1)
This extract, from the first part of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, is the first instance in which we are presented with a vision of metropolitan London, a setting which recurs throughout the poem. The barren soullessness of city life echoes through the landscape portrayed in lines 19-26: although in this section we have a more literal barren setting without life or the water which sustains it it could be argued that the multitude where “each man fixed his eyes before his feet” is similarly absent of vitality, with images of death also permeating this extract.
The plant imagery of lines 71 and 72 links back to the opening of the poem and the image of “breeding lilacs out of the dead land” (2-3), which references the ubiquitousness of desire and the pain that comes with it. In the given extract, images of life and death are juxtaposed again, perhaps referencing the myth of Hyacinth, already alluded to in the second stanza. In this myth she is accidentally killed by Apollo (who was in love with her) and subsequently names the flower after her - here linking with the blooming of a corpse.
“The Waste Land” is full of intertexts such as this, in part due to Eliot wanting to cement his place in the literary canon and demonstrate his knowledge of tradition, deemed of utmost importance in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” This prominence given to tradition is also echoed by Pound in his “A Few Don’ts of an Imagiste”, in which the canon’s significance is significantly stressed. Another intertext in this section of the poem is Dante’s “Inferno”, referenced in lines 63 and 64 - in the modern vision of a fragmented, apocalyptic world Dante’s vision of hell is a fitting choice, Eliot here not only demonstrating his knowledge of the literary canon, but asserting a certain Europeanness, that he strived for to the point of becoming a British citizen. Eliot also references English Renaissance dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil in line 74, whom he viewed to be one of the exceptional revenge tragedians of his period and particularly admiring his treatment of death. The reference to Baudelaire in the last line of the extract is yet another example of Eliot demonstrating his erudition - the poem is full of different languages, from Sanskrit to German and Greek, a challenge for the reader.
This fragmented puzzle of languages, extracts and images is in part a reflection of society at the time, and a technique used by many modernist writers. In the words of Peter Howarth, in The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Poetry, early twentieth century society was “a recipe for personal and social disintegration” (10). Society was becoming increasingly secular, leading to the disappearance of communal religion, the First World War had been devastating (as referenced in line 62 with “I had not thought death had undone so many” and the bombarding worlds of advertising and media were on the rise. Whilst composing the poem, Eliot himself suffered a mental breakdown, this too contributing to the fragmented and gloomy societal outlook.
The morose masses of “so many” (ine 63) are a recurrent image of modernist poetry (for example paralleled in Pound’s “In A Station of the Metro”). In the poem Eliot goes on to visit the voices of some of the individuals who we could posit in subsequent parts of the poem make up this crowd, even here picking out individual voices and using quotation. The interaction between the speaker in this extract and Stetson is an echo of the war, the reference to Baudelaire perhaps alluding to camaraderie established in those times of struggle. The incorporation of quotations is also favoured by writers such as Marianne Moore, who similarly uses collage techniques and varying voices in her work. Fiona Shaw’s reading of “The Waste Land” is particularly helpful for demonstrating the use of multiple voices as she assumes accents which drive home the different speakers and alters the tone, emphasising conversational aspects - quite in contrast to Eliot’s own, flat, recordings of the poem. While not perhaps a political poem in such a way as Langston Hughes or others, Eliot certainty displays a certain discontent with society in its current form, apparent in the zombie-like nature of the crowd and the “sighs, short and infrequent” (64) that are mentioned.
This broken society, echoed in the broken, fragmented form of the poem, with its sordid imagery, barren landscapes and pervasive atmosphere of death is here illustrated by Eliot as he zooms out over the commuters of metropolitan London. An epic of sorts, a poem of its time and tradition, “The Waste Land” and its style encapsulates many of the aspects of both modern poetry and society.
2)
Across early twentieth century American literature, we see women artists finding their voices and simultaneously demonstrating the struggles that they have to go through to do so. From the 19th century paradigm of the “Angel in the house”, still struggled against in texts like Their Eyes Were Watching God (see Janie’s first and second marriages), rises the concept of the New Woman a threat to traditional notions of femininity and patriarchal power.
In Willa Cather’s “Flavia and Her Artists”, Frau Lichtenfeld inverts the passive female stereotype, being not only a female artist with her own voice as a writer, but also having strong personality and peculiar appearance, presenting her as a “humorous caricature of a time honoured pose of the heroines of sentimental romance”, Cather directly criticising the traditional literary portrayal of women s virtuous. Moreover, with her “rolling baritone”, she breaks the feminine paradigm of silence, and is not only comical, but self-deprecating, demonstrating a strong sense of identity. In attributing to her quasi-masculine qualities in her size and gregariousness, as well as comparing her to a cavalier, Cather is perhaps suggesting that for female artists in the contemporary climate, it was necessary to assume masculine characteristics to some degree in order to be taken seriously.
Jemima Broadwood is presented as similarly masculine in Cather’s text, with her appearance compared to that of a “boy” and her assuming the male name “Jimmy”. This character encapsulates some of the ideas surrounding the new woman - her hair is cut short and she is an actress, a form of public person that women were not previously encouraged to assume. Aside from this, Cather creates ambiguity around Jemima’s sexuality, implying her queerness through her final encounter with Imogen, which is charged with a certain eroticism. This links to Cather’s own experience as a woman who had intimate relations with other women. Explicit references to Jimmy’s sexuality here would have been considered taboo in Cather’s era, hence her use of implicit suggestion.
In contrast to these strong, new women, Flavia is presented as a caricature of the female patrons of the arts who permeated the early twentieth century such as the Guggenheims, Whitneys and Vanderbilts, who collected (European) art and subsequently artists, to form literary and creative salons. Flavia’s preoccupation with art as a means of conferring status is satirised by Cather in the cynical tone of her story, for example when she says that Frau Lichtenfeld’s novels “were the talk of all Germany”, but appears not to have read them, their popularity more important than any personal connection created. Her need for validation is also emphasised when Imogen contradicts her and she colours “unbecomingly”. This reaches the height of its effect at the end of the story as Flavia takes to her bed ill as a result of her artists leaving the ironically named “House of Song”.
To return to the presentation of female artists here and to compare them with Eudora Welty’s short story, a trope that recurs in both texts is the gigantic woman artist. Frau Lichtenfeld is described by Cather as “over six feet”, with her “immense stature” as a “colossal woman”. In elevating her size, Cather is here perhaps commenting on the way that women artists were often perceived as threatening, due to their inversion of the status quo. In “June Recital”, when Miss Eckhart plays her piece during the storm, her corporeality is also elevated, her body compared to a “tree trunk” and her face to “a mountain” (300). Just as with Frau ichtenfeld’s loud voice, the volume of the piece is emphasised, although with this Eckhart this seems linked to self-repression, evident in Welty’s choice to describe the performance as something that “burst out, unwanted, exciting”. Indeed, the use of “unwanted” makes the performance seem almost some kind of expulsion of the abject in Kristevan terms, perhaps linked to the way in which female artists were often perceived negatively in this period.
Miss Eckhart also transcends the confines of gender, just as Jimmy and Frau Lichtenfeld do, while she is playing the piece - she ceases to be confined by femininity as her “face could have belonged to someone else - not even a woman necessarily.” As a woman dares to inhabit the creative world of the masculine artist with all its emotions, the children are shocked, the performance being “more than the ear could bear to hear or the eye to see” (301).
It could be argued that this repression of creativity - so clearly signalled as lying latent in Miss Eckhart by the simile of “she had been pricked and the music came out like red blood under the scab of a forgotten fall” (301) - is part of what drives her to her eventual madness, just as Gilbert and Gubar argue about Jane Eyre’s Bertha in The Madwoman in the Attic. In “June Recital” too, Miss Eckhart ends up voiceless, as she is dragged away by the supposedly ‘comic’ duo of Mr Fatty Bowles and Old Man Moody, who are in truth behaving quite violently towards the old piano teacher.
While no such violence takes place in Cather’s text, the idea of the woman as a threat is clear in the enlarged physicality of Frau Lichtenfeld, as well as in Monsieur Roux’s tirade against the impossibility of a true intellectual woman and his comparison between her and the destructive gaze of the Meduse. In a world where female creativity, sexuality and autonomy is threatening, both Cather and Welty (alongside other female creatives of the early twentieth century) not only subvert social norms in showcasing the unfair nature of this double standard, but actively challenged it in being creatives themselves.
