"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" As Teenaged Wasteland
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"THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK" AS TEENAGED WASTELAND As A thesis submitted to the faculty of 3G San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of 2 - 01$ ’ the requirements for the Degree *-3^3 Master of Arts In English Literature by Margaret Sarah Snyder San Francisco, California May 2015 Copyright by Margaret Sarah Snyder 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as Teenaged Wasteland by Margaret Sarah Snyder, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University. Sara Hackenberg, Associate Professor "THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK" AS TEENAGED WASTELAND Margaret Sarah Snyder San Francisco, California 2015 Though the large body of criticism on T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” reads the titular narrator as a middle-aged man, I would like to join the critical discourse to offer an alternate reading: that Prufrock is a teenager. I argue that Prufrock as a teenaged persona provides Eliot with a decidedly modern mechanism for an all- encompassing sensibility and strikes much greater consonance with both Eliot’s criticism and poetics, as well as, explicating the continued presence of the poem in the high school English classroom. I will outline Eliot’s early poetic development, focusing on adaptation of Matthew Arnold’s Victorian Romantacism to the Modern world and his indoctrination in the work of the French Symbolists Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire, who taught Eliot that, “the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry” (To Criticize the Critic, 126). With “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot therefore develops a narrative for teenaged experience that became a blueprint for young adult male experience; the afterlife of Eliot’s poem, which I will explore in British and American rock, forms another key piece of its continued ability to still relate to the world over one hundred years after its initial composition and publication. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. Date PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to take a brief opportunity to express my endless gratitude to Professor Sara Hackenberg for both her engaging teaching and creative coursework at San Francisco State University and her generous guidance and encouragement with this thesis project. I will remain forever indebted to her challenging intellect and passion for her subject matter. I would also like to thank Professor Meg Schoerke for all of her patience and her insightful course on metaphors. Finally, I would like to thank Jan Lamborn and other members of the Graduate Studies Department and College of Extended Learning who made the completion of this project possible. I could not have completed this paper without the invaluable assistance of the Faculty and Staff of San Francisco State and the experience has been arduous and rewarding. I will be proud to display my San Francisco State diploma and will always remember the support and kindness of those who helped me make a dream come true despite all the challenges and delays. Thank you. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as Teenaged Wasteland...........................................1 I. Introductory Remarks....................................................................................... 1 II. Eliot’s Studies in Poetics and Consciousness................................................7 III. Prufrock the Teenager....................................................................................23 IV. Eliot as Victorian Child Coming of Age.......................................................35 V. The Song of Powerless Prufrock................................................................... 60 VI. Publication and Reception: Contextual Atmosphere................................. 78 VII. Prufrock’s Afterlife as a Blueprint for Teenage Failure...............................86 Works Cited..............................................................................................................................95 6 1 “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” AS TEENAGED WASTELAND I. Introductory Remarks “Don’t cry Don’t raise your eyes It’s only teenaged wasteland” (The Who). The large body of criticism on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”1 focuses on Prufrock as the character of the modern man. Roger Mitchell provides one such reading: J. Alfred Prufrock is not just the speaker of one of Eliot's poems. He is the Representative Man of early Modernism.” Mitchell continues to summarize this pervasive interpretation, elaborating this Man as “shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually retarded (many have said impotent), ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point of solipsism (42). While such readings provide a specific access point to the poem, in this thesis I will join the critical conversation to develop an alternative perspective on the narrative persona of Prufrock. In this paper I will argue that Prufrock is not, in fact, a middle-aged man, but rather a teenager overwhelmed with the horrific apprehension of how he will grow old in a world in which he is not sure he belongs. The reason I think it is significant to assert this reading is two-fold. First, reading Prufrock as a teenager finds much more consonance with Eliot’s own critical writings and poetic development. Second, with “Prufrock,” Eliot develops a template for speaking to urban, adolescent male experience that has since been replicated through time as a powerful cultural tool for registering the angst, frustration and ennui considered endemic of modern experience. The afterlife of “Prufrock” exists on the one level through 1 To clarify, I will refer to Eliot’s poem as “Prufrock” and the poem’s narrator as Prufrock throughout the remainder of this paper. 2 continued presence in literary studies, as discussed by educator Derek Soles in his article on teaching “Prufrock” to high school students. As Soles notes, the poem “often appears in literature anthologies designed for use in high school and college English classes,” which has contributed over time to its status as a “modern classic” (59). On another level, the poem still makes sense to present day readers due to their familiarity, even if on a subconscious level, with the continuous reincarnation of the “Prufrock” blueprint in expressions of teenaged, male experience. As Eliot’s poem is itself a love song, I want to look to British and American music, especially rock music, to illustrate this blueprint phenomenon. Ultimately, my reading provides powerful insights into Eliot’s writing process, his poetic development, and the poem’s continuing afterlife. The underlying question inciting this paper was my own personal response to the poem. For, why did "Prufrock” resonate with me as a high school student, if it were simply the ramblings of an apprehensive middle-aged man? When I first read “Prufrock” as a fourteen year-old, I recall being struck by the directness of Prufrock’s voice, as if he were talking to me; in addition, unlike previous poems I had read, I knew how the narrator felt, especially the part about the eyes pinning you to the wall or wanting to just be crab legs. I thought Prufrock understood my high school anxieties, social unease and the sensation of wasting time, and it did not occur at all to me that he might be a middle-aged man. Since as a teenager, my original interaction with the poem was one of alignment and connection to the narrative voice, the assumption of Prufrock as middle-aged never quite sat right with me. In his essay on teaching “Prufrock” to high school students, Soles notes, “in some ways it is a strange choice for inclusion in young adult curriculum since it concerns the insecurities of a middle-aged man” (59). Soles does not take this observation further than thinking it odd. I think because “Prufrock” speaks to young adult experience that is exactly why it is so often taught in high school curriculum. 3 In all my research, I encountered only one reading that vaguely hinted at the narrator of “Prufrock” being a young adult. In a minor aside during critic Jackson J. Benson’s discussion of Quentin Compson as a self-portrait of a young William Faulkner, Benson mentions that “such contemporaries as Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Hemingway.... produced protagonists with whom they identified, yet viewed with a certain ironic detachment — self caricatures, as it were — but the young protagonist with all his faults is portrayed as less guilty in each case than the culture which surrounds him” (145). While this statement does not identify the Eliotic protagonist as Prufrock, previously Benson finds Faulkner’s self-portrait Quentin to be “reminiscent” of Prufrock, as the names of both narrators suggest “a certain self-mockery by the author” (145). While this indirect connection offers a promising glimpse at a potential interpretation in support of my argument, Benson’s discussion of Faulkner’s self-portrait veers into the category of a blatantly biographical reading hinged disappointingly on a collapse of author and narrator. Attempting to delve into the psychological state or the personality of Eliot in any productive way is like trying to solve a one hundred year old crime with no physical evidence except some letters and essays. What we do find in Eliot’s letters and essays is a poet and a critic obsessed with developing a distinct poetics. This is what I will attune my research to. I will not seek to find Eliot the person, but instead seek out Eliot the poet to unravel how he is telling a story and what this story might be. By focusing on the narrator as a persona, as a performance of a particular type of engagement with the world, we can think of Eliot as operating on an authorial level, willfully constructing a narrative persona and the drama surrounding him.