| In this project's examination of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, I depart from the strain of criticism pursued by historicists such as Michael North, cultural critics like Nancy Hargrove and Elaine Showalter, the psychoanalytic criticism of Maud Ellmann, and the approaches of Nancy Gish, Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick and other poststructuralists, to reconsider The Waste Land in a philosophic frame. This project will address the relationship between sexual desire and violence---so prevalent in the poem but even more so in its second section, "A Game of Chess"---and how this violence affects the various personae in the poem. By reading the representations of violence in the poem as entailing a type of despair---which the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard asserts is a misrelation of desire within the self---this project examines the characters in a state of despair in The Waste Land. Considering Eliot's repeated allusions to myth, Elizabethan drama, and even metaphysical poetry---which bring together images of violence, rape, and despair---in light of Kierkegaard's philosophy, provides for a reading of the poem as a damning indictment of modern, capitalist, patriarchal societies' suppression of the feminine voice. |
