World War I

The first time readers meet Lady Brett is at a dance club, where she arrives with her entourage of jersey-clad young men. After turning down an already smitten Robert Cohn’s request for a dance, she makes what seems to be a rather off-hand remark, “‘I’ve promised to dance this with Jacob,’ she laughed. ‘You’ve a hell of a biblical name, Jake’” (30). In a study of Jacob “Jake” Barnes, I think it’s worth keeping the parallels between this WWI war veteran and his equally troubled Biblical counterpart in mind.

In Genesis, Jacob is born the weaker twin into a culture that valued physical strength, the ability to hunt, and earning the love of the patriarch (all qualities belonging to his brother Esau). Jacob, described as “content to stay at home among the tents” while his brother became a skillful hunter, captured his mother’s love (Gen. 25:27). By connecting Jacob with the domestic and maternal aspects of Hebrew culture, the story calls into question the nature of Jacob’s masculinity. He does not have his father’s love, so he must steal his brother’s birthright through cunning and trickery. An obvious parallel to Hemingway’s narrative is Jake’s similar fight to prove himself as a man even after he has been robbed of his masculinity by a war wound that renders him impotent. Just as Esau, the very symbol of virility and manliness is described as a “man of the open country,” so Jake retreats to the open country to partake in traditional masculine activities of fishing and hunting (Gen. 25:27). I would almost read Robert Cohn, who is presented so many times in contrast to Jake, as a kind of Esau in his brashness, brute power, and continual struggle to prove himself against Jake (in tennis, in writing, and in his pursuit of the same woman).

Like Jake, the Jacob of Genesis is also a nomad. He leaves his home country to dwell in a foreign land among strangers. Jake is an expat living on the Left Bank in Paris, and in many ways, he is also a vagrant. He moves aimlessly from café to café, country to country. Though he has lived in France for some time, he remains an outsider. Hints of his native, Midwestern industriousness and value for hard work come through in observations like, “All along people were going to work. It felt pleasant to be going to work” (43). Among his buddies, most of whom are writers and artists, it is Jake who stands out for his commitment to his newspaper job, sending off articles and news wires, and taking a sense of pleasure from it. Such is not the Parisian way of life. But still he lives there, an American roving about in Paris. Gertrude Stein in her book Paris France notes the tendency for artists to be nomadic when she observes, “…writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there" (2). Jake really has three countries, counting Spain, but like Jacob in Genesis, he migrates upon the Earth without ever really pitching his tent permanently in any one place. And Paris, for him, does at times become unreal (more on that below).

Perhaps the most interesting connection to the biblical Jacob emerges in the Genesis narrative about Jacob’s wrestling with an angel. In his stubbornness and refusal to admit defeat, Jacob wrestles with this figure until daybreak, and when the angel realizes he cannot best Jacob, he cripples his hip instead. Even with this new—and permanent—injury, Jacob continues to wrestle, refusing to let go until the angel agrees to “bless” him. It is then that the angel tells Jacob that his name will be changed to Israel, for he has “struggled with God and with humans and have overcome” (Gen. 32:25). In The Sun Also Rises, we also see Jake wrestling. He fights against his inner demons, his similarly crippling experience in the war, and against his failed attempts to be with the woman he loves (also paralleling Jacob’s fruitless fight for Rachel). Jake also struggles with “God and with humans,” but Hemingway’s story is not a narrative overcoming; it is one of endurance.

Jake’s crisis of faith prompts him to take a sort of pilgrimage to Spain (he and Bill even talk with fellow train passengers about pilgrimages on their way to the Iberian peninsula). Paris is a world of the nighttime. Seedy café life, pulsing music, frantic dancing, and repeated descriptions of Paris being “dirty” (especially by Georgette) and “pestilential” (by Brett) make the déjà vu moments from each nights drunken stupor feel like some kind of PTSD episode, with Jake observing, “I had the feeling as in a nightmare of it all being something repeated, something I had been through and that now I must go through again” (70). So, like Jacob in Genesis, Jake packs up and moves on to Spain, which significantly first comes into view in the daytime. This day/night contrast solidifies Hemingway’s other prominent Biblical subtext in Ecclesiastes, where “the sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down.” Spain is “bright” and “very clean” in ways that Paris is “dirty” (98). Once in Bayonne (which significantly straddles the border between France and Spain), Jake retreats into a Spanish style cathedral, praying for everything he can think of yet lamenting that he is a “rotten Catholic” (103). Still, he admires Catholicism as “a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious,” ending his musings with the hopeful “maybe I would the next time” (103). Like Jacob, Jake wrestles with the angels and demons of his faith in both religion and in the meaning of life after a war, and though he emerges crippled, at least he can join his Hebrew counterpart in saying, “I saw God (or maybe the gods of war) face to face, yet my life was spared” (Gen. 32:30).

The ways that Jake balances personal reflection with distance from the reader is really interesting. There is often a sense of restrain and deferral even as he lets us into his pain and alienation in brief moments.

This tendency in Jake/Hemingway's narration stands out in a number of places, but particularly in one paragraph about the Boulevard Raspail in Chapter VI. Admittedly, at first I was just curious to know what "the semaphore" was (I'd never seen that word, much less connected it to its definition), but then grew more interested in Jake's reflections about "those dead places in a journey" (48). He vaguely alludes to "some association of ideas," but I don't get the impression that he's necessarily keeping the ideas secret from the reader so much as he's not sure he has access to those ideas himself. In this respect then, it seems like Jake is simultaneously restraining himself from showing too much to the reader and giving them a sense of his own experience--we can't get full access to his consciousness because on some level, he can't either.

Jake calls the street "ugly," but it doesn't seem like an entirely aesthetic judgment, then makes a distinction between "walking" and "riding" along--something I don't have much to say about yet, but it's interesting. Before we can get too close to Jake, though, he detaches himself by inserting a third-party text ("Perhaps I read something about it once"), then moves on to Cohn's "incapacity to enjoy Paris" (49). "Incapacity" is an important word, I think, because it implies both an actual lack of ability (disability) and a sort of mental block.

I hope I'm not reading too much into the text, but as I've been reading so far I've just found Jake's approach to storytelling to convey a lot of impressions of what it's like to keep working and loving in the wake of the war--a sense of boredom, but not a lack of humanity. Hemingway's stylistic choices in how he unfolds the story primarily through dialogue yet supplements them with Jake's scattered musings evokes the feeling that we are not only getting the chance to observe someone's postwar experience, but on some level to relive it ourselves.

(Image source: http://buttes-chaumont.blogspot.com/2012/02/semaphore-man.html)

The Sun Also Rises contains crucial themes relating to the experiences of several individuals living in Paris and other European locations post-World War I. While much of the story seems to be avoiding the war, suppressing its specific memory by drinking, joking, or participating in escalating, adrenaline-filled occupations so as to not remain “bored,” there are a few direct references to the war that seem to be very poignant, if understated (in the way they are presented in the text).
In one conversation between Cohn and Jake, they start talking about Brett. Cohn is obviously in love with her at this time and wants to find out more about her. Curiously, through this scene, he seems to learn more about her than he expected, and her ‘true self’ is caught up in her experiences of the war.  Jake starts:

 “She was a V.A.D. in a hospital [he] was in during the war”
“She must have been just a kid then.”
“She’s thirty-four now.”
“When did she marry Ashley?”
“During the war. Her own true love had just kicked off with the dysentery.”
“You talk sort of bitter.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was just trying to give you the facts.”
“I don’t believe she would marry anybody she didn’t love.”
“Well,” I said. “She’s done it twice” (46-47)

The fact that Jake knows Brett so well seems to go hand in hand with the fact that they shared war experiences. We’ve talked before about how soldiers often feel that they can’t relate to people who did not go to war with them, and there seems to be some element of that here. The reason that Jake knows Brett so well is that they were together at the war hospital, and the reason that Cohn cannot really know Brett, may be because he has not experienced this crucial life experience.

This scene is also particularly striking because Brett’s situation is one we’ve encountered previously in Brittain’s work, the idea that a woman who lost the one she truly loved in the war would right away marry the first ‘good offer’ that came her way in order to avoid dealing with the overwhelming loss and loneliness that resulted from her loved one’s death. Her situation is largely pragmatic, as seems to be her impending marriage to Michael, but it is understandable given her circumstances. Within this passage also seems to be contrasting views of love. One the one hand, Cohn is a romantic who believes in true love, that people marry for love, and that Brett would never consider not marrying for love. He projects his own notions of romantic love onto Brett, ignoring the reality that Jake is trying to convey to him. For Cohn, pragmatic love sounds bitter (admittedly, part of the perceived bitterness could be from how Jake is conversing, but I think that Cohn senses a bitterness in the message as well, and not just the way that Jake is narrating).  It is bitter, but it is an understandable result of her war experience. On the other hand, Brett has married twice (to someone she presumably, according to Jake) didn’t love, and she is about to marry again, as soon as her divorce is finalized. It seems that being with men, whether it be her husband, Jake, Cohn, or others, is another way for Brett (only a “kid” during the war) to cope with her experiences and to repress them, in the same way that others use alcohol to numb their pain and remembrance.  This passage really speaks to the types of changes going on post-war as well as the shift in values, priorities, and the ways that people coped with such a horrifying life experience.

Having read this novel a couple of years ago, I decided that I would look try to find a specific theme to address in my blog post for this week.  While I kind of remembered the plot, it has been very beneficial for me to reread this novel after our long discussions over the mental aspects of WWI, and the social, cultural, and especially, psychological trauma that it caused.  Ernest Hemingway’s writing is characteristically (and intentionally) simplistic and repetitive at the sentence level, but he also very effectively reuses simple—but powerful—symbols.  One such symbol I noticed is the use of sports as representing the male characters’ competitive natures.

Looking at Cohn, we definitely see a very competitive nature.  He likes to point out how good he is at bridge which he believes he could always make a good living at if he needed to.  Also, in the first sentence of the novel, we are told that “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton” (11).  Jake tells us that he wasn’t impressed by the title, but it was very important to Cohn.  This fact makes a lot of sense to us as the readers, since it is the very first thing we read about in the entire novel.  Displaying this fact in the first sentence tells us right from the beginning that Cohn is both a fierce competitor and that he wants to be seen as such by the other characters.  However, Jake quickly tells us that he was “overmatched” by his trainer/coach, Spider Kelly, and got “his nose permanently flattened” which Jake believes “improved his nose” (11).  The fact that he “was really very fast” got “promptly overmatched” makes me feel like he got a little too big of an ego against his coach during the sparring match, and Spider Kelly checked his ego by hitting him even harder.    

Cohn also enjoys tennis, which is how Jake knows him.  While Cohn considers himself a writer, he considers Jake his tennis friend rather than as a literary friend.  While Jake works at a newspaper, he doesn’t image that Cohn considers him a friend who is “literary” or a good writer.  I believe, however, Jake understands writing much better than Cohn, but he isn’t competitive enough to correct him in this.  Jake’s impotence as a character is seen very thoroughly in this aspect.  He seems to enjoy tennis to some extent, but later in the start of Book II, he states that “he rather enjoyed not having to play tennis” (75).  He gets tired of this athletic competition and sees playing tennis as kind of a chore.  He enjoys not having to compete with Cohn and others, because it takes time away from his work, his “dining with friends,” and his going to the races.  Jake really enjoys tranquility and leisurely activites, and through this, we see his impotency.  He is happy to be on the sidelines and gets tired of the competition that Cohn and a lot of the other male characters get wrapped up in.  Obviously, this includes sexual competition.  It makes a lot of sense that Jake enjoys going to the Spanish bull-fighting, since it is a sport in which most can only spectate.  

The Sun Also Rises features various places which are imbued with specific tones or emotions. The text moves from the numerous ex-patriot hotspots of Paris—in which protagonist Jake seems to feel generally crummy—, to rural Spanish landscapes, and eventually to the frantic and active city of Pamplona. Despite the attention given to describing and characterizing these physical spaces, protagonist Jake argues against the importance of location. Depicting a conversation between Jake and Robert Cohen, Hemingway writes:
     “Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
    “But you’ve never been to South America.”
    “South America hell! If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same. This is a good town. Why don’t you start living your life in Paris?”
    “I’m sick of Paris, and I’m sick of the Quarter.” (19)

Despite Jake’s protest that a change in location does not result in a change in his life, experiences, or attitude, he later describes his trip into a rural Spanish town, and its beautiful landscapes, with such detail that he hints at the location’s healing potential for him. As he describes the country's lush landscape, Jake seems to become soothed by his surroundings. As he travels into rural Burguete, Jake describes the scenery, “We went through the forest and the road came out and turned along a rise of land, and out ahead of us was a rolling green plain, with dark mountains beyond it. These were not like the brown, heated-baked mountains we had left behind. These were wooded and there were clouds coming down from them” (114). Jake’s description of the scenery surrounding Burguete—marked with green, lushness—suggests the beauty Jake associates with the place. Jake describes the mountains as better and richer than the ones he’d “left behind,” even invoking heavenly imagery as he describes the clouds coming down from the mountains— reminiscent of light-soaked clouds coming down from on high in religious pictures. In these descriptions, Jake suggests a hope that the town will provide him with a sort of rejuvenation as he tries to move past recent wounds involving Brett and Robert Cohen.

Throughout his experience in the town and its surrounding wilderness, Jake appears to be at his happiest. He narrates about reading and smoking in bed in the Burguete inn, “It felt good to be warm and in bed” (116). He elsewhere describes the trip’s various simplicities with joy and appreciation, ranging from the bounty of wine at dinner and the girl who was “nice about bringing it” (116), to the “wonderful story” he reads (125), and of course the “good fishing” itself (129). In Burguete, even his impotency seems less dreary. After Bill makes an awkward joke about the condition, Jake notes, “He had been going splendidly, but he stopped. I was afraid he thought he had hurt me with that crack about being impotent. I wanted him to start again” (120). It is as if in the rural Spanish town, and in the surrounding forest and fishing at the Irati River, Jake is momentarily able to achieve distance from his war-ravaged Parisian life and a bit of peace in his hopeless romantic situation. Jake most often focuses on nature in these pages, which hints at the power of greenery, woods, and rivers to offer healing as a natural form of resistance towards the very human forces of war and violence. However, it is also interesting to consider how Jake describes his fishing trip as an incredibly homosocial zone. In depicting his escapades in Burguete, Jake gives little focus to any female characters (other than a few workers at the inn). Instead, Jake spends most of this time in Burguete with another man, his buddy Bill, involved in the traditionally masculine sport of fishing. Thus, Jake seems to associate both all-male space and nature with a happier, hopeful attitude.

It seems that on almost every page, multiple times a page, Brett and Jake and their cohorts are having drink after drink. The novelty of this kind of life-style wears off on the reader rather quickly. At first, it seems that these fairly well-to-do, artistic ex-patriots are simply living in the moment of indulgence and whimsy in the very accommodating city of post-war Paris. However, it becomes clear that their alcoholism is more destructive than anything else. It may also be a sort of coping mechanism for each of the characters to deal with, or, avoid dealing with a great sense of loss that resulted from WWI.

When we first meet Brett, Jake casually says, "Hello, Brett...Why aren't you tight?" (22). "Tight" here refers to drunk. Later, Brett drunkenly appears at Jake's hotel in the middle of the night. He recounts the episode, "Bret came up the stairs. I saw she was quite drunk. 'Silly thing to do,' she said. 'Make an awful row. I say, you weren't asleep, were you?'...This was Brett, that I had felt like crying about" (34). Jake also describes Brett to Cohn rather unfavorably: "She's a drunk" (38). We can see fairly early on in the novel that Jake makes it clear that Brett's drinking is more than simply part of her persona as a aristocratic socialite. He explains to Cohn that he and Brett met in a hospital during WWI where she lost her "own true love [who] had just kicked off with dysentery" (39). Brett's great sense of loss is the loss of her true love, her youth, and perhaps even her ability to emotionally connect with men on a deeper level than sex, fine dinners, and drinking parties. 

Jake is certainly an enabler of Brett as he is always quick to either offer her a drink or indulge in a drink with her. He struggles with his experience in war and his resulting wounds. It is implied that he is impotent after the war by his vague and darkly sarcastic description of his wound(s) when he looks at himself in the mirror. He says, "Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed....Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny" (30). He also describes an Italian liaison colonel that came to visit him  while he was recovering from his wound during the war. He explains, "That was about the first funny thing. I was all bandaged up. But they had told him about it. Then he made that wonderful speech: 'You, a foreigner, an Englishman' (any foreigner was an Englishman) 'have given more than your life.' What a speech!....Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way" (31). It seems that Jake drinks to deal with what he lost: ostensibly, his ability to have sex, and, in turn, his ability to give Brett the physicality that she desires as a result of her sense of loss. This is the double-bind that Jake and Brett find themselves in: Jake cannot give Brett the physical relationship she wants, Brett cannot give Jake the love he wants, and they both drown their inability and dissatisfactions in alcohol. Brett is left to continue her wandering, drinking, and meeting one man after another, and Jake is nearly powerless to simply resign to following in her wake, drinks at the ready. Alcoholism acts as only a thin veil over these deeply troubled characters and their emotional, psychological, and physical problems that result from WWI.

Brett and Jake are both part of the lost generation that grew up not knowing the freedom and folly of youth that many of us know today. They grew up with war, sacraficed normalcy, safety, traditions, values, family life, and their innocence for a greater cause. After the war, it is no surprise that these two characters have few guiding principles and real connections left in life other than a few drinking buddies with enough money to pick up the tab and call a cab to take them to the next bar.

Even this far in The Sun Also Rises, it is apparent that each of these characters have been affected by WWI.  However, one aspect of this representation that I found interesting was the intertwining of visible wounds and their invisible mental counterparts.  A very tellin example is Jake Barnes' war injury, which makes him either unwilling or unable to take things further with Georgette (23); meanwhile, Barnes finds himself no longer able to have, shall we say, confidence in the traditional patriarchal power structure of the Catholic Church (128).  (This also plays into the World War I obession with fertility.)  Lady Brett Ashley, on the other hand, lost her true love to the War through dysentery (46)--keying into Brittain's ideas of pointless and random wartime deaths--and was abused by her husband, a member of the British Navy (207).  Although she was not as directly affected by the War, the aftermath is obvious:  she physically cannot stand to be touched by Jake despite her affection for him (33), and can only tolerate brief, unemotional affairs through which she drowns herself in alcohol.  War has warped these characters into people who, despite their healed scars, are perpetually wounded.

Interestingly, though, we are also shown a solution to this problem through Count Mippipopolous.  The Count has experienced more wars than the other characters, but is suprisingly sane and calm compared to them.  While he is adorned with some rather nasty physical scars (67), he does not seem as broken as his counterparts.  Because of this, it appears that Hemingway is trying to promote his coping mechanisms, knowing your values and being "always in love" (67), as a way for society to bury the dead and move on from the destructive and wounding effects of the First World War.

Dr. Drouin mentioned Pearl James’s new book The New Death: American Modernism and World War I several weeks ago during our reading of Brittain’s Testament of Youth. I’m still waiting for my copy to come in from ILL, but I did find some digital excerpts online (forgive the lack of page references; Kindle did not provide clear pagination). After reading The Waste Land and then comparing it with James’s assessment of how WWI changed modern ways of talking about pervasive death, I found that some of her claims helped frame my reading of Eliot’s imagining of death in a post-WWI landscape. James argues that what proved most jarring for survivors of trench warfare “is not primarily the numbers of dead. Instead, it is how people are dying and that once dead, they often remain unburied.” She cites a 1918 war essay by Winifred Kirkland as an example of writing focused not just on death but on “ ‘dissolution:’ the grotesque physical breakdown of the body over time.”

The reality of unburied dead easily leads to unfinished mourning. In Testament of Youth, we see Brittain experiencing tremendous survivor’s guilt as she seeks ways to memorialize the dead. She does not understand how she can go on living “when so many beautiful bodies of young men were rotting in the mud of France and the pine forests of Italy” (458). Like James mentions, these bodies were not given any kind of closing ritual, leaving survivors grappling with the task of disassociating the person from their unburied body. It is significant that Eliot titles the first section of The Waste Land “The Burial of the Dead,” borrowing from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It underscores the importance of death rites to a generation puzzling out what kind of relationship to have with the dead, if any.

Heightening this imagery of dead bodies and their relation to an unnatural burial, Brittain also says her “early ideals of the War were all shattered, trampled into the mud which covered the bodies of those with whom I had shared them” (446). The profaning of the human body and the image of it being carelessly scattered, like a type of deformed seed, in the mud again emerges when Brittain sees Roland’s possessions from the front. His clothes were “damp and worn and simply caked with mud…the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the Dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of eat, but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies--dead that had been dead a long, long time" (251-252).

This kind of description also appears in Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches,” where the poet describes how the soldiers were “Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, / The torn fields of France” (17-18) and how dead troops were becoming a part of this besmirched landscape, with poppies taking root in “man’s veins / Drop, and are ever dropping” (23-24). James supports this unsettling depiction in her book: “Unidentified dead bodies, broken into parts and mere matter, have become maidenly ubiquitous; they pervade the entire landscape, both at its surface and below, in its textures, smells, sounds, sights.”

Now we come to Eliot’s The Waste Land, which like Brittain’s Testament of Youth, adopts an almost funeralistc tone. While reading The Waste Land and looking at some excerpts of the source texts supplied in the Norton Critical Edition, these strange image patterns of rot and death sprouting from the ground kept surfacing, with the human body acting as a kind of seed. In its scattered and retooled elements from sources like Jessie Weston’s explanation of “The Fisher King,” Eliot’s poem clearly toys with fertility and sterility, but I think there’s an added dimension at play here, an added texture directly coupling unburied, unmemoralized bodies with planting and reaping. The poem operates on an inverted seasonal timetable, starting with a barren spring and moving back to winter. Dead, deformed seeds yield nothing in desolated ground. There is no redemption for the water death described in section IV; the body of Phlebas, like the bodies of soldiers, remains unburied, with only the sea’s current picking “his bones in whispers” (316).

Perhaps the clearest appeal to this type of imagery appears at the end of Eliot’s first section, where the speaker talks with Stetson, a war veteran. He asks, “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / Or has sudden frost disturbed its bed?” (71-73). Notice the parallels with Rosenberg’s poem, who described the body as sprouting poppies. In Eliot’s poem, the dead literally haunt the living, and I kept thinking about some of the related patterns in The Waste Land and Hamlet. While The Waste Land does not appeal directly to Hamlet, unlike Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” there is the inclusion of Ophelia’s parting words before her death at the end of Section II. In Hamlet, murderous blood waters the earth. Incest replaces healthy reproduction. The dead also haunt the living. After the carnage of Act 5, the crumpled bodies of Prince Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes litter the stage. In the last lines of the play, Fortinbras commands his troops: “Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this / Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss” (5.2.403-404). The field of battle and the grounds of the caste have switched in a way that is unnatural, or “amiss.” Eliot also dislodges the bodies from the fields of war, placing them instead in an urban, “Unreal City” (60), planting the corpses and raising their ghosts there instead. But do they belong here either? Traditional language proves unsatisfactory to describe the slaughter of WWI. Words lose their relation to each other; they are fragments, broken like unburied body parts, or “a heap of broken images” (22).

I like how John Crowe Ransom calls The Waste Land “one of the most insubordinate poems in the language” (Norton Critical Edition 170)—and he doesn’t mean it as a backwards compliment. He just doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like what it stands for, which he thinks is a “negation of philosophy,” a rejection of traditional “cosmological principles” (168). It purposely creates, by its disjointedness and refusal of sound aesthetics, a bewilderment of ideas from which the poem can’t recover. Ransom praises Eliot’s earlier poetry, and his great ability with language, but thinks this piece “restores him intellectually to his minority” (169).

Of course, Ransom has a point (as he always seems to have). I have great respect for him and the often-crotchety Agrarians and hesitate to criticize him from this distance, but maybe distance, or proximity, is the problem. Maybe he was too close (temporally) to the poem to see what Eliot was doing with it—that really he and Eliot have more in common philosophically than he thought in 1923—that the insubordination of The Waste Land wasn’t toward order, but was maybe toward the chaos of the world that it reflects.  

Throughout The Wasteland, Eliot examines various moments of sexuality rooted in anxiety, disconnection, or another disturbed mental or emotional state. The emotionally disturbed nature of sexuality is also attached specifically to women’s aberrant sexuality as female voices in Eliot’s poem are somewhat divergent in their attitudes towards sex. For example, one female voice refuses to succumb to sexual expectations while another gives in to a sexual relationship without enjoying any pleasure herself.

In Part II “A Game of Chess,” Eliot establishes a conversation between two speakers regarding a returning solder, Albert, and his sexual expectations. He writes, “He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time, / And if you don’t give it to him, there’s others will, I said” (148-149). Eliot then demonstrates the heightened emotion of procreation anxiety following World War I: “What you get married for if you don’t want children? / HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” (164-165). While “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” is a reference to a pub’s closing hour, Eliot’s repetition of the line, as well as its capitalization, creates a frantic and anxiety-ridden tone surrounding the couple’s sexual relationship. More specifically, as we’ve hinted at in class, the sexual anxiety seems very much embedded in concerns over reproduction and the continuation of the English bloodline. This fear comes to fruition as the woman Eliot describes refuses to procreate with the returning, theoretically triumphant Albert. Thus, the woman specifically becomes a force of anti-English sentiment as she refuses to do her duty to carry on the nation’s sacred bloodline.

Eliot further complicates the relationship between women and their sexuality in The Wasteland as he describes “the young man carbuncular” (231) having sex with an unnamed woman. Eliot writes:
    Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
    Exploring hands encounter no defence;
    His vanity requires no response,
    And makes a welcome of indifference.” (239-242)
While Albert’s partner retains all sexual control of their relationship, the young man carbuncular’s lover gives in fully to sex even though it bores her completely. Her indifference but willingness to submit to sex perpetuates the notion that a woman’s sexuality does not exist for her pleasure, but instead exists for the pleasure of someone else—namely, a man.

Eliot further complicates the questioning of women’s sexuality through his reference to Tiresias (218)—a Greek mythological figure who lived as both a man and a woman, and determined that women experience more sexual pleasure than men do (see p. 46 of the Norton Critical Edition). By including this figure, Eliot questions the oft prevailing notion—which he himself depicts with the vignette of the young man carbuncular and his lover—that women’s sexuality exists as a commodity to be enjoyed by someone else. By including these disparate views of women’s sexuality, Eliot reveals the complexity of navigating issues of sexuality for all people following World War I, and for women specifically.