The Belladonna: Eliot's Female Archetype in The Waste Land

Abstract

Since The Waste Land was first published over sixty years ago, critics, applying the theories of Freud and Jung and scouring the work of Frazer and Weston and Eliot's biography, have come to a general agreement that the poem is about a sexual failure which signifies a modern spiritual failure. This failure is customarily associated with an emasculating wound suffered by an archetypal male, the Fisher King, who appears in various avatars within the poem. While the importance of this mythic pattern can scarcely be overemphasized, it should be pointed out that Eliot counterpoints the legend of the castrated male with a less often recognized archetype: the sexually violated yet sterile female.1 The specific embodiment of this woman in Eliot's poetry is the prostitute who, despite innumerable fornications, never conceives nor gives birth. Whether she is an actual prostitute or merely a victimized and promiscuous female, she is characterized by acute neurasthenia, nervous chatter, hysterical laughter, and general physical and psychological debilitation. While Eliot explores the features of this mythic woman most extensively in The Waste Land, her face comes as no surprise to readers of his earlier verse. We catch glimpses of her in the. love-starved society matron in Portrait of a Lady, in the female whose eye twists like a crooked pin in Rhapsody on a Windy Night, in Grishkin with her uncorseted friendly breast, in the libidinous Princess Volupine with her blue-nailed, phthisic hand, in Sweeney's epileptic mistress, and in the drunken harlot in the Spanish cape who tries to sit on his lap in Sweeney among the Nightingales.