Sweeney, Becket, and the "Marina Figure" in Eliot's Modern Plays

Sweeney, Becket, and the "Marina Figure" in Eliot's Modem Plays ERNEST G. GRIFFIN '. When Eliot began composing his four plays about modem family and social life, he still, it seems to me, had very much in mind the two characters he had created some years earlier, Sweeney and Thomas Becket. Echoes from these two characters and what they represent occur throughout the plays; at the extreme, one might say that, together, they represent man as living in the shadow of the brothel as well as the shadow of the cathedral. They suggest also a pattern of development; each play is, on one level, a version of man's troubled journey from the experiences and temptations of the Sweeney-world to the redeeming graces of the Becket-world. However, whatever our understanding or judgment of Sweeney and Becket, I think it's fair to say that they do not strike us as "familiar" or "social" figures. For example, in the plays built around them, the two "Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama" and Murder in the Cathedral, there is little that can be called "feminine" except for the women who are used by men in Sweeney's setting, and the choral peasant class in Becket's, though Becket does allow them an instinctual knowledge that is wiser than the argumentative outlook of some of his priests. The word "love" does not appear at all in the "Fragments," unless we count the use of it in the epitaph that is a quotation from St. John of the Cross, where it refers to the soul divesting itself of the love of created beings. In the Becket play, there is a reference to "love in the garden," but that is dismissed as one of the pleasures of "thirty years ago"; otherwise, love is used in relation to the Divinity. Several commentators have felt that Eliot could have put his talents to better use than in writing for the modem naturalistic theatre, especially in adopting the form of "West End" social comedy.' However, this modem dramatic tradition had one important advantage; it obliged Eliot to give more attention to female characterization. This could, of course, mean little more than giving female names to old approaches. I suggest that this is what Model'll Drama, 36 (1993) 569 570 ERNEST GRIFFIN happened in the fIrst play, The Family Reullioll. The basic conflict is between two sisters, Amy and Agatha, both concerned with the future of Amy's son, Harry, Lord Monchensey. Amy is near death (for her, "death is an end") as she describes how she engaged in loveless copulation with the husband she had come to dislike as a weakling ("Forcing sons upon an unwilling father," as she put it)' in order to give birth to a son who would continue the family estate of Wishwood. In a way, she is a tragic version of Sweeney's view that "all the facts when you come to brass tacks" are summarized in the triad, "Birth, and copulation, and death" (122). The sister Agatha, who has remained virginal since the time when she, as a young girl. had fallen in love with Harry's father, was equally determined that Harry should be born; she prevented the father from trying to murder Amy when she was pregnant because, as she said to Harry, "I did not want to kill you!" She is convinced that Harry has been elected for a spiritual Becket-like;destiny; one might say that she counters the despair of Sweeney's "Birth, and copUlation, and death" with the hope implied in the Christian triad - the theme of Becket's Christmas Day sermon - of "Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection." Harry himself makes several uresurrective" remarks such as "You must just believe me, / Until I come again" (~38). There is a reminder of the hierarchy involved in the earlier play, Murder in the Cathedral, when Agatha tells Mary - the distant relation whom Amy has invited to Wishwood in hopes of her marrying Harry - that the two of them are "only watchers and waiters" (305). For all their education (Agatha has spent thirty years at a women's college "Trying not to dislike women") they can only "witness...