Reading and writing genders : explorations of androgyny in early modernist poetry.

Abstract

The growing field of research in gender and modernism calls for critics to interrogate already well-researched Modernist texts via new angles, especially for the search of a “greater sense of female transcendence”. Amongst the various Modernist texts which deal with the representations of gender and gender relations, it may seem unlikely to find one that challenges patriarchy and sexism in the masculinist works of the “Men of 1914”. Of these men and their works, T.S. Eliot’s seminal work The Waste Land was described, by his contemporary James Joyce, as having “ended the idea of poetry for ladies”. This essay challenges current readings of The Waste Land as a masculinist poem by using ecriture feminine as a selective interpretative strategy. While the first aim of this essay is to use Ecriture Feminine to illuminate new ways of reading gender in The Waste Land, the second aim is to situate an analysis of Eliot within Ecriture Feminine in order to reveal and challenge the shortcomings of this theory, and explore the contradictions as a "cunning strategy" to disassemble the phallogocentric system. Concepts of gender and the representation of such will be examined through close reading of the content and formal innovations of The Waste Land with a heightened attention to androgyny. For a critic dealing with The Waste Land and Ecriture Feminine, the complex nature of both texts calls for one to be a "better reader" by asking "questions of interpretation" that would yield the best angle toward analyzing the text and the effects it can produce.