T.S Eliot is one of the most important poets of modern English poetry. His masterpiece The Waste Land, published in 1922 is one of the most important poems of modernist poetry. Through The Waste Land, Eliot has depicted the reality of the society. The poem has been structurally divided into five parts namely “The Burial of the Dead”, “A Game of Chess”, “The Fire Sermon”, “Death by Water” and “What the Thunder Said”. Apart from the fourth part, “Death by Water”, Eliot has used the women as the dominant image throughout the poem.
The poem is
introduced through a quotation alluded from the Satyrican of Petronius written
in a Latin language. The introduction tells a story of Appollo who is
mythological figure that gave a woman an immortal life .She didn’t ask for
youth, so she wasn’t given eternal youth. She lived and became very old, weak
and fearful creature. When the old woman was asked about her wish, she said (I
wish to die) Eliot opens his poem by this story to show that the modern man is
living a death –in-life like this woman.
The second
woman is Madam Sosostris; she is a fortune teller and an image that he borrows
from the classical works. In the past people believe in superstitions details
and they used to visit this woman to prophesy but for good reasons since they
thought it would help them know how to get water from the Nile River to
irrigate their land. In modern life she is speaking about death by water and
not as a source of life.
Belladonna, which
means "beautiful lady", refers in this case to the Virgin
Mary. In other words,
Eliot associates the image of a beautiful woman with the spiritual beauty of
Christ's Mother. There was a painting of virgin Marry drown by Leonardo
da Vinci a very famous Italian painter and she is a symbol of purity and
sublime qualities of the woman of the past that are not in the women of the
present.
The game of
Chess is an allusion to a significant work of art, drama written by Thomas
Middleton who is a dramatist of the early 17th century. The game of Chess is
known with another significant title which is Women Beware Women as Eliot
states has a scene where a mother in law is distracted by a game of chess while
her daughter-in-law is being raped in the other room.
Two figures
of women Dido and Cleopatra are suggested here as a juxtaposition to the modern
situation reminding people of the kind of women who were in love and who would kill
themselves for the sake of their lovers
Philomel is
another women figure in the classical work of Ovid. The reason he chose her because
in the mythological story is raped by a powerful barbarous king Tereus and he
was her sister's husband, then Procne transferred her into a nightingale.
The myth says that the voice of the nightingale was always heard by the people;
so they learned a lesson that this should not happen and this evil wrong thing
that happened to her should not happen and they learn a lesson from the
experience she went through.
Eliot is
drawing a picture of all women, of their suffering, how they feel although they
have luxury and all the background you have seen before but they feel lonely. and isolated and the loneliness they feel is
disturbing, the woman he described wants the company she is afraid from being
alone, she needs someone. Bad is repeated to emphasize that she really feels
bad about the situation. It suggests that even the word thinking a meaningless
word and this is a link with the earlier suggestion that modern man can’t say anything
because he knows nothing but a broken image; they are saying nothing because
they know nothing.
Ophelia, a
character alluded from Shakespeare's Hamlet. He makes a comparison between
Ophelia who gone mad from the shock when she knew that her lover has killed her
father, with the modern woman who doesn’t react under any conditions. Ophelia
represents a sensitive woman who stands in a great contrast with the rich woman
and Lil who are insensitive and cold in their relations with their husbands.
In
conclusion, Eliot draws all these kinds of women figures from the past in
comparison to situations that is happening in the present time. That the modern
men need to wake up and beware of his surroundings.
