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Women in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot: A Psychoanalytic Approach PDF

167 Pages·1984·19.446 MB·English
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ISBN 978-1-349-06668-1 9 781349 066681 WOMEN IN THE POETRY OF T. S.ELIOT MACMILLAN STUDIES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE Anne Wright LITERATUREOFCRISIS, 1910-22 Tony Pinkney WOMEN IN THE POETRY OFT. S. ELIOT Holger Klein withJohn Flowerand EricHornberger THESECOND WORLD WAR IN FICTION EricWarner VIRGINIA WOOLF: A CENTENARY PERSPECTIVE Harold Ore! THELITERARY ACHIEVEMENT OF REBECCA WEST Women in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot APsychoanalytic Approach Tony Pinkney M MACMILLAN ©TonyPinkney1984 Softcoverreprintofthehardcover1stedition 1984 Allrightsreserved.Noreproduction,copyortransmissionof thispublicationmaybemadewithoutwrittenpermission. Noparagraphofthispublicationmaybereproduced,copiedor transmittedsavewithwrittenpermissionorinaccordancewith theprovisionsoftheCopyright,DesignsandPatentsAct1988, orunderthetermsofanylicencepermittinglimitedcopying issuedbytheCopyrightLicensingAgency,90TottenhamCourt Road,LondonWIP9HE. Anypersonwhodoesanyunauthorisedactinrelationtothis publicationmaybeliabletocriminalprosecutionandcivil claimsfordamages. Firstpublished1984by THEMACMILLANPRESSLTD Houndmills,Basingstoke,HampshireRG21 2XS andLondon Companiesandrepresentatives throughouttheworld ISBN978-1-349-06668-1 ISBN978-1-349-06666-7(eBook) DOI 10.1007/9789-1-349-06666-7 Acataloguerecordforthisbookisavailable fromtheBritishLibrary. Reprinted1993 ExcerptsfromCollectedPoems1909-62,Four Quartets,SelectedEssays,MurderintheCathedraland TheFamilyReunion,allbyT.S.Eliot,arereprinted bypermissionofHarcourtBraceJovanovich,Inc.; copyright1932,1935,1936,1950byHarcourt BraceJovanovich,Inc.;copyright1939,1943, 1960,© 1963,1964byT.S.Eliot; copyright1967,1971,1978byEsmeValerieEliot. Inmemory ofourdearson RaymondMinow Pinkney Contents Preface IX Acknowledgements Xl ListofAbbreviations Xll 1 Theoretical Preliminaries: Klein, Winnicott and Psychoanalytic Aesthetics 1 2 Wrestling with the Devil of the Stairs: Early Poems to Prufrock 18 3 Carving: Hulme, Pound, Stokes and Sweeney 58 4 Not Waving but Drowning: The Waste Land to Eliot's D~ma ~ 5 Stiffening in Conclusion: 'Gerontion' and the 'Objective Correlative' 132 Notes 147 Index 153 Vll Preface Early in Murder in the Cathedral we hear that 'Several girls have disappeared / Unaccountably'. But this tantalising hint, promising a narrative at least as interesting as that more resplendent 'disappearance' which is Beckett's martyrdom, is never quite developed. Two vivid lineslater in the text seem to belong to it: We have seenthe young man mutilated, The torn girl trembling by the mill-stream. And there is a final obscure allusion to 'the push into the canal'. 'We are not ignorant women', declare the Women of Canterbury, whose speeches these are; and they do indeed seem to know more than they are willing to tell. As we attend to their long choruses, we may well come to feel, for abrief, vertiginous moment, that the play's 'official' religious narrative is perhaps only a Formalist 'motivation of the device' for their catalogues of deprivation and daily pain or for those more lurid visions of 'the savour of putrid flesh' which terrorise them. It seems asifthe energies ofthe text lie not so much in Beckett as 'In the guts of the women of Canterbury' .1 Such a foregrounding of the role and tribulations of women in Eliot's work will be the aim of this study, which will also invoke the psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott in an attempt to render those disappearances a little less 'unaccountable'. Delving behind the Oedipus complex into the most primitive phases of relationship between infant and mother, Klein and Winnicott focus critical attention on the commanding importance of representations of the mother and the female body in Eliot's texts. These two analysts have not, as far as I know, been systematically used in literary criticism before, yet both have powerful claims on the attention offeminist criticism. Though my account of Eliot's verse isloosely chronological, I do not have a psychoanalytical narrative to tell. 'Hysteria' opens and IX x Preface 'Gerontion' closes my dealings with the poetry, in defiance of chronology, and my discussions are grouped thematically, as my chapter headings suggest. It has seemed more fruitful to use psychoanalysis to 'open up' the texts, to focus on the apparently marginal and to defamiliarise the well known, than to submit both poetry and drama to ateleology handed down by theory in advance. I have throughout aimed to be suggestive rather than exhaustive, and my own critical preference isdecidedly for the intricate dialectic of the 'schizoid' rather than the more suave schematisations of the 'depressive position', for reasons Idiscussat length below. This book derives ultimately from Moira Megaw's decision many years ago to lock my copies of Leavis away; I am grateful to her both for that and for her teaching. lowe along intellectual debt to Robin Jarvis and also to myoId Thumbscrew associate Julian Pattison, whose incisive comments have cleared away much literary-critical lumber for me. Thanks too to Graham Whybrow, fellow Winnicottian, whose suggestion that Othello's handkerchief isa 'transitional object' hasyet to be explored. I am deeply grateful to Terry Eagleton for his practical help and stimulating teaching during the writing of this work; to him lowe both the chance recommendations that directed me to Klein and Winnicott and the sustained encouragement that led me to persevere with them. To my wife, Makiko Minow, lowe the support, patience and continuing intellectual exchange which alone allowed me to complete this book. We dedicate it to the memory of our son Raymond, whose arrival made infant-mother psychoanalysis so exciting to me and whosedeath leavesit now sobitter and painful. T.P. Acknowledgements The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the useofcopyright material: Faber & Faber Ltd, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc., for the extracts from T. S. Eliot's On Poetry and Poets, To Criticize the Critic, Knowledge and Experience, Elder Statesman and Poems Written inEarly Youth. Faber & Faber Ltd, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., for the extracts from T. S. Eliot's Selected Essays, Murder inthe Cathedral, Confidential Clerk, The Family Reunion and Collected Poems 1909 1962. Faber & Faber Ltd, and Harvard University Press, for the extracts from T. S. Eliot's TheUse o{Poetryandthe Use o{Criticism. XI

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