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Sexual Politics in T. S. Eliot's "Hysteria" and the Waste Land {1}

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Sexual Politics in T. S. Eliot's Hysteria, Women, and Male Desire: Sexual Politics in T. S. Eliot's "Hysteria" and The Waste Land {1} Jian­kuang Lin Keywords: sexual politics, desire, hysteria, trauma, T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, "Hysteria," "Portrait of a Lady." Published in the fall of 1922, in the Dial in New York and the Criterionin London, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land has never failed to attract attention. Its lack of thematic clarity, fragmentary dialogues, and shifting voices and scenes soon made it a classic, and no less controversial, poem of the Modernist movement. The highly chaotic, disruptive form in whichThe Waste Land was written has since triggered the readers urge to master or make a "proper" {2} reading of it. However, even the publication in book form in December, 1922 by Boni and Liveright, in which Eliot provided notes and explained the scholarly sources and allusions he used in the poem, did not reduce its multiplicity of meaning and make it less controversial. Seeming to "offer a key to the poem and to promise a full and scientifically accurate explanation which would overcome its fragmentation," these notes reveal nevertheless that Eliot may "have been playing an elaborate and highly successful practical joke on the academic profession" (Davidson 124­5). The reader's fear of the text's unruly fragmentation, which impels his/her desire to search for order and system, is counter­balanced by Eliot's fear of a "problematic," or even "dangerous" femininity. Following Harriet Davidson's advocacy for an "improper" reading, this paper aims to discuss the representation of women in Eliot's "Hysteria" and The Waste Land, and to problematize Eliots desire for a "proper" femininity. While hysteria is one class of neurosis, the discourse on hysteria may contain a concealed sexual politics, which glosses over the male desire for order as well as his anxiety about a subversive femininity. Anything other than that valorized in a patriarchal society, in other words, may be regarded as "improper" or "bad," which should be cured by the psychoanalysis of a male audience and tamed by the symbolic order. Thus the discourse of hysteria serves as a vehicle by means of which a male subjectivity is established. Just as the legitimation of the Self is often constructed through an Other, male identity, as Jacqueline Rose well states, "relies on the disturbance of the woman to give it form" (qtd. in Li 323). The readers desire to overcome the disruptive fragmentation of the text, to reaffirm the authority of the Name of the Father of the signification system, thus runs parallel to the poet's desire to contain a problematic femininity. Before we go to the poems, however, a preliminary discussion of some classical literature on hysteria by Freud and Josef Breuer is necessary for our understanding of the role of women in "Hysteria" and The Waste Land. Freud's study on hysteria can be traced back to the publication in 1893 of a paper called "On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication," {3} a collaborated product of Freud and Josef Breuer, an already prominent physician in Vienna who had treated Fraulein Anna O. from 1880 to 1882. In this essay, Breuer and Freud attribute the pathology of hysteria to a traumatic event or a number of "partial traumas," which may be cured precisely through the reproduction of the traumatic experience (SE 6). For Breuer and Freud, hysterical symptoms are the result of an overexcitation in the nervous system, called the "affect of fright," which is not or cannot be properly managed by the subject (5­6). In economic terms, "the outcome of the trauma is always the incapacity of the psychical apparatus to eliminate the excitations in accordance with the principle of constancy" (Laplanche/Pontalis 467). In a properly prescribed hypnoid state, the unpleasant memories of the trauma, which are often repressed by the conscious self, are reproduced. The therapeutic value of the psychical working­ out of the trauma through hypnoid reproduction lies in the fact that it occasions the "strangulated affect to find a way out through speech" (SE 17). Breuer and Freud use the word "abreaction" to describe the cathartic effect of the hypnoid reproduction of trauma (8). What is interesting in the essay is the therapeutic function of human speech in the treatment of hysteria: … each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the [traumatic] event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words…. Thepsychical process which originally took place must be repeated as vividly as possible; it must be brought back to itsstatus nascendi and then given verbal utterance." (6; italics original) Although the term "talking cure" is not yet used until two years later, whenStudies on Hysteria, in which Anna O.’s hysteria constitutes the first case history, is published in 1895, the 1893 essay already touches upon the therapeutic value of "verbal utterance." If the hysteric suffers from the insufficient abreaction or catharsis of the tremendous amount of affect, the "talking cure" is, as the above quotation shows, a transcription of the "affects into words." In some other places, Freud uses the word "translation" and says that the "talking cure" is the "translation of affects into words," and repression for him is a "failure of translation" (qtd. in Hunter 484­5). That hysteria can be traced back to a traumatic event or a series of events, as explained in the 1893 essay, is a theory Freud maintains for some years. However, he would propose a more radical theorization on the nature of traumatic hysteria. In a memorandum he enclosed in a letter to Fliess in 1896, Freud further indicates that almost all traumas contain as their content an unpleasant sexual experience in childhood. For Freud, the inter­connection between hysteria and traumatic sexual experience explains why women are more likely to be hysterical, although male hysteria is not unlikely to happen: Hysteria necessarily presupposes a primary experience of unpleasure—that is, of a passive nature. The natural sexual passivity of women explains their being more inclined to hysteria. Where I have found hysteria in men, I have been able to prove the presence of abundant sexual passivity in their anamneses. (Gay 96) Women are more likely to be hysterical because, for Freud, their sexual passivity makes them more likely to be overwhelmed by the "fright of affect," and this also explains why some effeminate men, like Eliot's Pruffrock, are more likely to be hysterical. Although he does not state it directly, Freud seems to imply that in order for a male to "recover" from hysteria, psychoanalysis must "rouse" his masculinity and eliminate his "improper," hysterical femininity. We are thus reminded of the production history of The Waste Land, in which Pound, like a psychoanalyst, "rouses"the impotent, Pruffrockean Eliot by cutting a lot of passages from the original, more "feminine" manuscript, a point I will later return. Several months after his letter to Fliess, Freud read a paper to the Viennese Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in 1896, called "The Aetiology of Hysteria." Following the argument in the 1893 essay, "Aetiology" maintains that hysteria is caused by a childhood trauma, the reproduction of which through hypnosis might bring about the patient's recovery. Here Freud boldly claims that the pathology of hysteria can be attributed almost exclusively to a childhood sexual trauma: "Whatever case and whatever symptom we take as our point of departure, in the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience. So here for the first time we seem to have discovered an aetiological precondition for hysterical symptoms" (SE 199). Dismissed as "a scientific fairy tale" by a celebrated neurologist called Richard Freiherr von Krafft­Ebing (qtd. in Gay 97), Freud's theorization on hysteria, trauma, and female sexuality nevertheless provides us a perspective from which Eliot’s poems can be reassessed. Before turning to The Waste Land, I would like to examine one of Eliot's less well­known poems: "Hysteria." Written in 1915, the year that Eliot married his first wife, Vivien Haigh­Wood, "Hysteria" is a prose poem that depicts the child's failure to identify with the father in a typically Oedipal structure (CP 19). The laughter of the "hysterical" woman and her movement ("the shaking of her breasts") are said to disrupt a coherent reality and disintegrate the unity of a day into "fragments of the afternoon." What is threatening about hysteria is its contagious, mimetic nature. Looking at the woman, the male speaker ("I") feels his solid, male identity crumbling. Being unable to control himself, he is now compulsively mimicking her hysterical body movements: "As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it ... I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles" (CP 19). Like the Sirens whose seductive, maternal voice induces the sailors to forgo their male subjectivity and jump into the sea (a feminine, oceanic image), the woman’s voice tends to dissolve the male speaker's autonomous self. He has the impulse of abandoning his subjectivity and "becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it," like the sailors' impulse to be one with the sea­mother described in Homer's Odyssey. If the cunning Odysseus represses his libidinal desire by tying himself to the phallus­like mast, Eliot resorts to a father figure, the "elder waiter," to repress his impulse of being assimilated to the third object, i.e., female hysteria.
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