The Wasteland

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T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” depicts a definitive landscape of desolation, reflecting the damaged psyche of humanity after World War I. Relationships between men and women have been reduced to meaningless social rituals, in which sex has replaced love and physical interaction has replaced genuine emotional connection. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” goes a step further in depicting these relationships: the speaker reveals a deep sexual frustration along with an awareness of morality, in which he is conscious of his inability to develop a connection with women yet cannot break free from his silence to ask “an overwhelming question” (line 10). “The Wasteland” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” together illustrate that individuals are in conflict with meaningless social rituals in modern society. This raises some interesting questions: why is there such an intense lack of connection between men and women? Can it ever be mended? In comparing the relationships between these two poems, we discover that...

The modern world as depicted by Eliot in “The Wasteland” is one with arbitrary male-female interaction loaded with meaningless sex and casual one-night stands. One such relationship--that of the typist and the clerk--not only shows a lack of connection between the two but also a lack of understanding of each other. The clerk’s actions in the sentences, “The time is now propitious, as he guesses, / The meal has ended, she is bored and tired, / Endeavours to engage her in caresses / Which still are unreproved, if undesired” (235-239) and “Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference” (240-242) shows the absence of verbal communication that is commonplac...

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...o find meaning in their lives or a point in creating meaningful relationships with the opposite sex. After subjecting themselves to meaningless social rituals which override personal human connection, they are reduced to a spiritual emptiness in which they are unable to overcome their vices. Tiresias is the one character who understands. His suffering has led him to understand that their current state of waste is not perpetual. Though all men and women cannot be subjected to the same experiences Tiresias suffered through, there is a solution. If they can understand that the current state of being was different in the past and will be different in the future, that their state of desolation and waste is transient, their desire to form meaningful relationships can be restored, their ability to love can be revitalized, and they can all find a meaningful purpose to life.

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