ACADEMIC WRITING

In his poem The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot responds to the aftereffects of World War I on 20th century Europe. One of these aftereffects is a shift in ideas of masculinity and femininity caused by a loss of many male soldiers and a simultaneous movement towards women’s rights. In Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot, Cassandra Laity addresses these post-war shifts in masculinity and femininity by examining Eliot’s place in modernism, the “dominant art form in the West . . . until the end of World War II” (DeKoven 174). Specifically, Laity argues Eliot existed within an exclusively “male-defined modernism” (5) and so wrote The Waste Land surrounded by a masculinist, misogynistic literary Canon. However, Laity analyzes Eliot not as a misogynist product of male-defined modernism but rather as a poet responding to his masculinist surroundings by expressing a complex relationship with femininity. Utilizing Laity’s lens, this essay will similarly attempt to resituate Eliot’s relationship to femininity by unravelling Canonical modernism’s “claims to literary and cultural authority” (53). First, this essay will examine how Eliot, affected by the loss of a post-war idealized masculinity and the rise of an emerging female autonomy, became disillusioned with traditional gender roles. However, this essay will depart from Laity’s argument by then specifically focusing on Eliot’s treatment of femininity in The Waste Land. Ultimately, by including femininity in the poem as a symbol of redemptive hope, Eliot contradicts male-defined modernism and demonstrates an ambivalence to femininity which suggests the presence of hope for his modernist waste land.