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Lebanese University
Faculty of Letters – Deanship
English Department – Masters II
Instructor: Dr May Maalouf
Course:LITR M3105 – Literature and Gender
Paperby: Sayde Tawk
Thesis Statement: Eliot's TheWaste Land announces the fall of conventional
masculinity after World War I, and alludes to the anxiety of the modern man
following the collapse of a social constructthat once secured his position of power
and dominance.
Eliot's The Waste Land reflects a radically changed world, the "title and the
view it incorporated of modern civilization seemed, to many, to catch precisely the
state of culture and society after World War I" (Holland D: 1417). What is of
interest to this paper is the challenged status of the modern man and masculinity in
this post-war culture and society. Middleton states that "Eliot refigured the
'perversity', 'weakness' and 'diminished masculinity' of modern poetry" (qtd. in
DuPlessis 601). The myths and characters he employs in the poem epitomize the
subjugation of women throughout history as "the inferiority of women was [long]
assumed a priori simply by virtue of their creation from the rib of Adam" (Howell

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5). However, though the voices in the poem are those of oppressedwomen, the
oppressors are granted no voice throughout the poem as if they have disappeared
and exist only through the stories told about their practices against the other
gender. By absenting a direct male voice from the poem, Eliot alludes to an
anxious masculinity heading toward an uncertain future as much as he alludes to a
subjugated femininity that was the norm for a significantly long past. In this sense,
Eliot's TheWaste Land announces the fall of conventional masculinity after World
War I, and alludes to the anxiety of the modern man following the collapse of a
social constructthat once secured his position of power and dominance.
The poem emphasizes ruined communication between men and women evident
in "A Game of Chess" when the woman addresses her partner saying "Speak to me.
Why do you never speak to me. Speak. / What are you thinking of? What thinking?
What? / I never know what you are thinking. Think." (12-14). This explicit
inability to communicate, which previously had taken place in the framework of a
discourseconstructed by men, implies that a defect has ruined this discourseand
thus ruined conventional communication between men and women. This defect
was a result of an atrocious world war that rendered returning soldiers unable to
integrate in a radically changed society where masculinity and femininity are no
more defined by an individual’s biological sex but rather by their gender, which, in
Butler’s words, is "performative", and its "performativity is not a singular act, but a

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repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the
context of a body" (qtd. in Pondrom425). Thus, the psychological implications
suffered by returning soldiers and the harsh conditions forcing women into the
public sphere changed the whole perspective on femininity and masculinity. As
Mazlin notes "women's roles in nations that were involved [in WWI] became more
varied, with women often venturing outside the home to work in munitions
factories or as nurses, or filling the positions their men had left", which gave way
to what McCracken called "female masculinity" (48). On the other hand, returning
soldiers came back to their homes to find themselves engaged in another kind of
battle stripping them of their familiar masculine identity that they grew to know
before the war. In McDermott words:
If before the war, men had identified with strength, physical and emotional,
and in their role as providers for their families, they returned to find these
modes of identity empty of significance. What was masculinity if the ways it
had been understood before the war had changed? The war left physical and
emotional scars on the soldier; and even if he was unharmed physically, he
was still stripped of his role as sole provider as women had usurped this
status. (44-45)
Learning to survive in a society where men had to be absent from their families'
lives, women had to perform masculine roles unaware that such performance is to

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change their lives and men's lives for the years to come, changing with it also the
traditional communication between men and women. Returning to The Waste
Land, and to "A Game of Chess", by replying "I think we are in rat's alley / Where
the dead men lost their bones." (115-116), the man asserts an awareness of
something lost and cannot be retrieved. The loss in this case is not just
communication, but a male constructed discourse, which had always delegated
conventional power roles long held by men, and defined by their narrow perception
of women, or in Stoltenberg words "a norm of human identity that is consistent
with and derived from his privileged irresponsibility to women" (Murphy 46).
Having said this, it is worth noting the significance of this discourseto men in
general and to masculinity in particular. John Stoltenberg further notes:
What is denoted by the word masculinity derives from the objective reality,
the fact of our lives under patriarchy, that all members of the gender class of
males are entitled to obtain their sense of self by postulating the selflessness
of the gender class of women, their sense of worth by asserting female
worthlessness, and their power in the culture by maintaining the
powerlessness of women. Masculinity is that sense of self, that sense of
worth, that right to power that accrues to every male on account of the global
subjugation of women. (Murphy 47)

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This cultural constructof human identity built, supported, and nourished
conventional masculinity. Stoltenberg's claim that "in order to end the system of
patriarchy, the very sexual [and social] identities of males will have to change"
(46), proves that the dissipation of this constructreflected in the poem through the
dissipation of meaningful communication threatens men's identity and
subsequently their masculinity.
Though the poem does not allude to a post-war alternative discourseor cultural
construct, where "dual-earner, single-parent, and same-sex couple homes …
[would] out-number the once-ascendant homemaker-breadwinner family" (Gerson
736) that would replace the conventional one, it does indeed affirm the identity
crisis men are facing and the unlikelihood of bringing back the latter to life. This is
evident through referring to the conventional masculinity discoursemerely through
past stories, which do not just epitomize the subjugation of women throughout
history, but also emphasize that modern men are stripped of what defines their
masculinity and manhood and what supports and authorizes their domination in
their cultural construct. Thus, it does foresee that masculine identity is to be
reshaped according to a new discourseand under news paradigms that previously
never accounted for what is not masculine. Paul Hosh says that "the relationship
between sexism and racism is the key to the chauvinist mind and to the tendency
for men to oppress women and members of cultures they presume to be inferior"

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(qtd. in Murphy 13), thus men held themselves superior to women by biological
nature not to mention their presumed racial superiority to other races they
perceived as inferior. Therefore, the shift from a biological masculinity to a
gendered masculinity shattered the foundations of the pre-war patriarchy. After
WWI the chauvinist identity became a legend from the past and men had to submit
to new paradigms of a gendered masculinity more associated with behaviour rather
than a biological masculinity that was later recognized by men themselves to "limit
their ability to be human" (Murphy 25).
In "The Burial of the Dead" the following lines further reflect the
disappointment of post-war men:
Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence. (37-41)
These lines convey the state of bewilderment the returning soldiers experienced
upon facing the new unexpected social practices that spread after the war. In Eric
Leed's words "after the Armistice, the common ideology was that everything in
society, including images of ideal masculinity, should return to a prewar state of
normality" (qtd. In Mazlin), yet the "prewar state of normality" did not survive the
brutality of war and remained a mere memory of an irretrievable past that Eliot

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explicitly dwells on. Eliot's wasteland is a land denied to men and to conventional
manhood that resist the changes brought about by the needs of a post-war society.
Gerson notes that the "intertwined social shifts - revolutions in family life, gender
arrangements, work trajectories, and life-course patterns - face great resistance
from institutions rooted in earlier eras" (736). Another significant example in the
poem is the allusion to the Fisher King, "I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the
arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?" (424-426). The Fisher
King Legend further supports the state of the wounded modern man whose welfare
is linked to the welfare of the whole society. In Sicker's words "the poem is about a
sexual failure which signifies a modern spiritual failure … associated with an
emasculating wound suffered by an archetypal male, the Fisher King, who appears
in various avatars within the poem" (420). This king needs to restore his kingdom
believing that "a rigorous, healthy ruler would ensure natural and human
productivity; on the other hand, a sick or maimed king would bring blight and
disease to the land and its people" (Guerin 193). The importance of a healthy king
in this myth is synonymous with the importance of a healthy masculinity in Eliot's
barren wasteland that is doomed to infertility if the per-war masculinity is not
restored. Eliot holds men's anxiety and chattered identity accountable for the
desolate desert dominant in the poem, as if without the pre-war assertive

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conventional masculinity regeneration is endangered and "order" cannot be
restored.
The poem further challenges the survival of the conventional power distribution
by silencing the male character or keeping him in the background of the stories and
myths employed. Evidently, women in The Waste Land are not yet independent or
outside the conventional discourseof male domination as the effects and practices
of this unbalanced discourseecho heavily in the poem. An example of past
practices is the story of Philomel, and an example of present effects is the
superficiality attributed to the woman figure in "A Game of Chess," and her
helplessness. As pointed out earlier, sexism and chauvinism were interrelated to
the extent that men's primary mean to identify themselves is to regard women as
inferior beings and subjugate them. Thus, the patriarchal prerogative of King
Tereus that Eliot alludes to in the poem allows him to rape Philomela and deny her
the voice to communicate his cruel practices against her. Men's deplorable
violence and objectification of women is evident throughout the poem that
oscillates between past myths and present frustrations of men. Whether it is
Madame Sosostris and her "wicked packof cards", Cleopatra and her "burnished
throne", Philomel and her bitter story with the king, the women unable to
communicate with her husband, or "antique looking" Lil who could be easily
replaced by her returning husband if she does not meet his expectations, these

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women are all victims of a male dominant society that force them to submit to its
standards and function as subordinates to men as "women were certainly regarded
as different from men, but different in the sense of being incomplete or inferior
examples of the same character" (Connell 68). However, despite Eliot's elaborate
representation of women as subordinate characters in the poem, they are the ones
who communicate the bitter reality of the post-war world and reflect the infertile
relationships of the time. The women characters of the wasteland are indeed the
ones witnessing the crisis of a voiceless masculinity and the collapse of a system
that never perceived them as equal beings, but they are not yet aware of the radical
change emerging at the horizon as their mythical and real representation in the
poem reflect their pre-war status of subordination and abuse. It is also worth
mentioning that the collapse of this system is no less threatening to women's
identities as "under patriarchy, men are the arbiters of identity for both males and
females, because the cultural norm of human identity is, by definition, male
identity—masculinity" (Murphy, 46). Yet, women were better able to adapt to this
change as "being deprived of power … [they] have been denied the opportunity to
become as competitive and ruthless as men" (Murphy 27).
The juxtaposition of a dominance of oppressed women characters in the poem
to that of the male oppressorsin the past underscores the need for a new discourse
that accounts for both sexes equally and independently of their sexes as well as it

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emphasizes the failure of the current discoursein rendering any of them a winner
in this gendered game. As mentioned earlier, the post-war discourseaccounted for
the needs of a society that forced women into the public sphere due to men's
preoccupationwith war or their frustration with the implications of war.
This paper does not assume that the oppressionofwomen has been totally
demolished in the modern world. New paradigms of power have undoubtedly
emerged after the WWI bringing women to the forefront after centuries of
marginalization, and attributing the responsibility of sustaining society to them
after being long regarded as inferior. However, many cultures still promote and
nourish the conventional constructof power and domination that places women in
a subordinate and submissive position, and makes it harder for men of this culture
to first admit the equal rights of women and then achieve a healthy independent
identity outside this construct. In addition, the argument here does not assume that
the participation of women in the public sphere would certainly achieve ideal
results of equality and justice. According to Sawyer:
In the increasing recognition of the right of women to participate equally in
the affairs of the world, then, there is both a danger and a promise. The
danger is that women might end up simply with an equal share of the action
in the competitive, dehumanizing, exploitative system that men have

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created. The promise is that women and men might work together to create a
system that provides equality to all and dominates no one. (Murphy 27)
Having expanded their responsibilities and influence outside the home or
private sphere, women are to prove now that excluding them was shortsightedness
on men's part throughout history and not a cultural norm.

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