Jason Harding

Gender and Sexuality

The previous Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot , first published in 1994, contained no essay on the subject of Eliot and gender, and had only one page reference to gender in its index: “gender, rendering of.” There were eleven references to sexuality, three of which appeared under the subheading “insecurity of.” Ten years ago, a substantial volume written by distinguished scholars did not dwell upon the significance of gender and sexuality to Eliots work. An earlier publication, Mildred Martins A Half-Century of Eliot Criticism (1972), a thorough annotated bibliography of English-language books and articles for the 1916–65 period (2,692 items), makes it clear that the controversies in Eliot studies in the first half of the twentieth century were far more likely to center on the poets putative obscurity, his religious conversion, and his conservative politics than on his attitudes toward women or sexuality. “Politics,” at that point, had barely begun to be associated with feminist theory: the politics of gender and identity were still in the making. My first task, then, is to justify the inclusion of an essay on this topic now. Although the configurations, definitions, and theories of gender and sexuality are unsettled and the contours of the fields variable, it is now nearly impossible to imagine studies of modernism and its major writers without these categories of investigation. To neglect them is to ignore several decades of significant developments in literary criticism generally and modernist studies particularly: influential work recovering and revaluing modernist women writers, critical examination of gender representation in literary works, analyses of style through the lens of sexuality, and investigations of gender and sexuality in the cultures of modernity and modernism. Surveying the development of criticism over the last half-century, one need not be a fashion-monger to recognize that poststructuralism, feminist studies, cultural studies, and gender and queer studies have had a transformative effect on the way we now read. New Modernist Studies, announced in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1999 and institutionalized in the now well-established Modernist Studies Association, would have been unthinkable without the significant shifts in critical perspective brought about by these new modes of analysis.

T. S. Eliot's Social Criticism

The nineteenth century gave us the idea of “culture” as the broadest framework in which the forms of life of a society, whether a tribe or a national state, can be located. From cooking to clothing, from poetry to dance, to marriage, to religion, these and every other aspect of a societys customs, practices, and beliefs are part of something we have come to call its “culture.” This is an idea that began in embryo in Giambattista Vicos Nuova Scienza (1725) and came fully into the light of day in Germany and France decades later in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Hegel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the brothers Grimm, and others. The primacy of culture is an idea that has in the last two hundred years evolved into the social sciences as we know them today and, most brightly, in the discipline of anthropology. It found one of its strongest voices in England in the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century. Arnolds was one of the first English voices to put the matter of “culture” on the intellectual agenda of his time. To say that culture encompassed a whole series of pursuits such as football matches, cheese-making, and brass bands was one thing, but it was quite another when Arnold wrote that religion and the spiritual life of a people were also part of culture. Objections to this characterization of religion as merely a part of a peoples culture were quick in coming. The counterclaim that culture derived ultimately from religion and that the spiritual truths of a people gave birth to any serious notion of culture was put forward in the nineteenth century by those who were seen to be defending an old idea. Progressive opinion already accommodated to the scientific cast of mind and to secularism applauded Arnolds bold claim. All the momentum of persuasion was on the side of the arguments of the secularists and the quick growth of anthropology, sociology, and political economy in the later years of the nineteenth century anchored the proposition in the academy. There were objecting voices of course – John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and any number of bishops of the Church of England – but the force was with “culture,” not religion, as the nineteenth century ended. For all intents and purposes, the argument was over.

Eliot: Form and Allusion

James Longenbach has argued that “Eliot forces his readers to feel the weight of his allusions very strongly.” The point is thought-provoking; forcing us to “feel the weight of … allusions” is part of that process of “assuming a double part” which Gareth Reeves notes is acknowledged as “an articulated and articulate strategy” in the terza rima passage in Little Gidding . In Eliot, allusion brings to mind a particular literary moment and a larger generic model. At the same time allusion finds a home in an imaginative world that is innovative. This newness may often involve shaking us out of conventional responses, as when, in John Crowe Ransoms words, Eliot “inserts beautiful quotations into ugly contexts.” Ransom is discussing the use of Olivias song from Goldsmiths The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) in The Waste Land . Here, Eliot turns lyric melancholy into a simulacrum of automatic response. He does so by making us hear the original differently. That original (“When lovely woman stoops to folly”) has a tetrametric lilt and movement that are called up yet almost cancelled through the addition of “and” in line 253, “an unaccented syllable,” as Jason Harding points out. The reworking satirises lyric sentimentality. But it stops short of mere debunking; Eliot/Tiresias may have “foresuffered all” ( CPP 69), yet there is something to be “suffered” in the scene, and the allusion suggests that there is, as well, residual value in the original lyric mode. That value allows Eliot to express tacit sadness at the fate of the woman who “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” ( CPP 69). The quatrains of the passages central section imitate the “automatic” nature of the sexual encounter they depict. The formal means are metronomic iambs and alternating, often sardonic rhymes: “guesses” and “caresses,” “tired” and “undesired” ( CPP 68). However, as a whole, the passage accommodates disciplined feelings of yearning. Secret sympathy for the woman insinuates itself beneath the air of detachment. Her washing “perilously spread,” she is a descendant of the Keats who imagines voyages across “perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn” (“Ode to a Nightingale,” line 70).

Banishing the Backward Devils: Eliot's Quatrain Poems and “Gerontion”

In the latter half of a war-torn decade, Eliot produced scores of reviews and essays but published only a handful of poems. While the most influential of his polemical pieces went on to shape literary discourse, the quatrains of Poems (1920) made but a negligible impression. In the wake of the positive reception of Prufrock and Other Observations , Eliots formal experiments struggled to find an audience. Early critics of the quatrain poems thought them novel but “fatally impoverished of subject matter,” or fit only for “readers in the waiting-room of a private sanatorium” (Brooker 21, 47). Eliot was stung by the reception of his new poetry, which he hoped could take him beyond the burdensome success of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In a letter to his brother he reveals his estimation of the new work: “some of the new poems, the Sweeney ones, especially ‘Among the Nightingales’ and ‘Burbank’ are intensely serious, and I think these two are among the best that I have ever done. But even here I am considered by the ordinary Newspaper critic as a Wit or satirist, and in America I suppose I shall be thought merely disgusting” ( L1 441). Subsequent criticism has done little to rescue the quatrain poems from the early charges that were laid against them. They have been denigrated as plagiaristic, pseudo-scholarly and preparatory; they are seen to have little in common with the lyrical and psychologically poignant poems that stand on either side of these experiments. Yet Eliots choice to trade free verse for the tautness of cross-rhymed tetrameters was deliberate. According to Ezra Pound, with whom Eliot scrutinised Theophile Gautiers quatrain poems in Emaux et Camees between 1917 and 1919, the two poets sought a way of addressing the lax formalism of their contemporaries. Eliot, perhaps less concerned with the general state of poetry than with framing his own thoughts, conceded in an interview that the “form gave the impetus to the content.” The statement is as cryptic as the content of the poetry is varied: subject matter ranges from sexual debasement to the tepidity of institutionalized religion, and the only common denominator would seem to be rhyme and rhythm. But the textual history of the quatrain poems suggests that they are also unified by an undercurrent of personal pain.

Prufrock and Other Observations

In 1917, T. S. Eliot published “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” a prose dialogue between two figures modelled on caricatures of himself and Ezra Pound. Eeldrop is Eliot: “I test people,” said Eeldrop, “by the way in which I imagine them as waking up in the morning. I am not drawing on memory when I imagine Edith waking to a room strewn with clothes, papers, cosmetics, letters and a few books, the smell of Violettes de Parme and stale tobacco. The sunlight beating in through broken blinds, and broken blinds keeping out the sun until Edith can compel herself to attend to another day. Yet the vision does not give me much pain.” ( CP1 530) Eeldrops test follows from a remark Appleplex makes about Edith: “‘Everyone says of her, “How perfectly impenetrable!” I suspect that within there is only the confusion of a dusty garret’” ( CP1 530). Eeldrop picks up on Appleplexs “dusty garret,” but he is less explicit about the distinction between what may be within Ediths person and what may be around her; where Appleplex speculates about the kind of room within Ediths person, Eeldrop imagines her placed within a room. The expression “waking to a room” (emphasis added) slightly alters the expected prepositional locution of “waking in a room.” As Eeldrop phrases it, Edith wakes to her setting, as if, say, waking to remorse. The specific moment of regaining consciousness is temporally afloat, as if part of Eeldrops test is to imagine the act of waking in order to speculate when, and how, a person and the world may come together, but also to show the difficulty of locating any such finite place or time when a sharp distinction might be drawn between a person and the world. Edith wakes to a setting which is itself a threshold in the double aspect of the sunlight beating in and being kept out: the broken blinds recall the shaded peripheries between figures, rooms and worlds in Eliots “Preludes,” where the “showers beat / On broken blinds,” and where “the world came back / And the light crept up between the shutters” ( CPP 22, 23). “Rooms,” “scenes,” “atmospheres,” “situations” – these words repeatedly play a part in Eliots early poems and critical prose: “the contact and cross-contact of souls, the breath and scent of the room” ( CP1 488).

‘Our greatest Asset’: Encounter Magazine and the Congress for Cultural Freedom

This chapter examines Michael Josselson’s assertion that Encounter magazine represented the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s ‘greatest asset’. It considers the unpublished archival record, and the vexed question of the relation of CIA funding to Encounter’s editorial independence. However, it places the greatest emphasis on interpreting the contents of the magazine in the light of the details of contemporary periodical debates in London, and also within the larger intellectual currents of the cultural Cold War. Ultimately, Harding’s analysis reveals the extent to which Encounter transcended rather than conformed to the template set by other CCF journals.

European Avant-Garde Coteries and the Modernist Magazine

Modernism is synonymous with cosmopolitanism. In their groundbreaking collection of essays, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane argued: “Conspicuous in the age of Modernism is an unprecedented acceleration in the intellectual traffic between nations . . . in this climate, international exchanges and unacknowledged borrowings flourished.” Successive waves of transnational avant-garde movements—symbolism, expressionism, cubism, Futurism, Dada, surrealism, constructivism— swept across Europe. In Extraterritorial (1972), George Steiner directed attention to the polyglot milieu of twentieth-century literature shaped by exile and expatriation, and, following the upheavals occasioned by two world wars, the displacement of millions of refugees. Steiner’s attention to a modern multilingualism as a condition of “extraterritoriality” indicates that concepts like “modernism” may be more culture-bound and stubbornly resistant to translation than we think.

The Great War and the Language of Modernism (review)

363 The more serious problem with this book lies neither in its archival and historical scope nor in its typically revealing readings of Joyce’s texts. Instead, it is the overall argument itself that seems to grow increasingly creaky as the text progresses. Mullin seeks to dismiss the image of Joyce as a wide-eyed innocent naïvely caught up in the legal wrangles over his stories and novels, but this critical ground has already been well worked in the last decade. A similar impulse is evident in Ellmann, and it has been fruitfully expanded in a number of directions by critics like Michael Groden, Trevor Williams, Andrew Gibson, and a host of others who have all revealed the ways in which Joyce self-consciously struggled both textually and personally against the imposition of censorship. Similarly, the rapidly expanding scholarship on Joyce and the law has revealed the writer’s sometimes steely legal acumen, particularly when dealing with issues of copyright and intellectual property. In using the discourses of social purity to tilt at the “longstanding and still entrenched view of Joyce the apolitical writer in splendid isolation,” Mullin succeeds only in demolishing an already well-worn straw man (210). Similarly, her insistence throughout on Joyce’s continual “subversion” of sexual purity discourses seems slightly dated and somewhat unfair to the complexity of her own analysis. When she concludes a fascinating chapter on Theosophy and sexual anxiety in “Scylla and Charybdis” with the claim that the episode “thus contributes to . . . the underground correlation between vice and vigilance,” (139) one cannot help but feel that she has done herself an injustice. The reading, frankly, is much richer and far more historically nuanced than this vaguely Derridian conclusion allows. A Joycean critic once wrote that we should declare a moratorium “for a year and a day” on any discussion of paralysis in Dubliners, and I finished this book thinking that a similar embargo on “subversion” might prove equally productive.1 The real strength of this work, however, lies in its careful archival work, its deep cultural knowledge of Victorian and Edwardian social purity movements, and its often masterful and always witty engagement with Joyce’s works. As a collection of essays on sexuality, censorship, and the illicit pleasures of reading, it will make a welcome addition to the libraries of Joyceans and non-Joyceans alike. Indeed, the work Mullin has done in this text may establish a launching point for a wide array of additional work on social purity and its effects on other texts of the early twentieth century. Its sometimes unfortunate insistence on the rhetoric of subversion, moreover, is more than offset by its wit and readability. Indeed, this is a genuine rarity among critical books: a smart, concise, and engaging text that treats sexuality and scandal with just the right mix of scholarly rigor, native intelligence, and good humor.