ABSTRACT |
Eliot’s renowned fear of the feminine as portrayed in his early poetry
- ‘Hysteria’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ - variously finds
expression as a vertigo of the feminine body. This fear may be said to
resorts to the poetic dissection of body parts as a defence mechanism,
but which subversively reflects the conventions of the Renaissance love
lyric. The latter’s fetishistic transformation of female limbs into
metaphors becomes in Eliot’s poetry a fantasy about the annihilation of
the body as escape from a nihilistic nightmare of embodied entrapment.
This escape is made good at the expense of metaphor by moving into the
literal paradigm of physiology. This approach demands that Eliot’s
alleged misogyny be revised by re-contextualizing it in terms of a
larger existential anxiety about embodiment, which finds its most
inescapable apparition in the gendered body. To do this it is worth
considering the presence of compensatory rhetorical tactics in Eliot’s
early literary criticism where lyrical fetishism gives way to the
surgical dissection of inner organs – such as digestive tracts or the
cerebral cortex. This move has much to do with an attempt to recover
embodied experience as the site of what Eliot calls ‘sensibility’, while
it simultaneously affords him the necessary distance to confront the
body critically. This paper would like to argue that Eliot, if a
misogynist, is so as part of a struggle to re-affirm his faith in the
body with reference to his critical considerations of the body of
Dante’s Beatrice.
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