THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK

106 Pages·2015·4.36 MB·English

"THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK" AS TEENAGED WASTELAND
As A thesis submitted to the faculty of
3G San Francisco State University
In partial fulfillment of
2 01
- $ ’
the requirements for
the Degree
3^3
*-
Master of Arts
In
English Literature
by
Margaret Sarah Snyder
San Francisco, California
May 2015
Copyright by
Margaret Sarah Snyder
2015
CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as Teenaged Wasteland
by Margaret Sarah Snyder, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for
approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree
Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.
Sara Hackenberg,
Associate Professor
"THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK" AS TEENAGED WASTELAND
Margaret Sarah Snyder
San Francisco, California
2015
Though the large body of criticism on T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
reads the titular narrator as a middle-aged man, I would like to join the critical discourse
to offer an alternate reading: that Prufrock is a teenager. I argue that Prufrock as a
teenaged persona provides Eliot with a decidedly modern mechanism for an all-
encompassing sensibility and strikes much greater consonance with both Eliot’s criticism
and poetics, as well as, explicating the continued presence of the poem in the high school
English classroom. I will outline Eliot’s early poetic development, focusing on adaptation
of Matthew Arnold’s Victorian Romantacism to the Modern world and his indoctrination
in the work of the French Symbolists Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire, who taught
Eliot that, “the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience that an adolescent had
had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for poetry” (To Criticize the
Critic, 126). With “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot therefore develops a
narrative for teenaged experience that became a blueprint for young adult male
experience; the afterlife of Eliot’s poem, which I will explore in British and American
rock, forms another key piece of its continued ability to still relate to the world over one
hundred years after its initial composition and publication.
I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.
Date
PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to take a brief opportunity to express my endless gratitude to Professor Sara
Hackenberg for both her engaging teaching and creative coursework at San Francisco
State University and her generous guidance and encouragement with this thesis project. I
will remain forever indebted to her challenging intellect and passion for her subject
matter. I would also like to thank Professor Meg Schoerke for all of her patience and her
insightful course on metaphors. Finally, I would like to thank Jan Lamborn and other
members of the Graduate Studies Department and College of Extended Learning who
made the completion of this project possible. I could not have completed this paper
without the invaluable assistance of the Faculty and Staff of San Francisco State and the
experience has been arduous and rewarding. I will be proud to display my San Francisco
State diploma and will always remember the support and kindness of those who helped
me make a dream come true despite all the challenges and delays. Thank you.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as Teenaged Wasteland...........................................1
I. Introductory Remarks.......................................................................................1
II. Eliot’s Studies in Poetics and Consciousness................................................7
III. Prufrock the Teenager....................................................................................23
IV. Eliot as Victorian Child Coming of Age.......................................................35
V. The Song of Powerless Prufrock...................................................................60
VI. Publication and Reception: Contextual Atmosphere.................................78
VII. Prufrock’s Afterlife as a Blueprint for Teenage Failure...............................86
Works Cited..............................................................................................................................95
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“THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” AS TEENAGED WASTELAND
I. Introductory Remarks
“Don’t cry
Don’t raise your eyes
It’s only teenaged wasteland” (The Who).
The large body of criticism on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”1 focuses on Prufrock as the
character of the modern man. Roger Mitchell provides one such reading:
J. Alfred Prufrock is not just the speaker of one of Eliot's poems. He is the Representative
Man of early Modernism.” Mitchell continues to summarize this pervasive interpretation,
elaborating this Man as “shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually retarded (many have said
impotent), ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point of solipsism (42).
While such readings provide a specific access point to the poem, in this thesis I will join the critical
conversation to develop an alternative perspective on the narrative persona of Prufrock. In this paper I will
argue that Prufrock is not, in fact, a middle-aged man, but rather a teenager overwhelmed with the horrific
apprehension of how he will grow old in a world in which he is not sure he belongs.
The reason I think it is significant to assert this reading is two-fold. First, reading Prufrock as a
teenager finds much more consonance with Eliot’s own critical writings and poetic development. Second,
with “Prufrock,” Eliot develops a template for speaking to urban, adolescent male experience that has since
been replicated through time as a powerful cultural tool for registering the angst, frustration and ennui
considered endemic of modern experience. The afterlife of “Prufrock” exists on the one level through
1 To clarify, I will refer to Eliot’s poem as “Prufrock” and the poem’s narrator as Prufrock throughout the
remainder of this paper.
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continued presence in literary studies, as discussed by educator Derek Soles in his article on teaching
“Prufrock” to high school students. As Soles notes, the poem “often appears in literature anthologies
designed for use in high school and college English classes,” which has contributed over time to its status
as a “modern classic” (59). On another level, the poem still makes sense to present day readers due to their
familiarity, even if on a subconscious level, with the continuous reincarnation of the “Prufrock” blueprint in
expressions of teenaged, male experience. As Eliot’s poem is itself a love song, I want to look to British
and American music, especially rock music, to illustrate this blueprint phenomenon. Ultimately, my
reading provides powerful insights into Eliot’s writing process, his poetic development, and the poem’s
continuing afterlife.
The underlying question inciting this paper was my own personal response to the poem. For, why
did "Prufrock” resonate with me as a high school student, if it were simply the ramblings of an
apprehensive middle-aged man? When I first read “Prufrock” as a fourteen year-old, I recall being struck by
the directness of Prufrock’s voice, as if he were talking to me; in addition, unlike previous poems I had
read, I knew how the narrator felt, especially the part about the eyes pinning you to the wall or wanting to
just be crab legs. I thought Prufrock understood my high school anxieties, social unease and the sensation
of wasting time, and it did not occur at all to me that he might be a middle-aged man. Since as a teenager,
my original interaction with the poem was one of alignment and connection to the narrative voice, the
assumption of Prufrock as middle-aged never quite sat right with me. In his essay on teaching “Prufrock” to
high school students, Soles notes, “in some ways it is a strange choice for inclusion in young adult
curriculum since it concerns the insecurities of a middle-aged man” (59). Soles does not take this
observation further than thinking it odd. I think because “Prufrock” speaks to young adult experience that is
exactly why it is so often taught in high school curriculum.
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In all my research, I encountered only one reading that vaguely hinted at the narrator of “Prufrock”
being a young adult. In a minor aside during critic Jackson J. Benson’s discussion of Quentin Compson as a
self-portrait of a young William Faulkner, Benson mentions that “such contemporaries as Joyce, Pound,
Eliot, and Hemingway.... produced protagonists with whom they identified, yet viewed with a certain
ironic detachment — self caricatures, as it were — but the young protagonist with all his faults is portrayed
as less guilty in each case than the culture which surrounds him” (145). While this statement does not
identify the Eliotic protagonist as Prufrock, previously Benson finds Faulkner’s self-portrait Quentin to be
“reminiscent” of Prufrock, as the names of both narrators suggest “a certain self-mockery by the author”
(145). While this indirect connection offers a promising glimpse at a potential interpretation in support of
my argument, Benson’s discussion of Faulkner’s self-portrait veers into the category of a blatantly
biographical reading hinged disappointingly on a collapse of author and narrator.
Attempting to delve into the psychological state or the personality of Eliot in any productive way
is like trying to solve a one hundred year old crime with no physical evidence except some letters and
essays. What we do find in Eliot’s letters and essays is a poet and a critic obsessed with developing a
distinct poetics. This is what I will attune my research to. I will not seek to find Eliot the person, but instead
seek out Eliot the poet to unravel how he is telling a story and what this story might be. By focusing on the
narrator as a persona, as a performance of a particular type of engagement with the world, we can think of
Eliot as operating on an authorial level, willfully constructing a narrative persona and the drama
surrounding him. As Eliot reiterates, “the poet has, not a personality to express, but a particular medium”
(“Tradition and Individual Talent,” 42). Thus, I do not read Prufrock as a teenager out of biographical
speculation that he might be a thinly veiled self-portrait of Eliot, but rather, I offer that we approach
Prufrock the persona as a teenager, as a poetic mechanism to capable of consuming all experience and
mediating meaning to the reader.
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In order to substantiate an interpretation of Prufrock as a teenager, I will identify important
elements of larger cultural context and Eliot’s own early poetic development and later critical writings that
give credence to this reading. By utilizing the John Savage’s research in The Prehistory of the American
Youth Culture: 1875-1945,1 will cover the specific demographic shifts from Eliot’s birth in 1888, until the
poem’s publication in 1917, that led to a rising subculture of urban American and European teenagers. With
this sense of cultural movement in mind, I will chart Eliot’s development of a poetic voice in his young
adult years. Eliot’s discovery of the late nineteenth-century “dramatically young and urban poets,” Charles
Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue, catalyze Eliot’s development of a specific voice (Hannoosh, 345). Another
important aspect of Eliot’s early poetic metamorphosis can best be observed through a comparison between
Eliot’s work with that of Victorian poet Matthew Arnold; I will show how Eliot remains in conversation
with his contemporaneous poetic heritage of the Victorians and Romantics and he engages mainstream
poetic trends in order to register his difference and develop something new.
Looking at the publication and the reception of "Prufrock" provides an invaluable lens into the
way readers initially approached Eliot as a young rebel and a further reason why I read the poem as about
the experiences of a teenager. As Eliot writes,
From Baudelaire I learned first, a precedent for the political possibilities, never developed
in any poet writing in my own language, of the more sordid aspects of the modern
metropolis, of the possibility of the fusion between the sordidly realist and the
phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic.
From him, as Laforgue, I learned that the sort of material that I had, the sort of experience
that an adolescent had had, in an industrial city in America, could be the material for
poetry; and that the source of new poetry might be found in what had been regarded