material:
Faber & Faber Ltd, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc., for the extracts from T. S. Eliot's On Poetry and Poets, To Criticize the Critic, Knowledge and Experience, Elder Statesman and Poems Written inEarly Youth.
Faber & Faber Ltd, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., for the extracts from T. S. Eliot's Selected Essays, Murder in the Cathedral, Confidential Clerk, The Family Reunion and Collected Poems 1909 1962.
Faber & Faber Ltd, and Harvard University Press, for the extracts from T. S. Eliot's The Use o{Poetry and the Use o{Criticism.
XI List of Abbreviations
CC T . S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic, 2nd edn (London: Faber, 1978). CP T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber, 1963). EEY Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). FR T . S. Eliot, The Family Reunion (London: Faber, 1963). FS T . E. Hulme, Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955). IF The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes, ed. Richard Wollheim (Harmondsworth: Penguin , 1972). IP Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). JL Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trs. David Macey (London: Routledge, 1977). OPP T . S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957). PEY T . S. Eliot, Poems Written in Early Youth (London: Faber, 1967). PR D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1974). S T.E. Hulme, ~eculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy 01 Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Routledge, 1960). SE T . S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 3rd edn (London: Faber, 1951). SP Ezra Pound, Selected Poems, ed. T . S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1948). UPUC T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Faber, 1964). WLF T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, ed. Valerie Eliot (London : Faber, 1971).
Most references to the above works appear within the body of the text.
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