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  • Essay / Invitation, Violation, and Automation: The Deterioration of Desire in Ts Eliot's The Waste Land

    DiscussionIn The Waste Land, Eliot uses women as a window to show the dissolution and distortion of love and desire. Eliot creates a progression from invitation to violation to automation through the use of three distinct female characters: the hyacinth girl, Philomela, and the young typist. These women allow the reader to understand how the wastelands came to be. As the reader observes the changing landscape, the women in the landscape gradually transform from pure maidens into sterile, mechanical beings. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayThe erosion of intimacy is documented in these three crucial parts, showing a pre-corruption world, a tragic in-between world and the final product: the wasteland. In these scenarios, Eliot's women show the weakness and suffering that are an integral part of the human condition. However, the transformations of pure love into a pale imitation of love prove detrimental to the landscape of desire. The foreshadowing of the dissolution of love begins with an invitation to the consummation of love in the hyacinth garden. This is represented through a vivid memory of purity associated with fertility and flourishing: “You gave me hyacinths for the first time a year ago; and your hair wet, I could not speak, and my eyes were failing, I was neither alive nor dead, and I knew nothing, looking into the heart of light, silence. (Eliot 34-40) The dynamism and natural setting of this scene provide a stark contrast to the darker depictions of love that appear later in the poem. The narrator's inaction turns out to foreshadow, not indicate, the dissolution of desire. Critic Cyrena Pondrom reads this scene as a specific entry into the wasteland itself: "In the agonizing light of the expectation of male domination in literal physical and erotic connection, the speaker cannot connect from no abstract manner” (Pondrom, 428). The premature identification of this particular male impotence as "agonizing" leaves no room for the memory of a pre-desert world, which seems to be the crucial point on which the first part rests, and the following parts follow. support. But this also leaves no room for an intermediate phase. Even at the point of failure, it seems that the purity of love is preserved. The male speaker's nervousness and inability to act comes from love, the "heart of light" (Eliot 41). Because the recall of this scene mixes “memory and desire” from the first lines, it signifies the world before the fall (Eliot 2-3). However, the event in the hyacinth garden and the failure of the male counterpart to accept the hyacinth girl's offering portends the wasteland to come. The role of female suffering in The Waste Land reflects the "violation" part of the text: the intermediate scene in our progression towards the wasteland. This violation manifests itself through the anxieties of Philomel, whose rapist cut out her tongue so that she could not pronounce his name: The change of Philomel, by the barbarian king, so brutally forced; And yet, there the nightingale Filled all the desert with an inviolable voice And she still cried, and the world still chases "Jug Jug" to dirty ears. (Eliot 99-103) Through the rape of Philomel, Eliot depicts the opposite of the nervous excitement and inaction displayed in the hyacinth garden. Assertion of desire becomes a desperate overcompensation for pretensionmale in power, which had previously failed. The desire of the “heart of light” is replaced by a fulfillment “so grossly forced” (Eliot 41, 100). The sexually eager but virginal Hyacinth Girl is replaced by the raped and mute Philomel. Interestingly, Eliot does not recognize the second half of Ovid's story, in which Philomel weaves a tapestry that recounts the name of his rapist (McRae, 34). Instead, he weaves a version in which the nightingale's mutilated syllables are, after much difficulty, able to convey the name of his rapist: "Twit twit twit/Jug jug jug jug jug jug/So crudely forced." Tereu” (Eliot 204-207). This image of suffering and inability to speak morbidly echoes the lost actions and unspoken words in the hyacinth garden. In this scenario, however, male and female roles have been tainted and violently distorted. It is important to note that the roles in the two aforementioned storylines still possess passion and struggle, which are erased in the mechanical world of the typist that Philomel's story precedes. The mistreatment of women embodied in the story of Philomel is followed by the definitive destruction of love and desire. At this point, Eliot foregrounds his poetic presence as an observer by identifying himself as Tiresias, blinded and bisexual. In this voice, Eliot presents his vision of how intimacy functions in a fully developed wasteland. Teiresias got his lady parts as punishment for striking two copulating serpents. Eliot's version of Teiresias is ironically forced by his agonizing prophetic powers to predict the scene of a sterile, sleeping copulation between two figures in this ruined landscape. Through the character of Tiresias, Eliot justifies his prophetic abilities and is able to express his distressing observations without risking poetic vulnerability. He states in his notes on The Waste Land that “both sexes meet at Tiresias” (Eliot quoted in Rainey, 105). Tiresias' dual sexuality allows Eliot to move from a masculine to a feminine voice, and justifies his ability to discern both perspectives: In the violet hour, when eyes and backs turn toward the top of the desk, when the human machine waits, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, the old man with wrinkled female breasts can see in the violet hour… (Eliot 215-220, emphasis added) Eliot uses the imagery of machines and automatons in order to synchronize the death of love with the acceleration of industrialism. . It is significant that the woman in this story is anonymous, referred to only as “the typist at home at tea time” (Eliot 222). She is only directly identified by her profession: a “human engine” (Eliot 216). Her body, asleep to external contact, only feels a pair of “exploring hands” in place of intimacy (Eliot 240). His “smutty young man” is apathetic about whether his actions are acknowledged or reciprocated. Philomel's rape finds a strange echo when the young man “immediately attacks” her after an unsuccessful attempt to “engage her in caresses” (Eliot, 239; 237). desire: “All pretense of genuine feeling has disappeared and the typist, unlike her predecessors, does not even seem to possess a real sexual ‘appetite’” (Sickler, 428). The “lovers” become two distinct mechanical entities. at home, the typist is always an insensitive automaton. Sickler states that the remains of his sexuality reside in “an unstimulated, almost unconscious prostitution, in which the body only participates, or half” (Sickler, 428). , “unconscious prostitution in which the body alone participates” implies a deliberation of the body, 1984.