Gender and Sexuality
in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

by: Theresia Knuth

Content

1. INTRODUCTION 3

2. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE WASTE LAND 4

3. CONCLUSION 8

Works cited 9

1. INTRODUCTION

The rise of feminist theory during the last decades provoked a reconsideration of the general focus of interpreting literary texts, and literary criticism has been largely engaged in a rereading of canonical author’s works in terms of gender and sexuality while many definitions underwent a necessary revision. Modernist works, especially poetry, are a rewarding source for an interpretation in these terms since due to their fragmentary, ambivalent nature and lack of thematic clarity they offer much room for different interpretations. With its predominating sexuality, Freudian psychoanalysis and questions of sex and gender sneaked into the modernist world. In this essay I will attempt a reading of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in order to see in how far such issues are implied.¹ My understanding of ‘gender’ follows that of Judith Butler, who pointed out that gender is not only socially constructed in discourse rather than biologically predetermined, but also performative.² This is quite evident in Eliot’s poem. Moreover, in modernist texts sexuality seems to lose romance and meaning. In Eliot’s case such a loss seems connected with personal experience. His marriage with Vivien Haigh-Wood was problematic from the beginning on and worsened increasingly, and while working on The Waste Land he had a nervous breakdown. The poem is divided into five parts and features various narrative voices which cannot always be identified unmistakably, especially in terms of the speaker’s gender. In order to examine the depiction of gender and sexuality in the poem, I will proceed mostly chronologically and focus on the depiction of the love relationships. Due to the limited scope of this paper I cannot, by far, include all relevant themes, let alone the numerous other related fragments and themes. The focus is therefore on the hyacinth girl, the Fisher King and Phlebas / Eugenides, the couple and Lil and Philomel, as well as Tiresias and the typist. Images of fertility and homoerotic desire will be considered alongside the character depictions.

2. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE WASTE LAND

The first person encountered in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ is Marie. Her name hints at her status as a prelapsarian female archetype and represents an antithesis to the also archetypal female prostitute encountered later in the poem. Though the vivid sledging image connotes sexuality, Marie rather reads ‘much of the night’ (l. 18) instead of being sexually active. Strikingly, there is no pronoun rendering the speaker male or female. Though this phenomenon is ubiquitous throughout the poem, one usually assumes the speaker is male while the unambiguously gendered characters are female (except Tiresias). The reader has to presume the speaker is male because he acts in ways that are perceived male. This is a powerful example of Butler’s performativity of gender: only in the discourse between reader and text gender is ascribed to the speaker.³

After a passage full of fragmented images of desolation (l. 19-34) the hyacinth girl appears. Significantly, the passage is framed by quotations from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, which deals with adultery and loss. The image of the hyacinth, phallic in shape, is a fertility symbol. It stems from the Greek myth of Hyacinthus: after Apollo, who was in love with the boy Hyacinthus, accidentally killed him the flower grows from his blood. The hyacinth and fertility are also echoed in lines 71-2: ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout?’. It has been suggested that due to the fact that the flower originally stems from a male body, the hyacinth girl is in fact male, or at least androgynous, thus proposing a homoerotic reading of the passage. In my understanding, though, the text does not support such a reading at this point. The girl recalls an assumed sexual encounter in a garden: ‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago’. The speaker, again lacking a male pronoun, recalls the garden incident which left him speechless and blind. The passage is highly sensual and sexually suggestive⁴:

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1 Even though suitable for the purpose of this paper, considering the scope I have to disregard deleted scenes of earlier drafts in my analysis. I refer to the version printed in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed.

2 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999.

3 On gender and its performativity in The Waste Land see Pondrom

4 What is more, the failure can not only be interpreted in a sexual, but also spiritual way. ‘Neither / Living nor dead’ (l. 39-40) the speaker is caught in a paradoxically beautiful, transcendent moment brought about by a glimpse of the ‘heart of light’ (l. 41).