Reading “The Waste Land” with the #MeToo Generation

March 4, 2019 By: Megan Quigley

I did it again. In Tuesday’s class, my undergraduate literature students were wrapping up a great discussion of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). We’d had a rigorous look at Brexit and Scotland, on the changing status of girls’ education in the 1930s, on Free Indirect Discourse, and on what might be meant by a treatise of Moral Philosophy entitled, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.” “Any further questions?” I asked. With five minutes on the clock a student somewhat...

Fluidity

March 4, 2019 By: Carrie Preston

Please humor me with a thought experiment. Imagine introducing T. S. Eliot and “The Waste Land” (1922) to your class with some of the bare biographical details: T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis but, like other modernist poets, made a career abroad. Ezra Pound, whom Eliot met in London in 1914, helped get “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” published in Poetry magazine and edited the first drafts of “The Waste Land.” Perhaps you had already introduced Pound’s editorial relationships with and advocacy for other young poets by telling the story of how Pound launched H. D.’s career by editing early poems, scrawling “H.D. Imagiste” at the bottom, and sending them to Harriet Monroe for Poetry. Your students might assume that, regardless of T. S. Eliot’s sex at birth, the initials T. S. were intended to be as gender-neutral as H. D. [1] Many of your students grew up reading J. K. Rowling, who was convinced by a publisher that Harry Potter would sell better without the feminine name of Joanna (no middle name) Rowling. T. S. Eliot as a gender-neutral name undoubtedly sounds a bit ludicrous to modernists who cut their teeth and their teaching on Eliot’s famous and infamously difficult long poem. It is far more plausible to our students, many of whom are engaged in an evolving terrain of categories and possibilities related to gender and sexuality. Making space for a gender-neutral approach to Eliot and “The Waste Land,” while acknowledging that such an approach was not accurate to Eliot’s historical moment, has given some of my students a purchase on the poem. These students have taught me about new conceptions of gender and their relevance to readings of “The Waste Land.”

Time

March 4, 2019 By: Ria Banerjee

During conversations about #MeToo, I find myself thinking often about time, perhaps most directly because the call of #MeToo was answered in 2018 by #TimesUp. This subsequent movement had its own share of problems, from questions about individual actors to pertinent criticism of Hollywood’s celebrity machine. [1] But from where I stand at the very fringes of pop culture, it’s heartening to watch the cyclical, “That’s just how power works” morph into a full stop: “No more.” Not all the evidence offered up to public scrutiny has received full credence, unfortunately; but every conversation about power dynamics and gender violence shows that we are at a rare moment when discussions about how rhetoric constitutes truth- as-bias have spilled over from their usually restricted purview in humanities classrooms. Suddenly, newspaper Op-Eds are debating philosophical abstractions about the malleability of reality— believing her and believing him as if we’re all within a literary house of mirrors.

Boundaries

March 4, 2019 By: Erin E. Templeton

The keyword I have chosen is Boundaries. I am interested in boundaries as they relate in particular to the middle portion of “A Game of Chess,” which begins “My nerves are bad tonight.” [1] This section not only features annotations by Ezra Pound, but also it bears the mark of Eliot’s first wife, Vivien. [2] It demonstrates one of the most important and most difficult elements of #MeToo: the messiness of boundaries emotional, intellectual, physical, and, in this case, textual.

Silence

March 4, 2019 By: Nancy K. Gish

Some stories are told and retold: they seem to strike a profound chord and to resonate in new ways. The story of Philomela, for example, reappears in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline when Imogen has fallen asleep while reading Ovid’s tale. Imogen’s bedroom is described—by a creepy Iachimo as he watches her—with details similar to those in “A Game of Chess.” Lavinia, in Titus Andronicus, is also raped and her tongue cut out. Titus compares her to Philomela, but the assault is even worse: her hands are cut off so that, unlike Philomela, she can not even weave a tapestry of her story. Today the story reappears in commentary and art: The Colby College website account claims it “provides a powerful warning to those who would silence their victims” because, as it does in Ovid, “the truth will out!” Paisley Rekdal retells it to expose the demand for a story. In the Margate exhibition recalling Eliot’s recuperation there, it appears as a graphic image of sorrow. [1] For the #MeToo generation, the story of Philomela, a recurrent allusion in “The Waste Land,” provides an intense articulation of our own experiences.

Discomfort

March 4, 2019 By: Michelle Taylor

If ambiguity is the bread and butter of academia, discomfort is probably its toaster, by which I mean that our profession loves and relies on discomfort. In the classroom, and even in reading, we take this discomfort to be productive, even therapeutic; we see it as an invitation to find in the text a space that will alleviate the feeling, or to make that space in the discourse that surrounds it. Transforming discomfort into opportunity—even producing discomfort for said purpose—is a trope so common in teaching narratives that it sometimes feels like a generic marker. Yet as the stories of #MeToo multiply, I’m beginning to question the function and fungibility of that feeling.

No

March 4, 2019 By: Sumita Chakraborty

I chose the keyword No because it has long been a cornerstone of discourse surrounding sexual consent, and because it both subtly and directly highlights the difficulty of reading “The Waste Land” at a moment when sexual consent is at the forefront of our minds. Well before the current iteration of the #MeToo movement, the phrase “No means no” has been wielded as a battle cry and passed along as an educational tool for persons of all genders, either to learn how to articulate their rights or to learn how to recognize the articulations of others. It has even been used as a rejoinder in casual conversation. Situated at the uneasy intersection of the sloganeering associated with late capitalistic commerce ( merchandise with the phrase is ubiquitous) and the tireless efforts of feminist discourse to popularize the apparently elusive concept of mutually consensual sexual activity, the phrase’s simplicity is both ironclad and generative. No means no: the word’s repetition signals a firm equation grounded in literal, syntactical fact. At the same time, efforts have been made to define “no” in a range of ways that extend beyond the literal and sometimes even, properly, the syntactical, to gestures, silences, hesitations, impairments, and more. The goal of the phrase is—to a politically beneficial end—to establish both a singular meaning and an expansive plurality of significations: no always means no, and no can be implied by a battalion of forms of rhetoric at various intersections of the linguistic and the embodied

Voice

March 4, 2019 By: Janine Utell

Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker describes a spate of current essays by men disgraced by #MeToo, essays that speak of what these men have lost personally and professionally and their quest for redemption, as bearing “the gravitational pull of male power . . . exerting itself, turning our attention back to the place where it has been trained to linger: the hero’s journey of men.” Those of us who study modernism have also been, perhaps, trained to linger on the hero’s journey of men. The contours of the field early on, indeed, were shaped by such hero’s journeys. Paul Saint-Amour, in the introduction to the special issue of Modernism/modernity on “ weak theory,” casts these contours as explicitly masculinist, writing that we have “equated” modernism with “warrior masculinity” and that the “heroic ‘men of 1914’ script likely compounded baseline cultural and institutional prejudices in effacing” women writers and others. Recovery work has raised up silenced or unheard voices, even as the value placed on those voices and that work by the structures of prestige and power that define academia is sometimes measured in coffeespoons. Rai Peterson, in arguing that we should attend to how women modernists like Nancy Cunard and Hope Mirrlees speak back to T. S. Eliot, has pointed out that “[r]eaders . . . [still] believe that Eliot’s work speaks definitively for its age.” [1] It matters who gets to speak and who does not, and for whom, and how we hear what they say. In engaging the topic of this roundtable, I’m coming from the perspective of someone who has devoted her career to undergraduate teaching, and who has thought a lot about feminist pedagogy and gender and sexuality in the classroom and in academe. In reading “The Waste Land” in the context of #MeToo, what space might students as well as emerging critics find for their own voices? Can they speak back to certain voices—and thus ways of reading—that dominate? Or are those voices—and ways of reading—silencing in their very volume?

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Silence

March 4, 2019 By: Nancy K. Gish

Volume 4 Cycle 1

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0098

Tags:

me too pedagogy

Her cries aroused the dastard tyrant’s wrath, and frightened him, lest ever his foul deed might shock his kingdom: and, roused at once by rage and guilty fear . . . he caught her tongue with pincers, pitiless, and cut it with his sword

—Ovid on Philomela, 8 CE

CHIRON [to Lavinia] Nay then, I’ll stop your mouth. [Grabs her, covering her mouth.]

—William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 1594

I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth

—Christine Blasey Ford, “Opening Statement,” NPR, 2018

Some stories are told and retold: they seem to strike a profound chord and to resonate in new ways. The story of Philomela, for example, reappears in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline when Imogen has fallen asleep while reading Ovid’s tale. Imogen’s bedroom is described—by a creepy Iachimo as he watches her—with details similar to those in “A Game of Chess.” Lavinia, in Titus Andronicus, is also raped and her tongue cut out. Titus compares her to Philomela, but the assault is even worse: her hands are cut off so that, unlike Philomela, she can not even weave a tapestry of her story. Today the story reappears in commentary and art: The Colby College website account claims it “provides a powerful warning to those who would silence their victims” because, as it does in Ovid, “the truth will out!” Paisley Rekdal retells it to expose the demand for a story. In the Margate exhibition recalling Eliot’s recuperation there, it appears as a graphic image of sorrow.[1] For the #MeToo generation, the story of Philomela, a recurrent allusion in “The Waste Land,” provides an intense articulation of our own experiences.

Fig. 1. Image from an Attic wine cup, circa 490 BCE, depicting Philomela and Procne preparing to kill Itys. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

I have been interested for some time in the effect of contextualizing allusions within their full stories to rethink how they function. Traditional definitions emphasize how allusions can import meanings and connotations by a word or image or brief phrase that may evoke intense feeling, but that may also displace meaning from the immediate scene to a larger and more abstract idea. Megan Quigley, in her introduction, describes her own experience of being directed “away from Philomel to Nightingales and Keats.” Yet the massing of allusions in “The Waste Land” has often had the unfortunate effect of presenting the poem as a kind of puzzle to be solved rather than an immense and rich experience of many scenes and voices. Notes and citations send us to slight summaries and sources carrying little emotional weight. Notes to “The Waste Land,” for example, typically summarize Ovid’s Tereus and Philomela, explain the connections to Shakespeare, comment on “jug, jug” as a conventional representation of bird song, and add a comment on the image as one of violated innocence. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd edition (in use when I was a graduate student) says she was “ravished,” an archaic term meaning to seize and carry away by force but not necessarily even including rape.[2] These notes remain detached facts about Eliot’s method, the ironic contrast or comparison of past and present. But in many cases the full stories evoke passionate intensity from directly known or partially known experience, what is, in fact, understood and felt. Perhaps the most telling change we could offer students reading “The Waste Land” today would be placing it back in its many complex historical and cultural contexts, rather than studying only brief notes and summaries of sources. Students who learn to analyze original sources on their own can discover the fascination of archival research. In a recent modernism seminar, for example, a Classics major told me with excitement that “The Waste Land” sent her off in many new directions: she had independently made new—and revealing—links with the Aeneid.

“A Game of Chess” opens with an ironic allusion to Cleopatra on her barge, both gorgeous and artificial. Dido, Queen of Carthage, appears in “laquearia,” the roof of her palace in the Aeneid as Aeneas tells his life story and she falls in love (line 92). Cleopatra and Dido are great monarchs who rule their countries. Both fall in love and, abandoned, rage—then commit suicide. In both Shakespeare’s play and Virgil’s epic, the women are blamed for distracting great men from war and conquest; when both men abandon them to return to war, their deaths are a final silence. A third queen appears in an allusion to sexual violence appearing repeatedly in the poem, the story of Philomela and her sister Procne, wife of Tereus and Queen of Thrace. The image of Philomela, raped, her tongue cut out, and her transformation into a nightingale with an “inviolable” song, was for long—and in some accounts still is—read as symbolizing purity and idealism, once valued but lost in the modern world though her song lives on: “‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears” (line 103).

But the story is much bigger and more disturbing than Philomela’s brutal rape and mutilation. Trapped and guarded, she weaves her story and a servant sneaks it out to Procne, who, also stunned into silence by rage, frees Philomela. Together they plot a horrific revenge: as her own son by Tereus weeps and cries to her, Procne lops off his limbs; Philomela cuts off his head; and together they chop him to bits, cook him, and feed him to Tereus. When Procne, “curst with joy” reveals that he has eaten his son, they flee his rage.[3] All are turned into birds: Philomela a nightingale, Procne a swallow, and Tereus a hoopoe, which, unlike the songbirds, is fierce and has an odd cry. Though Procne is not named in “The Waste Land,” Eliot adds her at the end of the poem—“Quando fiam uti chelidon” (“When shall I be as the swallow”) a cry also in the end of the “Pervigilium Veneris,” ironic origin of “Prufrock’s Pervigilium” (line 429). So the backstory of this violent rape adds a mother who slaughters her own son, cannibalism, and metamorphoses into voices that have been read traditionally as positive transformation.

I was astonished, on rereading Grover Smith’s commentary from 1956, framed in the then-standard account of the poem as paralleling the Grail legends: he identifies the opening upper-class woman speaker with Belladonna and “a burning Dido, wronged perhaps, but faithless to her household gods.” She has, he acknowledges, been a victim—“in one sense”—but the real victim is “the quester” of the Grail legend, who has become the Fisher King (and also here the male narrator): “it is he who has been silenced . . . through a failure symbolically equivalent to the crime of Tereus.”[4] Smith’s claim of equivalence is unclear and not developed, yet it moves us further and further from the scene itself. And for Smith, the narrator of this passage finds himself with a “neurotic, shrewish woman of fashion” as a wife (T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 79). It is the man who suffers. I was more astonished that I had also, decades ago, accepted the idea of the nightingale’s song as representing a past with “at least an ideal which transcended time and was acknowledged.”[5] I do think that was wrong, but in the time of #MeToo, it is simply untenable.

Reading “A Game of Chess” today calls for a new context--one in which women are not simply individual images from many ancient tales but a series of the silenced. The scene opens with Philomela and three queens who are betrayed, of whom two are initially great monarchs and passionate lovers driven to suicide by their love for great warriors, and one who takes a violent revenge before becoming a bird: “O swallow swallow” (line 429). Only Philomela, a virgin, innocent and trusting and destroyed, is affirmed. The queens, seldom studied, are powerful women equally silenced but not mourned or idealized. As an obscure allusion to Ovid in Eliot’s notes, briefly summarized and explained as about “ravishing” or the silencing of Tereus, Philomela’s story can seem merely an academic exercise in demonstrating irony and overall unity. As a story, told and retold, of women raped, abandoned, silenced, it takes on the passionate intensity of genuine felt experience and fear, a profoundly ambiguous tale of recognition, evasion of women’s experience, and the motivation for #MeToo. For students of this generation, it takes on a depth, power, and complexity grounded in but moving far beyond summary notes.

Notes

[1] At the Violet Hour was an exhibition from February 3–March 11, 2018, at the Nayland Rock Hotel, Margate.

[2] T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd edition, ed. Alexander W. Allison, Arthur M. Eastman, and Arthur J. Carr (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 1001–1012, 1004n8.

[3] Ovid, “Tereus and Philomela,” Metamorphoses 6, book 6.

[4] Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 80.

[5] Nancy K. Gish, Time in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot: A Study in Structure and Theme (London: Macmillan, 1981), 56.