Image Of Culture As A Barren Woman example essay topic

The poetry of T.S. Eliot reveals certain beliefs that continue to develop in reaction to the European world of the 20th century. In Eliot's The Waste Land, Western culture is depicted as a female whose ability to reproduce has been vanquished. The image of culture is a barren woman, hollowed out by the empty fruits of mass culture. She is Marie, the hyacinth girl, Madam Sosostris, an upper- class woman, a working-class woman, a typist, and a gliding hooded figure which is neither male nor female. The male bodies are all but removed from The Waste Land, they are either dead or dismembered. With this feminizing of culture Eliot is able to ground his poetry in terms of the most powerful of creative forces, birth.

In The Waste Land, Eliot explores the now bankrupt culture of Europe and its failure to inspire the next generation of poets. Throughout the poem culture is depicted in the bodily form of a woman. In the first section "The Burial of the Dead", culture is depicted through Marie, the hyacinth-girl, (it is interesting that Eliot chose hyacinths to represent Marie instead of the lilacs he opens the poem with. Hyacinths are symbolized by a male, based on the Greek god Hyacinthus) who has rendered the speaker speechless.

The speakers states "Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing / Looking into the heart of light, the silence" (38-41). Marie, the hyacinth-girl has had such an effect on the speaker that she has made him unreservedly worthless. He is neither existing nor deceased, he cannot converse, and his vision is gone. Even in her disheveled position, her hair sodden and arms full, she has the control to utterly close down the speaker.

The speaker then looks to the heart of light, but is met only with stillness. There is nothing left for him to do. The very next line: "Oed' und leer das Meer". (42) (as explained in a note of Eliot's. In act 3 of Tristan und Isolde, Tristan lies dying.

He's waiting for Isolde but is simply told "Waste and empty is the sea". ) Speech and vision fail him, and he ends the passage by borrowing the articulation of another poem, a ventriloquize d voice that is not his own, that reveals him at a loss for words. Eliot closes the stanza of the hyacinth girl by letting us know that there is nothing left-waste and emptiness is the sea- the once full and fertile sea is no more. In "The Burial of the Dead", Eliot continues his belief of a bankrupt culture by introducing Madame Sosostris, a famous clairvoyant.

Madame Sosostris, is a mock name made up by Eliot, perhaps based on "Sosostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana", the name of a character of Ald us Hugely who dresses up as a gypsy to tell fortunes at a fair. It is interesting that Eliot changed the name to Sosostris. The first image the name brings us is SOS, a distress call. Madame Sosostris may well be in distress. She is proficient at reading the Tarot cards. She speaks of the drowned Phoenician sailor who appears later in the poem.

She speaks of poisonous belladonna's and foreshadows the coming of the lady of limitation in section two. "Here is Belladonna, the lady of the Rocks, / The lady of situations". (49-50). When she arrives at the last card her expertise is called into query: "Which I am forbidden to see.

I do not find / the Hanged Man. Fear death by water". (54-55) Madame Sosostris, the wisest woman in Europe cannot unearth the Hanged Man, who symbolizes the self-sacrifice of the fertility god. The Hanged Man is killed so that fertility can once again return to the soil and people. Without him there is no fertility.

The line instantly following that is "Fear death by water". As with the hyacinth-girl we are given another allusion to the sea / body of water. It is feared it again equals death. In "A Game of Chess", the second section of The Waste Land, Eliot juxtaposes an upper class woman with a working class woman. The end result is unchanged nonetheless. We do not have a lucid bodily representation of either lady.

The only thing we know about the upper-class woman is that she has "fiery hair" and we know that Lil, the working class woman's husband cannot bear to look at her. "A Game of Chess", begins with a long, rambling account of the upper-class woman's room. This detailed account encompasses lines 77-110. This is by far the longest expressive account in The Waste Land.

This majestic like woman sits in furniture that suits her glorious but vacant reality. Her private space is elaborately decorated with rich, lavish designs, lighted by a "seven branched candelabra" and coated with her "strange synthetic perfumes / Unguent, powdered, or liquid-troubled, confused / And drowned the sense in odours: stirred by the air" (82, 87-89). This sterile atmosphere offers her no stimulation. She is far removed from the natural world with its artificial environment and heavy oppressive air that stifles and inhibits the senses. The decorations are now mere "withered stumps of time", artificial tools of seduction and devices which promote nothing but empty pleasures (104).

Inside this barren environment, we meet the mistress of this world seated on her "burnished throne" (77) (which is a direct comparison to Antony and Cleopatra. In the opening scene Cleopatra is described as sitting on a barge like a burnish'd throne.) Concentrating the whole of her image by focusing on her hair, which is "spread out in fiery points", Eliot concisely conjures up the image of a woman becoming undone (109). Her art of illusion is fading, and the potency of her potions is diminishing. She is going to pieces and can no longer conceal her breakdown through superficial means. Like her disheveled, fiery hair, she converses in the same tangled fashion.

The breakdown she is undergoing is "glowed into words" as she tries to articulate what she is experiencing to an unnamed man in her life. A hysterical outburst follows in which she begs this silent man to voice his thoughts, to console her in her loss. From the placement of the quotations in the poem, the reader realizes that her lover or husband's mouth remains "savagely still" (110). Like Marie's man he is rendered speechless. Cleary communication has become impossible. Neither can articulate what they wish to say.

Unlike the muses, who inspire and allow for the creative flow of thought, this woman makes the man verbally impotent. The desperation conveyed in her questions and her fractured speech mirrors their shared shattered lives. In the last round of questions she addresses herself. It too turns out to a fruitless exercise. Escape is imaged as simply rushing out the door and onto the street, as if a simple stroll around the neighborhood could cure her ailments. Unfortunately this is no longer possible as the fear of being found out redirects her attention to her unkempt hair and the importance of image.

She remembers the need to keep up appearances above all else. Out of this bleak present moment she looks to the future, to tomorrow, but even that offers no respite. Both the man and woman in the first part of "A Game of Chess" are suffering but Eliot has opted to focus more so on the female. We are privileged only to the man's thoughts and they are cryptic at best.

The second part of "A Game of Chess" begins with an account of a working-class woman's dilemma. While her story is not nearly as detailed as the upper-class woman's tale there is still sufficient evidence to bring about a comparison of the two women as representatives of the expanding downward spiral of European culture. Lil is a weathered, trodden woman. Her life is hollow, her husband and friend cannot bear to look at her, and she is not worth mentioning at the age of 31.

She's wasting away; she is the end of fertility. "It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. / (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) / The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same" (159-161). She was once productive and supplied many offspring to this world.

Now she is nothing but a burnt out shell of a woman. She terminated her last baby, perhaps to save herself. The woman's speech in the first part of "A Game of Chess" is disjunctive and serves to mirror her inner collapse. As a representation of culture, this woman with her bad nerves embodies the shell of Western tradition.

Lil's life is as disconnected as the woman's in part one. Lil's past fertility, then lack of also exemplifies the shell of Western tradition. All that is left are the empty images. Both she and Lil are barren, their fertility spent of the proliferation of mass culture. The third section "The Fire Sermon" is narrated by Tiresias a male / female persona. Tiresias is an "Old man with wrinkled female breast" (199).

We are unsure of his role and not quite sure of his sexual identity but assume he's a female because he "too awaited the expected guest" (230). Again we go into another semi-detailed account of a woman's private room. Although with this woman we have a bit more of a description. Her room is "typical" not lavishly decorated. She survives with just the basics. Her life is routine.

She has no name. She is just a typist, a machine. An unnamed man is once again her mate. While he does not speak his actions more then make up for his lack of voice. He tries to "engage her in caresses" (237) which are "unreproved, if undesired" (238) and then "Flushed and decided, he assaults at once" (239).

Throughout all of this "His vanity requires no response" (241). When all is ended the typist remarks "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over" (252). What has passed between these two individuals is devoid of love and emotion. The typist symbolizes the representation of culture in 20th century Europe.

She is incapable of feelings and lives in a vast, meaningless society where people are viewed as merely machinery. There is no creativity, they are all barren. Human beings are isolated and sexual relations are sterile and meaningless. Their world is filled with isolation, and barrenness.

The fifth section "What the Thunder Said", introduces us to a gliding figure. "There is always another one walking besides you / Gliding wrapped in a brown mantle, hooded / I do not know whether a man or a woman" (362-363). Like Tiresias, this figure is neither man nor woman. However, Eliot had previously associated the hooded figure with Madame Sosostris in the card that she could not see. We have been privileged to this information and can easily associate the hooded figure with the Hanged God of Frazer whom Eliot mentions. Elliot associates the Hanged Man with "the Hanged God of Frazer" (Eliot 48).

This Hanged God is named Marsyas, and he is either a satyr or a shepherd, skilled in playing the flute. He challenges Apollo to a music contest. After losing, Marsyas is tied to a pine tree and flayed. The skin of the flayed god was hung in a cave "from which the river Marsyas rushed with an impetuous and noisy tide to join the Mender" The flaying and hanging of his skin is said to reflect a ritual by which will effect his resurrection, and also that of the vegetation in spring. Madame Sosostris missed this. She could not see this card; she could not find the hanged man, therefore abandoning expectation of a fruitful environment.

Just as we are certain that all hope is abandoned we see that "A woman drew her long black hair out tight / And fiddled whisper music on those strings" (378-79). This makes us think of the woman with "fiery hair". Their only identifying mark is their hair. This is where their similarities end.

The woman in "A Game of Chess" was disjunctive and hollow. The woman with the black hair in "What the Thunder Said" is composed and complete. As she is drawing out her long black hair " "bats with baby faces in the violet light / whistled, and beat their wings / And crawled head downward down a blackened wall" (380-82). In an obvious sign where the bats are impersonating the progression of birth, Eliot inserts a rare form of life into the poem.

While the images of black hair and a blackened wall tend to bring negative thoughts, the opposite is true. As the bats make their way downward we are shown "Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours / And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells". (384-85). There is hope, life is returning. Eliot attempts to instill some hope as the poem is ending. Women are once again associated with birth.

They are fertile. The bats have symbolized this and in the next stanza we are given another image the return of sexual potency "In this decayed hole among the mountains" (386) and "In a flash of lightening. Then a damp gust / Bringing rain" (394-95). By shifting to a poetic mode that expresses emotion through landscape rather than through character, Eliot can achieve sexual potency in purely symbolic terms, as, in the decayed hole and the damp gust comes, bringing rain. Water has returned and it is no longer feared. From Marie, the hyacinth-girl to the unnamed woman with the black hair, Eliot has portrayed an assortment of women who fit nicely in his view of modern culture, that of a womanly body.

Women had been portrayed as empty, hollowed symbols, unable to procreate. They were shallow and machine like. These women were representatives of the descending turn of European culture until Eliot can transfer their forthcoming return of fertility onto the poet. From the sweeping changes that engulfed 20th century Europe, Eliot found source for poetic inspiration. He experienced an age of political turmoil, modernization, and unprecedented growth. It was a time of enormous change which transformed societies.

Of the many changes that were ushered in, it was the rise of mass culture that Eliot came to view as a serious threat to his poetic ideas. In The Waste Land Eliot has portrayed Western civilization as a female whose ability to replicate has been defeated. The image of culture as a barren woman, hollowed out by the empty fruits of mass culture, fits nicely with Eliot's longing to create a new style of poetry. Eliot's use of the female as a representative of culture allowed him to view his poetry in the most important, force a woman has, birth. Eliot marks out a new age, one which claimed that the impoverished culture could only yield defected fruits. Culture could no longer inspire and be trusted to reproduce faithfully.

It is only the fertile mind of the poet, pen in hand, who can continue to reproduce an untainted lineage. The poet usurps the feminine ability to procreate and relocates this generative power to his own mind. The cure for cultural sterility then rests squarely with the poetic mind.