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  • T. S. Eliot:The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land
  • Cyrena N. Pondrom (bio)

One of the most influential ideas developed as American feminist theory and women's studies grew into disciplines is the assertion that gender is socially constructed. Conceived in part as a means of political resistance to the disempowerment of women, this theoretical position may be located in a context of post-structuralist theory that sees meaning as constructed and deferred in language, and the speaking subject itself as constructed in discourse—positions variously elaborated by Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva. At the beginning of the last decade this idea received a powerful re-interpretation in the work of Judith Butler, who argued that gender is performative, asserting that "the performativity of gender revolves around . . . the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself" and that "performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body. . . ."1

A close reading of The Waste Land will show, I believe, that T. S. Eliot profoundly anticipates a fundamental cluster of concepts taken, for much of the latter part of the twentieth century, to be post-modern. That Eliot's work contains a play of dramatic voices has long been well-understood, but critics have not fully recognized that a founding part of the drama is the performance of gender.2 Indeed, this poet, sometimes flagrantly positioned as the epitome of male poetic/sexual hierarchy,3 is one of the first twentieth century figures to depict what Judith Butler later called "the ways in which the very thinking of what is possible in gendered life is foreclosed by certain habitual and violent presumptions" (GT, viii). To illustrate the way Eliot uncovers [End Page 425] these structures of the self, as performances and as socially constructed in discourse, I will reexamine three crucial emotional scenes from The Waste Land comprising the Hyacinth girl episode (35–42); the first conversation in "A Game of Chess" (111–38); and the silent confession to the friend in "What the Thunder Said" (402–23). Each of these scenes reflects, I believe, memories of searingly intense moments from Eliot's private life, involving three different persons with whom his relationship was deeply personal. Though such attributions may never fully escape from the speculative, recently published documentary evidence makes somewhat less arbitrary the association of the first of these scenes with the college friend he considered marrying, Emily Hale, the second with first wife Vivienne Eliot (TSE, 169), and the third (though a more contested one) with the young medical student Jean Verdenal.4 It is not insignificant that each of these scenes involves markedly different performances of gender and social situations in which expectations of performance are clearly, sometimes traumatically, imposed. The biographical allusion is enriching to our understanding of the full ramifications of these scenes; in the language of Butler's later book, the protagonists possess bodies that matter.

Recognizing the performative elements of Eliot's understanding of gender can help us get past some disputes in Eliot criticism; more fully understand the foundations of the modern; and perhaps help us make sense—possibly for our own satisfaction—of some of Eliot's more abrupt decisions in his personal life. Both the first and the last of the three examples are contested sites for those who wish to claim Eliot exclusively for worlds either heterosexual or queer.

Significantly, each scene contains textual qualities which foster gender ambiguity—the first because the female figure of the lines is connected by name with the homoerotic figure of Hyacinthus and the third because the lines exploit the gender indifference of the English "I" and "you." (Even the second exemplified scene withholds all explicit forms of gender assignment, save for the assumption that one quoted speaker is the same as the "she" who sits on a "Chair . . . like a burnished throne" (CPP, 39). Such indetermination forces a construction of gender in discourse about the poem.

Moreover, recognizing Eliot's understanding of gender as performative highlights the extent to which competing critical claims to assign...

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