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Trans-Scripts 2 (2012)
Fixed in a Formulated Phrase: The
Construction and Constriction of Gendered
Terms in T. S. Eliotâs âThe Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrockâ
Andrew J. Calis*
For J. Alfred Prufrock, words and their categorical definitions demonstrate the power to restrict or confine, locking him into a term which cannot possibly articulate him. Thus, an escape from the regimented order of language, which becomes tied up with sexuality, seems to come from a lack of definitions; but with this escape also comes a sort of perpetual wandering, since Prufrock refuses the definitions that would otherwise ground him. This wandering is insular and internal, so much so that he becomes a permanent nomad, unable to connect to his surroundings. In this way, he embodies Carla Frecceroâs notion of queerness in her chapter, âAlways Already Queer (French) Theory,â in which queerness, as a sort of Derridean notion, marks the space between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and ârather than occupy one pole (the negatively valorized one) of a binary, as these terms have seemed to do, queer moves in the space between hetero- and homo-â (18).
Recent gender study on T. S. Eliot has mostly focused on his ubiquitous poem, The Waste Land. Scholars such as Cyrena N. Pondrom write that âEliotâs work contains a play of dramatic voices [which] has long been well- understood, but critics have not fully recognized that a founding part of the drama is the performance of genderâ (425). Yet, her article âT. S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land ,â as the title implies, only focuses on said poem, briefly mentioning the wealth of gender issues in Eliotâs other works, then moving promptly on. Max Nanny writes in ââCards Are Queerâ: A New Reading of the Tarot in The Waste Land â that he is
- Andrew J. Calis is a Masterâs Degree Candidate in English at West Virginia University. He is interested in pedagogy and modernism, and in particular, American poetic modernisms.
âconvinced that the Tarot is not only found in the mythical dimensions of the cards but in their reference to Eliotâs own emotionally crucial experiencesâ (337). Nanny elaborates, saying âEliot suffered from âan absolute and emotional derangementâ which he himself called âa life-long affliction,ââ alluding to the poetâs possible personal sexual struggles (339). Despite the articles written on queerness in The Waste Land , the scarcity of gender-related publications on âThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrockâ is surprising, considering the poemâs popularity in academia. Some essays on Prufrock and gender studies mention, as Jaime Hovey does in her book A Thousand Words , a âthwarted masculinityâ that results from ceaseless and meaningless chatter (55). She categorizes him as a homosexual jealous of other homosexuals who âfar surpass him in both genius and sex appeal,â thus imprinting on him a located sexuality I look to unravel (57). Suzanne W. Churchill writes her essay âOuting T. S. Eliotâ in order âto redirect attention to the poetry and to develop a more complex model of authorial identityâ by looking at a large canon of Eliotâs poems, including (but not remotely limited to) Prufrock. She uses the lens of T. S. Eliotâs own sexuality, in her eyes, his homosexuality, to read his poetry.
This sort of queer biographical reading of Eliot is something that many scholars have explored^1. This is not my objective, however. I investigate the ways in which âThe Love Songâ demonstrates Prufrock as neither homosexual nor heterosexual, but instead queer (as Freccero uses the term). This is the cause of his own exclusion from his community, not his homosexuality, as other critics posit. Prufrockâs exclusion results from his internal resistance to codification, through language but also through gender. His struggle and difficulty articulating his isolation indicate his queerness, an argument I will support primarily using the theories of Freccero in âAlways Already Queer (French) Theory.â
Prufrockâs isolation manifests itself through his perception of being an outcast, rather than an actual, definitive remoteness. As Eliotâs poem begins, Prufrock wanders through grimy streets which contrast starkly with the sophisticated room in which âthe women come and go / Talking of Michelangeloâ in the second stanza (ll. 13-14). Prufrockâs embarrassment shifts from his vagrancy to his vanity as he worries about his baldness, the thinness of his arms and legs, and his ânecktie rich and modest, but asserted
(^1) See Pondromâs âT. S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land ,â Suzanne Churchillâs âOuting T. S. Eliot, Gabrielle McIntireâs âAn Unexpected Beginning: Sex, Race, and History in T. S. Eliot's Columbo and Bolo Poems,â to name a few.
charactersâ) heterosexuality, but these markers soon deconstruct, leaving Prufrock in a realm of fluidity, perceived by the narrator as instability.
The poemâs title identifies a masculine figure, J. Alfred Prufrock, the narrator, as the one who sings the love song. At the start, the poem asserts his masculinity, describing his collared shirt âmounting firmly to the chinâ and his ânecktie rich and modest,â both conventionally male adornments (ll.42-43). Prufrock is also sure to identify himself as distinct from the women who ââŠcome and go / Talking of Michelangeloâ (ll.13-14). He genders them as different from the âIâ who silently walks towards his destination; the women instead chat amongst each other. The women are characterized as well through physical markers, such as their jewelry and clothing. He speaks of âArms that are braceleted and white and bareâ or wrapped up in a shawl (ll. 63; 67). In the same stanza, he refers to the smell of âperfume from a dressâ which distracts him (ll. 65). In this way, since the object of the desire is a woman, and since the object of desire shapes the sexuality of the desirer, it is assumed (at least initially) that the allure of the women makes Prufrock straight (Freccero 21). Since the relationship between the object and the subject rarely work out that easily, though, the relation is more like âa split subject, a subject whose object is the creation of that subjectâ (21). In this way, the object of desire both shapes and is shaped by the desirer.
This complex identity causes the poemâs identifying markers break to down, and as the love interestâs feminine characteristics fade as the poem develops, a queer interpretation emerges. This reading allows the relationship between the characters to extend beyond either homosexual or heterosexual, instead exhibiting it as a combination. The poem âshow[s] how the two, gay and straight, are inter-implicated and how they differ from themselves from withinâ (Freccero 18). In a parenthetical comment after the mentioning of his attraction to the love interestâs white, bare, arms, Prufrock exclaims, â(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)â with what seems to be admiration for a conventionally masculine physical feature: the hairiness of her arms (ll. 64). Later in the poem, the narrator mentions the love interest as ââŠone, settling a pillow by her headâ (emphasis added, ll. 96), thus using an identifying feminine pronoun, but then paralleling these lines in the stanza that follows: ââŠone, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl â (emphasis added, ll. 107). Only this time, the feminine pronoun is removed, and another marker of femininity, the shawl, is cast off as well, obscuring the love interestâs gender and complicating Prufrockâs attraction.
Prufrock mentions his own resistance to being characterized so readily. While imagining himself unfairly typified by others, he speaks of âThe eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all of the butt-ends of my days and ways? / And how should I presume?â (ll. 55-61). In this central quote from the poem, he identifies his discomfort with forced definitions: he feels âformulatedâ when others characterize him, since he himself cannot mention the âbutt-ends of [his] days and ways,â a life of wandering down sawdust-strewn avenues and âone night cheap hotelsâ (ll. 60; 6). He resists the lyrical exchange Freccero posits regarding Petrarch, saying that the difference âbetween an âIâ and a âyouâ is a relation both of desire and identificationâ (22). The gendered love interest serves to give the lover an inaccurate identification and vice versa. Yet, by resisting such clear markers, Prufrock can avoid locking his identity with his sexuality, at least ideally.
This lack of a permanent locus coincides with what Freccero writes regarding queernessâs ability to resist a permanent definition, as âThe special valence of queer would have to be spatio-temporal, as diffĂ©rance is^3 , and its emplacement would be deferred indefinitely. It would be a nomadism of sortsâ (19). And this is precisely where the poem starts, with the narrator, the titular J. Alfred Prufrock, wandering around the streets, moving from place to place without any mentionable grounding. He identifies âone-night cheap hotelsâ instead of permanent homes (ll. 6), and âStreets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent,â implying something non- physical or impermanent about them (ll. 8-9). Later he wants to ask the love interest a question (presumably a confession of love), yet mentions also the time left ââŠfor a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions / Before the taking of a toast and tea,â showing an internal struggle, perhaps with his own sexuality, which evades a simple categorization (ll. 32-35). This is the sexuality that Freccero attributes to queerness : that which âis what is and is not there,â and that which evades simple characterization (18).
This reinforces Frecceroâs notion that the characters are doing little else except performing normalcy with the conventional expectations of a female lover and heterosexual love (20). Since sexuality receives its label by its
(^3) Freccero mentions Derridaâs notion of diffĂ©rance elsewhere in her paper, calling â Queer , it its deconstructive sense,âŠa kind of Derridean diffĂ©rance , occupying an interstitial space between binary oppositionsâ (18). This is largely why the term queer should not be easily identified with a singular field of study, she says.
organization^4. The epigram, a stanza taken from Danteâs Inferno , is six lines of Italian, all of roughly equal length and with a regular rhyme and meter. This order falls apart in the opening stanza of Eliotâs poem, where the first line is nearly half the length of the second, and the rhyme is first stalled, then buried: âLet us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a tableâ (emphasis added, ll.1-3). The first line, in trochaic tetrameter^5 , contrasts with the second, in trochaic hexameter, so that the stress of the rhyme leaves the listener waiting uncomfortably for two beats until it drops, only to be re-emphasized in the third line on the fourth trochee again. Eliot similarly uses this uncomfortable rhyme scheme in the second stanza, where âIn the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangeloâ (ll. 13-14). Here, the cadence of the first lineâs perfect trochaic pentameter is undermined by the second lineâs not- quite-trochaic tetrameter, thus undermining not only the number of beats in the line (its regular meter) but also the rhythm of the words: âTalking of Michelangeloâ cannot be said with the same smooth, trochaic rhythm of the preceding line without mashing the first three syllables into two.
The second stanza, which describes the aforementioned women, is also visually isolated as a couplet, but there is nothing heroic about this couplet^6. In this way, Prufrock, the narrator, questions the regular order of such a structured form and wonders if there is any room for abandon in such a regimented style. By playing with the rhythm and styles of historically famous forms of poetry, Eliot questions their regularity. In such a system, he seems to say, there is no room for the chaos of multiple meters or off-rhymes.
(^4) Again, the paucity of scholarship on Prufrock and form is surprising. However, David Trotter writes that âFor Eliot, regular meter and rhyme were neither an encumbrance nor an expressive support, but precisely a frameâ (241). In regard to Prufrock, âThe intensity of Prufrockâs arousal produces or is produced by an intensification in the verse,â which includes descriptions of the internal rhymes and the semi-colons (243). Still, Trotter spent most of the essay describing Eliotâs form in The Waste Land , which seems to be the popular thing to do among scholars. John Hughes, for example, spends only two sentences in âSex Wars in Moon Deluxeâ describing pronoun usage in Prufrock before moving away from the poem (both its content and its form) entirely (406). (^5) A trochee is a beat in poetry where the stress falls on the first syllable, then lifts on the second, falls on the third, lifts on the fourth, etc.: â Let us go then, you and I .â An iamb is a beat where the stress lifts on the first syllable, falls on the second, etc.: âAnd saw dust rest aur ants with oy ster- shells .â The meter refers to how many beats (whether trochees, iambs, or otherwise) are in each line. The first example (âLet us goâŠâ) is trochaic tetrameter, since it is four beats, which each beat being a trochee. The second example (âAnd sawdustâŠâ) is iambic pentameter, since it contains five beats, with each beat being an iamb. (^6) A heroic couplet is two lines of poetry, done in iambic pentameter, with the rhyme falling on the last syllable.
Much poetry that precedes Eliot utilizes one form of meter and rhyme and exercises only that single style, with the occasional variation. However, by breaking from such a tradition in this poem, Eliot insists that one style, just like one definition or one limiting term, formulates the ideas of the poem into an unnatural, imposed category in which it does not fit.
The visual function of the stanzas, though, stresses not the divergence from the norm but the isolation that results from such an action. Certain lines stress Prufrockâs loneliness, being that he stands out as both visibly and invisibly, materially and immaterially, different from his surroundings. There are three places where a set of six periods mark breaks in the text, serving to indicate to the reader a shift in time, place or mood. The stanzas are not completely separated from each otherâsince the periods take the place of a line break, the visual space between stanzas is actually smallerâand the stanza before and after the break still hearken to each other. Here, the reader can quickly move between time, place or mood along with Prufrock, paralleling the mobility his queerness offers. However, when the line breaks isolate only one or two lines, which happens most often toward the end of the poem, the visual remoteness calls attention to the disadvantages to his queernessâs fluidity; a single line of text floats between two full stanzas, appearing lonely and out of place. This is especially true at the poemâs final few stanzas: âI have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. // I do not think that they will sing to me. // I have seen them riding seaward on the wavesâ (ll. 124-126). The isolated line, âI do not think that they will sing to me,â clearly indicates the speakerâs isolation. Mermaids^7 , as I mentioned earlier, as fictitious elements of the speakerâs imagination, still refuse him an opportunity for a community. Prufrockâs loneliness embeds itself so deeply onto his character that he cannot communicate with real people around him anymore than he can speak to the creatures in his own mind.
Just before finishing her chapter, Freccero asks whether we should âconclude that the Western love song is always already queer and that we have only to deconstruct heteronormative culture for these differences within to appearâ which she answers herself in the affirmative (29). In much the same way, âThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrockâ resists being chained with
(^7) Churchill dismisses the argument âif J. Alfred Prufrock can't talk to women, he must be gayâ as homophobic, although I disagree (10). His inability to communicate with anyone, his struggle at being always separate can be reinforced by the fact that he clearly sees himself as not fitting with heteronormativity. By making sexuality a cause for his isolation, Eliot calls attention to the disruption that results from realizing the constrainedness, constructedness, and ill-fittedness of imposing heterosexuality.
Works Cited
Churchill, Suzanne W. âOuting T. S. Eliot.â Criticism 47.1 (2005): 7-30. ProjectMUSE. Web. 23 Nov. 2011
Eliot, T. S. âThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.â The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume D (1914-1945). Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007. 1577-1580. Print.
Freccero, Carla. âAlways Already Queer (French) Theory.â Queer/Early/Modern. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2006. 13-30. Print.
Hovey, Jaime. A Thousand Words: Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism. Columbus: Ohio State U P, 2006. Print.
Hughes, John. âSex wars in Moon Deluxe: Frederick Barthelme and the postmodern Prufrock.â Studies in Short Fiction 33.3 (Summer 1996) 401-411. EbscoHost. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.
Nanny, Max. ââCards Are Queerâ A New Reading of the Tarot in the Waste Land.â English Studies 62.4 (1981): 335-347. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Nov. 2011.
McIntire, Gabrielle. âAn Unexpected Beginning: Sex, Race, and History in T. S. Eliot's Columbo and Bolo Poems.â Modernism/Modernity 9.2 (2002): 283-
- ProjectMUSE. Web. 23 Nov. 2011.
Pondrom, Cyrena N. âT. S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land .â Modernism/Modernity 12.3 (2005): 425-441. ProjectMUSE. Web. 23 Nov.
Trotter, David. âT. S. Eliot and Cinema.â Modernism/Modernity 13.2 (2006): 237-265. ProjectMUSE. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.
