Homoeroticism and misogyny in T. S. Eliot’s Life and The Waste Land

Abstract

There has been a renewed interest in reading the life story of T. S. Eliot by Gordon (2012) along with that of his first wife Vivienne Haigh Wood by Seymour-Jones (2009) with adjuvant scholarship on the poet’s ‘deviant sexuality’ and disavowed homoeroticism. The biographical approach took a new turn in Eliot’s case especially after the publication of Inventions of the March Hare (1996), which not only exposed or let’s say help ‘out’ the closeted poet. The paper uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ‘Paradigm of the Closet,’ and Koestenbaum’s idea of ‘male literary collaboration’ to complicate the study of a celebrated author who enthralled a whole century of readers. While the author seems not to die despite Barthes dictum, the paper problematises the author/poet/character nexus in The Waste Land and suggests that the detestable portrayal of women and their sexuality in the poem reflects a conspicuous psychic manifestation of repressed homosexuality, which engenders serious anxiety of the feminine. The bleakness of his magnum opus The Waste Land, read in the failed sexual encounters, is forced onto the feminine. However, “outing Eliot” here should not be read as homophobic, and on the contrary the paper works its way down to demonstrate how psychological manifestations of a repressed homosexuality in the author enthralled a whole generation, till it turned out that societies of modern times can at times be tricked into celebrating misogyny.