"Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays": Demystifying authority and constructions of female sexuality in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land
Date
1999
Authors
Khambalia, Andrea Catherine
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Abstract
This study attempts to identify the site of The Waste Land's authority. Examining T.S. Eliot's theoretical investments, namely his theory of impersonality articulated in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," results in an awareness of the authority he invests in tradition, which he conceives of as impersonal and objective. However, what appears to be impersonality in fact constitutes a consensual agreement among individuals of a specific social and ideological perspective. The paper then reveals the strategies the poem employs to engineer objectivity and to obscure its subjective perspective. The analysis specifically exposes the poem's use of metaphoric and metonymic devices to project its image of woman and female desire. Consequently, misogyny is inscribed in The Waste land through metonymy, and universalized through metaphor.