Tawk 1

Lebanese University

Faculty of Letters – Deanship

English Department – Masters II

Instructor: Dr May Maalouf

Course: LITR M3105 – Literature and Gender

Paper by: Sayde Tawk

Thesis Statement: Eliot's The Waste Land announces the fall of conventional

masculinity after World War I, and alludes to the anxiety of the modern man

following the collapse of a social construct that once secured his position of power

and dominance.

Eliot's The Waste Land reflects a radically changed world, the "title and the

view it incorporated of modern civilization seemed, to many, to catch precisely the

state of culture and society after World War I" (Holland D: 1417). What is of

interest to this paper is the challenged status of the modern man and masculinity in

this post-war culture and society. Middleton states that "Eliot refigured the

'perversity', 'weakness' and 'diminished masculinity' of modern poetry" (qtd. in

DuPlessis 601). The myths and characters he employs in the poem epitomize the

subjugation of women throughout history as "the inferiority of women was [long]

assumed a priori simply by virtue of their creation from the rib of Adam" (Howell

Tawk 2

5). However, though the voices in the poem are those of oppressed women, the

oppressors are granted no voice throughout the poem as if they have disappeared

and exist only through the stories told about their practices against the other

gender. By absenting a direct male voice from the poem, Eliot alludes to an

anxious masculinity heading toward an uncertain future as much as he alludes to a

subjugated femininity that was the norm for a significantly long past. In this sense,

Eliot's The Waste Land announces the fall of conventional masculinity after World

War I, and alludes to the anxiety of the modern man following the collapse of a

social construct that once secured his position of power and dominance.

The poem emphasizes ruined communication between men and women evident

in "A Game of Chess" when the woman addresses her partner saying "Speak to me.

Why do you never speak to me. Speak. / What are you thinking of? What thinking?

What? / I never know what you are thinking. Think." (12-14). This explicit

inability to communicate, which previously had taken place in the framework of a

discourse constructed by men, implies that a defect has ruined this discourse and

thus ruined conventional communication between men and women. This defect

was a result of an atrocious world war that rendered returning soldiers unable to

integrate in a radically changed society where masculinity and femininity are no

more defined by an individual’s biological sex but rather by their gender, which, in

Butler’s words, is "performative", and its "performativity is not a singular act, but a

Tawk 3

repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the

context of a body" (qtd. in Pondrom 425). Thus, the psychological implications

suffered by returning soldiers and the harsh conditions forcing women into the

public sphere changed the whole perspective on femininity and masculinity. As

Mazlin notes "women's roles in nations that were involved [in WWI] became more

varied, with women often venturing outside the home to work in munitions

factories or as nurses, or filling the positions their men had left", which gave way

to what McCracken called "female masculinity" (48). On the other hand, returning

soldiers came back to their homes to find themselves engaged in another kind of

battle stripping them of their familiar masculine identity that they grew to know

before the war. In McDermott words:

If before the war, men had identified with strength, physical and emotional,

and in their role as providers for their families, they returned to find these

modes of identity empty of significance. What was masculinity if the ways it

had been understood before the war had changed? The war left physical and

emotional scars on the soldier; and even if he was unharmed physically, he

was still stripped of his role as sole provider as women had usurped this

status. (44-45)

Learning to survive in a society where men had to be absent from their families'

lives, women had to perform masculine roles unaware that such performance is to

Tawk 4

change their lives and men's lives for the years to come, changing with it also the

traditional communication between men and women. Returning to The Waste

Land, and to "A Game of Chess", by replying "I think we are in rat's alley / Where

the dead men lost their bones." (115-116), the man asserts an awareness of

something lost and cannot be retrieved. The loss in this case is not just

communication, but a male constructed discourse, which had always delegated

conventional power roles long held by men, and defined by their narrow perception

of women, or in Stoltenberg words "a norm of human identity that is consistent

with and derived from his privileged irresponsibility to women" (Murphy 46).

Having said this, it is worth noting the significance of this discourse to men in

general and to masculinity in particular. John Stoltenberg further notes:

What is denoted by the word masculinity derives from the objective reality,

the fact of our lives under patriarchy, that all members of the gender class of

males are entitled to obtain their sense of self by postulating the selflessness

of the gender class of women, their sense of worth by asserting female

worthlessness, and their power in the culture by maintaining the

powerlessness of women. Masculinity is that sense of self, that sense of

worth, that right to power that accrues to every male on account of the global

subjugation of women. (Murphy 47)

Tawk 5

This cultural construct of human identity built, supported, and nourished

conventional masculinity. Stoltenberg's claim that "in order to end the system of

patriarchy, the very sexual [and social] identities of males will have to change"

(46), proves that the dissipation of this construct reflected in the poem through the

dissipation of meaningful communication threatens men's identity and

subsequently their masculinity.

Though the poem does not allude to a post-war alternative discourse or cultural

construct, where "dual-earner, single-parent, and same-sex couple homes …

[would] out-number the once-ascendant homemaker-breadwinner family" (Gerson

736) that would replace the conventional one, it does indeed affirm the identity

crisis men are facing and the unlikelihood of bringing back the latter to life. This is

evident through referring to the conventional masculinity discourse merely through

past stories, which do not just epitomize the subjugation of women throughout

history, but also emphasize that modern men are stripped of what defines their

masculinity and manhood and what supports and authorizes their domination in

their cultural construct. Thus, it does foresee that masculine identity is to be

reshaped according to a new discourse and under news paradigms that previously

never accounted for what is not masculine. Paul Hosh says that "the relationship

between sexism and racism is the key to the chauvinist mind and to the tendency

for men to oppress women and members of cultures they presume to be inferior"

Tawk 6

(qtd. in Murphy 13), thus men held themselves superior to women by biological

nature not to mention their presumed racial superiority to other races they

perceived as inferior. Therefore, the shift from a biological masculinity to a

gendered masculinity shattered the foundations of the pre-war patriarchy. After

WWI the chauvinist identity became a legend from the past and men had to submit

to new paradigms of a gendered masculinity more associated with behaviour rather

than a biological masculinity that was later recognized by men themselves to "limit

their ability to be human" (Murphy 25).

In "The Burial of the Dead" the following lines further reflect the

disappointment of post-war men:

Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence. (37-41)

These lines convey the state of bewilderment the returning soldiers experienced

upon facing the new unexpected social practices that spread after the war. In Eric

Leed's words "after the Armistice, the common ideology was that everything in

society, including images of ideal masculinity, should return to a prewar state of

normality" (qtd. In Mazlin), yet the "prewar state of normality" did not survive the

brutality of war and remained a mere memory of an irretrievable past that Eliot

Tawk 7

explicitly dwells on. Eliot's wasteland is a land denied to men and to conventional

manhood that resist the changes brought about by the needs of a post-war society.

Gerson notes that the "intertwined social shifts - revolutions in family life, gender

arrangements, work trajectories, and life-course patterns - face great resistance

from institutions rooted in earlier eras" (736). Another significant example in the

poem is the allusion to the Fisher King, "I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the

arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?" (424-426). The Fisher

King Legend further supports the state of the wounded modern man whose welfare

is linked to the welfare of the whole society. In Sicker's words "the poem is about a

sexual failure which signifies a modern spiritual failure … associated with an

emasculating wound suffered by an archetypal male, the Fisher King, who appears

in various avatars within the poem" (420). This king needs to restore his kingdom

believing that "a rigorous, healthy ruler would ensure natural and human

productivity; on the other hand, a sick or maimed king would bring blight and

disease to the land and its people" (Guerin 193). The importance of a healthy king

in this myth is synonymous with the importance of a healthy masculinity in Eliot's

barren wasteland that is doomed to infertility if the per-war masculinity is not

restored. Eliot holds men's anxiety and chattered identity accountable for the

desolate desert dominant in the poem, as if without the pre-war assertive

Tawk 8

conventional masculinity regeneration is endangered and "order" cannot be

restored.

The poem further challenges the survival of the conventional power distribution

by silencing the male character or keeping him in the background of the stories and

myths employed. Evidently, women in The Waste Land are not yet independent or

outside the conventional discourse of male domination as the effects and practices

of this unbalanced discourse echo heavily in the poem. An example of past

practices is the story of Philomel, and an example of present effects is the

superficiality attributed to the woman figure in "A Game of Chess," and her

helplessness. As pointed out earlier, sexism and chauvinism were interrelated to

the extent that men's primary mean to identify themselves is to regard women as

inferior beings and subjugate them. Thus, the patriarchal prerogative of King

Tereus that Eliot alludes to in the poem allows him to rape Philomela and deny her

the voice to communicate his cruel practices against her. Men's deplorable

violence and objectification of women is evident throughout the poem that

oscillates between past myths and present frustrations of men. Whether it is

Madame Sosostris and her "wicked pack of cards", Cleopatra and her "burnished

throne", Philomel and her bitter story with the king, the women unable to

communicate with her husband, or "antique looking" Lil who could be easily

replaced by her returning husband if she does not meet his expectations, these

Tawk 9

women are all victims of a male dominant society that force them to submit to its

standards and function as subordinates to men as "women were certainly regarded

as different from men, but different in the sense of being incomplete or inferior

examples of the same character" (Connell 68). However, despite Eliot's elaborate

representation of women as subordinate characters in the poem, they are the ones

who communicate the bitter reality of the post-war world and reflect the infertile

relationships of the time. The women characters of the wasteland are indeed the

ones witnessing the crisis of a voiceless masculinity and the collapse of a system

that never perceived them as equal beings, but they are not yet aware of the radical

change emerging at the horizon as their mythical and real representation in the

poem reflect their pre-war status of subordination and abuse. It is also worth

mentioning that the collapse of this system is no less threatening to women's

identities as "under patriarchy, men are the arbiters of identity for both males and

females, because the cultural norm of human identity is, by definition, male

identity—masculinity" (Murphy, 46). Yet, women were better able to adapt to this

change as "being deprived of power … [they] have been denied the opportunity to

become as competitive and ruthless as men" (Murphy 27).

The juxtaposition of a dominance of oppressed women characters in the poem

to that of the male oppressors in the past underscores the need for a new discourse

that accounts for both sexes equally and independently of their sexes as well as it

Tawk 10

emphasizes the failure of the current discourse in rendering any of them a winner

in this gendered game. As mentioned earlier, the post-war discourse accounted for

the needs of a society that forced women into the public sphere due to men's

preoccupation with war or their frustration with the implications of war.

This paper does not assume that the oppression of women has been totally

demolished in the modern world. New paradigms of power have undoubtedly

emerged after the WWI bringing women to the forefront after centuries of

marginalization, and attributing the responsibility of sustaining society to them

after being long regarded as inferior. However, many cultures still promote and

nourish the conventional construct of power and domination that places women in

a subordinate and submissive position, and makes it harder for men of this culture

to first admit the equal rights of women and then achieve a healthy independent

identity outside this construct. In addition, the argument here does not assume that

the participation of women in the public sphere would certainly achieve ideal

results of equality and justice. According to Sawyer:

In the increasing recognition of the right of women to participate equally in

the affairs of the world, then, there is both a danger and a promise. The

danger is that women might end up simply with an equal share of the action

in the competitive, dehumanizing, exploitative system that men have

Tawk 11

created. The promise is that women and men might work together to create a

system that provides equality to all and dominates no one. (Murphy 27)

Having expanded their responsibilities and influence outside the home or

private sphere, women are to prove now that excluding them was shortsightedness

on men's part throughout history and not a cultural norm.

Works Cited

Tawk 12

Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. California: U of California P, 1995. PDF.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. "Gender, Sexuality, and Desire in T. S. Eliot (review)."

Modernism/modernity 11.3 (2004): 599-602. Project Muse. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.

<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v011/11.3duplessis.html>.

Gerson, Kathleen. "Changing Lives, Resistant Institutions: A New Generation Negotiates

Gender, Work, and Family Change." Sociological Forum 24.4 (2009): 735-753. JSTOR.

Web. 7 Dec. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40542594>.

Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5th ed. New York:

Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

Holland, Laurence B, et al. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 6th ed. United States

of America: Norton, 2003. Print.

Howell, Maria L. Manhood and Masculine Identity in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of

Macbeth. United States of America: University Press of America, 2008. PDF.

Mazlin, Cyrena. "War-torn Masculinity: Some Women’s Fiction of First World War Returned

Soldiers." International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3.16 (2010): 264-275.

InternationalJournal.org. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.

McCracken, Scott. "From performance to public sphere: The production of modernist

masculinities." Textual Practice 15.1 (2010): 47-65. Taylor & Francis. Web.

11 Dec. 2014. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502360010013893>.

McDermott, Hanna Wood. Nueva York and The Waste Land: The Post-War World Envisioned in

the Modern Metropolis. MA thesis. Wesleyan University, 2009. Web. 18 Dec. 2014.

Murphy, Peter. Feminism and Masculinities. United States: Oxford University Press, 2004. PDF.

Tawk 13

Pondrom, Cyrena N. "T. S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land."

Modernism/modernity 12.3 (2005): 425-441. Project Muse. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.

<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v012/12.3pondrom.html>.

Sicker, Philip. "The Belladonna: Eliot's Female Archetype in The Waste Land." Twentieth

Century Literature 30.4 (1984): 420-431. JSTOR. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp>.