It does not seem to have been pointed out that T. S. Eliot’s famous concept of the’objective correlative’, which has been so influential in the assessment of literature and its values, was originally put forward in 1919 in the form of a reproach against the character of a woman (Eliot 1975). The woman in question is Gertrude in Shakespeare’s Hamfet, and the reproach Eliot makes of her is that she is not good enough aesthetically, that is, bad enough psychologically, which means that in relationship to the affect which she generates by her behaviour in the chief character of the drama-Hamlet himself-Gertrude is not deemed a sufficient cause.

The question of femininity clearly underpins this central, if not indeed the central, concept of Eliot’s aesthetic theory, and this is confirmed by the fact that Eliot again uses an image of femininity-and by no means one of the most straightforward in its own representation or in the responses it has produced-to give us the measure of the conseqvent failure of the play. Hamlet the play, EIiot writes, is ‘the Mona Lisa of literature’(Eliot 1975, p. 47), offering up in its essentially enigmatic and undecipherable nature something of that maimed or imperfect quality of appeal which characterises Leonardo’s famous painting. The aesthetic inadequacy of the play is caused by the figure of a woman, and the image of a woman most aptly embodies the consequences of that failure. Femininity thus becomes the stake, not only of the internal, but also of the critical drama generated by the play.