The psychological effect the city environment has on both, the characters and authors, can be seen in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and T.S.Elliot’s the wasteland. The lack of unity of Elliot’s text has lead critics to feel the writing is far too fragmented:
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking? What. I never know what you are thinking. Think. (TWL: 110)
However, as Gareth Reeves suggests in the book T.S.Elliot: The wasteland ‘unprecedented conditions of chaos and disintegration demand unprecedented methods of poetic fragmentation’ (16). Critics, who felt the poem lack form, may have over looked the fact that Elliot has purposely designed the poem as such. ‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes bad’ sounds like spoken English, which is not always spoken in complete sentences. Add to the fact that the person speaking sounds unnerved to the point of not bearing to be by herself should her thoughts reveal reality.(Selby,106) It is as if the stress of the city has finally poured into the speakers thoughts, making the speaker feel the need to self-reassure.
Point one: 2-v
The modernist perception of a person being produced from a place fits neatly into Virginia Wolfe’s Mrs Dalloway. The book’s namesake if often portrayed as a person framed by her emotions, worried how ‘something awful was about to happen’(Woolf,1). Although the city has allowed more freedom, such as to roam unescorted, being in an alien environment to which Clarissa was bought up in has had a psychological effect. By comparison, Mr Dalloway is externally viewed as a strong character. Although, Richard is good at remaining in control, he has his own issues. Even with h...
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Selby,N. T.S.Eliot: The Waste Land: A readers guide to essential criticism .Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Print.
Wallace, J. Beginning Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press,2011.Print
"The Waste Land." 1922. Modernism: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies). Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. 123-42. Print.
Willson, R. "Is There Hope in The Waste Land?" Critical Essays on :The Waste Land. Essex: Longman, 1998. 82-93. Print.
Woolf, V. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2003. Print.
Rielly, Edward J. “Out of the Landscape of His Past.” Journal of American Cultuer 16.3 (1993): 47.
Tyler, Anne. “Teenage Wasteland.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 12th ed. New York: Pearson, 2013. 189-95. Print.
Set just after one of England’s worst tragedies, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway is a vivid picture of the effects of World War I on London’s high society, often in glaring contrast to the effects of shell shock suffered by war veteran Septimus Smith. For members of high society, the War’s impact is largely indirect, mainly affecting their conversations at posh social functions. Although the war has had little impact on these people, some strive to develop a deeper understanding of the War’s main consequence: death. For Septimus, who has endured the direct impact of the War as a soldier, however, the memories and traumas of the War are more real than the peaceful life to which he has returned. At the urgent pleas of his wife, doctors unsuccessfully attempt to help him regain the blissful ignorance of war that he once had. Woolf illuminates a perpetual clash between those who merely understand the War as a continuing news story, and Septimus, who knows it as a frightening reality.
Eliot, T.S. The wasteland. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991: 1447-1463.
Spurr, David. Conflicts in Consciousness: T.S. Eliot’s Poetry & Criticism. Urbana: U of Illinois P. 1984.
In T.S. Eliot’s Poem, The Waste Land, modernism is strewn across every page. In the time period it was composed, The Waste Land was a very unique poem that displayed many modern characteristics. Here, the concept behind modernism was to show the rejection away from society. Eliot was living during the period where the traditional norms of the 1800’s were cast aside and writers wrote more realistic and how life really was. The poem breaks traditional form by not having customary stanzas and lines; not to mention the random spurts of foreign language. Unlike the typical poems of its time, it did not use excessive imagery to paint a picture or rhyming. Eliot sought out a new type of poetry that used individual fragments to create a sense of desolation that he thought the world was suffering...
Physical surroundings (such as a home in the countryside) in works of literary merit such as “Good Country People”, “Everyday Use”, and “Young Goodman Brown” shape psychological and moral traits of the characters, similarly and differently throughout the stories.
Eliot, T. S., and Michael North. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.
Williamson, George. A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot; a Poem by Poem Analysis. New York:
...In "The Waste Land," Eliot delivers an indictment against the self-serving, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without giving us, particularly the youth a message of hope at the end of the Thames River. And in "Ash Wednesday," Eliot finally describes an example of the small, graceful images God gives us as oases in the Waste Land of modern culture. Eliot constantly refers back, in unconsciously, to his childhood responsibilities of the missionary in an unholy world. It is only through close, diligent reading of his poetry that we can come to understand his faithful message of hope.
T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" is considered by many to be the most influential work in modern literature. First published in 1922, it captures the feelings and sentiments of modern culture after World War I. Line thirty of "The Waste Land," "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," is often viewed as a symbol of mankind’s fear of death and resulting love of life. Eliot’s masterpiece—with its revolutionary ideas—inspired writers of his era, and it continues to affect writers even today.
Different speakers in "The Waste Land" mirror the disjointedness of modern experience by presenting different viewpoints that the reader is forced to put together for himself. This is similar to the disassociation in modern life in that life has ceased to be a unified whole: various aspects of 20th-century life -- various academic disciplines, theory and practice, Church and State, and Eliot's "disassociation of sensibilities," or separation of heart and mind -- have become separated from each other, and a person who lives in this time period is forced to shore these fragments against his or her ruins, to borrow Eliot's phrase, to see a picture of an integrated whole.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
T.S Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, is written in the mood of society after World War I. By using these allusions, The Waste Land reflects on mythical, historical, and literary events. The poem displays the deep disillusionment felt during this time period. In the after math of the great war, in an industrialized society that lacks the traditional structure of authority and belief, in the soil that may not be conductive to new growth (Lewis). Eliot used various allusions that connected to the time period and the effect of the war on society in his poem. Aided by Eliot’s own notes and comments, scholars have been able to identify allusions to: the Book of Common Prayer, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles-Louis Philippe, James Thomas, Guillaume Appollinaire, Countess Marie Larsich, Wyndham Lewis, nine books of the Bible, John Donne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Wagner, Sappho, Catullus, Lord Byron, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, J.G. Frazer, Jessie L. Weston, W.B. Yeats, Shakespeare, Walter Pater, Charles Baudelair, Dente, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and John Webster—all within the first section of 72 lines, about one allusion every two lines (Lewis). Using various allusions, Eliot was able to connect to the fact that he lived in a modern day waste land as a result of the destruction caused by World War I. Eliot used the allusions to show that death brings new beginnings and change, and love still flourishes.
The Wasteland is a poem Eliot wrote after his divorce with his wife Vivienne Haighwood. Critics say the title of the poem, the wasteland, comes from his thoughts on his marriage. This poem is considered to be “one of the most difficult poems in a difficult literary period”. The Wasteland is a poem that is said to be of his most influential work. At first glance, critics considered the poem to be too modern but then opinions changed as they realized the poem reflected Eliot’s disillusionment with the moral decay of World War I in Europe. T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland combines theme, style, and symbolism to explore life and death.