You! hypocrite lecteur! New readings of T. S. Eliot

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2007 by Carrie J. Preston

Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot

edited by Cassandra Laity and Nancy K. Gish

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 265 pages

Readers, hypocritical or otherwise, have found in T. S. Eliot a range of causes for complaint, celebration, and inspiration over the past three-quarters of a century. Once a laurelled star of literary criticism, Eliot has more recently been cast by postmodernism as the reactionary gatekeeper of a masculinist, elitist, and monolithic modernism. With the incorporation of gender theory, feminism, and postcolonial theory, among others, modernist studies has redefined a modernism that can encompass multiplicity and alternative gender identities. Indeed, one of the highlights of Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot is Cassandra Laity's introduction, a concise and thorough history of modernist studies that summarizes major contributions and the debates that have reinvigorated the field. As Laity points out, critics have been slower to use new theories to reconsider Eliot than other "hypermasculine" modernists such as W. B. Yeats and James Joyce (2). This wide-ranging collection of essays, edited by Laity and Nancy K. Gish, resituates Eliot with the tools of expanded feminist, queer, and gender theories. Divided into three sections, "Homoeroticisms," "Desire," and "Modern Women," the volume offers important new readings of Eliot's poetry, drama, criticism, and biography. While its diversity of topics and approaches is admirable, the collection does not always deliver on its promise to engage the most current critical trends, especially in queer theory. Still, it provides valuable insight for those interested in modernism and gender, and it is absolutely essential reading for scholars of Eliot.

The first section, "Homoeroticisms," despite its title, does not deal centrally with homoerotic elements in Eliot's work, except in Colleen Lamos's contribution. The s appended to homoeroticism suggests an alignment with queer theory's deconstruction of binaries such as gay/straight and masculine/feminine. There is a plurality of sexualities, according to this position, and the experiences of homosexuals are too diverse to be encompassed by a singular category. This section, however, does not adequately explore how such a concept would produce new understandings of Eliot. As Colleen Lamos recognizes in "The Love Song of T. S. Eliot: Elegiac Homoeroticism in the Early Poetry," Eliot is a problematic figure, an "avowedly heterosexual, homophobic writer" (23) who actively censored early readings of homoeroticism in his work. Lamos hopes to avoid the usual dependence on biographical evidence to discuss same-gender desires: "Uncovering homoerotic impulses does not unlock the enigma of Eliot's personality." Instead she argues that Eliot's use of the genre of elegy allows him to articulate a homoeroticism that the trope of death both enables and controls. Yet her claim that "he is a textbook illustration" (33) of Judith Butler's theory of "heterosexual melancholia" in The Psychic Life of Power demonstrates the difficulty of avoiding the biographical. Butler's formulation explains how the heterosexualized subject negates early same-gender attachments but preserves them through "melancholic incorporation" (32). As a "textbook illustration," Eliot's subjectivity or "personality," rather than his poetry, is described by the theory. The most suggestive work of the essay connects Butler's "heterosexual melancholia" to the genre of elegy.

Using Eliot's theory of impersonality, Tim Dean's "T. S. Eliot, Famous Clairvoyante" takes a different approach to the question of personality and sexuality. Often derided in modernist studies as an evasive dissimulation, impersonality actually accounts for otherness and, according to Dean, "should be considered ethically exemplary rather than politically suspect" (44). Eliot uses impersonality to theorize the poet as a conduit for other voices and experiences. Yet Dean's statement that "Eliot imagines figures for the ideal impersonalist poet as eminently rapable" (45), figures that are primarily "women [Madame Sosostris] and sexually ambiguous youths [Saint Sebastian]," suggests the limits of this version of ethical impersonality. The poet's access to and idealization of these "rapable" subjects does not suggest a political program for change. Dean usefully contextualizes impersonality within modernist spiritualism and connects it to Yeats's interest in the occult. He could look backward as well and explore ways this version of impersonality participates in a tradition stemming from the Victorian dramatic monologue.

In "'Cells in One Body': Nation and Eros in the Early Work of T. S. Eliot," Michele Tepper rereads "Tradition and the Individual Talent" with two lesser-known essays, "Was There a Scottish Literature?" and "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV]," all published in 1919. Tepper demonstrates the prevalence of erotic energy in Eliot's criticism, especially in his theories of the poet's relationship to tradition, and argues that anxieties about sexuality are inseparable from concerns with national literatures. Although Tepper, like other critics in this section, claims that "homoerotic energies" are "channeled into the maintenance of the heterocentric social order" (71), her readings actually suggest the inadequacy of the heterosexual/homosexual binary. Eliot's pronouns slip between genders and the poet as a bearer of tradition is feminized through images of pregnancy. Tepper discusses this briefly in the penultimate paragraph, where she claims that the erotic in Eliot is "not reducible to genital sexuality" (80). This crucial paragraph is one of few in the volume that positions Eliot in relation to contemporary debates in queer theory and earns the title of the section, "Homoeroticisms."