Cutting Philomela's Tongue: The Cocktail Party's Cure for a Disorderly World

Cutting Philomela's Tongue: The Cocktail Party's Cure for a Disorderly World LAURA SEVERIN Although readers of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1949) have long noted its connection to his 1940 tract The Idea ojChristian Society, none have fully or critically explored the play's social agenda. Like Eliot's earlier treatise, The Cocktail Party presents a hierarchical world view that is alarming in its implications for both class and gender. Occasionally, the play's class implications have disturbed critics. For example, David Jones comments on the "Christian conspiracy" of the play's Guardians; this elite group, who as Jones points out "set themselves apart," manipulate rather than aid, dictate rather than discuss.' However, the implications of the play's violence against women have never been examined. Of all Eliot's works, The Cocktail Party is his most sinister in its war on the educated, middle-class woman, that " modem woman" whose departure from the home threatened the exclusive rights of such male public spheres as the literary world. Given their discussion of T.S. Eliot's works in The War oj the Words, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar would most likely reserve this dubious distinction for The Waste Land.' However, The Waste Land merely mourns the loss of traditional gender roles, while The Cocktail Party seeks to restore them.3 A second act in Eliot's long-interrupted drama on gender, The Cocktail Party serves as The Waste Land's opposite: a triumphant play of order regained. By play's end, Eliot has rendered all The Cocktail Party's literary ladies silent, exiling them permanently from the public sphere. Lavinia, who fonnerIy ran a literary salon, is pregnant and longing for a retreat in the country. Celia, once a fine poet, has been martyred on an anthill. Left mute or dead, woman is no longer able to interfere in man's public sphere. The "cured" world of the epilogue, presented as harmonious and orderly, has come about through the restoration of traditional gender roles. What has been "sick," we understand through that last act, is woman's desire to enter the world of Modern Drama, 36 (1993) 396 Cutting Philomela's Tongue 397 words. A triumphant tour de force for the male playwright, The Cocktail .Party returns the world of letters, and the power it holds, to men. Out of the chaos of a feminized world, Eliot resurrects an almost forgotten binary order in which woman returns as man's silent, submissive partner, his Philomela. Surprisingly, the reactionary message of The Cocktail Party was not unpopular in post-war society. Performed 407 times in New York and 325 in London, the play was an important commercial success, especially for a verse drama.4 The play's positive reception is at least partially responsible for the inability of contemporary critics to identify its social agenda for women. One has to question why the mutilation of one woman and the complete domination of another went largely umemarked. The answer would seem to lie in the ideology of domesticity prevalent in the post-war era. Eliot's play is only one of many social documents which sought to counter anxiety over changing gender roles by returning women to their traditional sphere, the home. Despite popular belief, women did not return to their homes after the war; the number of married women in the British work force more than doubled between 1931 and 1951. As Alan Sinfield points out, such changes caused great anxiety and frequently led to reactionary measures: "It is because all this undermined male control of public affairs and the household, and seemed to threaten women's roles in servicing the workforce and rearing children, that conservative institutions and individuals urged women back into the home. "5 Eliot embodies this anxiety in his character Edward, who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown after his relationships with the strong-willed Lavinia and Celia. One change in particular which alarmed Eliot and his contemporaries was the high divorce rate in the later 1940s. After all, the focus of the play is the marital crisis of Edward and Lavinia. Elizabeth Wilson explains that the rise in divorces was...