Women And The Wasteland

9/22/09

Holly Oakley

Mentor: Walter Hesford

Background

            Since I first read T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, I have been fascinated by it.  I read it at a time when I was falling out of love with English: Literature Emphasis as a chosen major. It instantly made me remember why I loved to study literature. I wrote a short paper for Survey of American Literature on the roles of women in the poem but felt that I did not do it justice. One of the reasons I believe that the poem has continued to fascinate me is Eliot’s portrayal of women with in the poem. As a minor in women’s studies, I feel that it is important to think about and analyze how women are portrayed in our culture and in history. I am hoping to be able to do this with this project.

Current Project

            The current project is to analyze the portrayal of women in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In doing this I will be creating a deep analysis of The Waste Land, looking at Eliot’s life and relationships with women, and looking at the roles of women around the time that Eliot would be writing the poem to it’s publishing date in 1922. 

Plan for the next two months

            Over the next two months, I will be researching T.S. Eliot’s life and relationships with women by reading biographies. I will also be researching the roles of women during the time Eliot was writing the poem. I hope to be bring the things I learn from this research into further understanding the poem to create a rich analysis of Eliot’s portrayal of women with in the poem by the end of these two months.

Ideas on the presentation of this work

            The complete project will consist of a written paper that will fulfill my goals for the project as well as a presentation to the class about my findings. I will hope to create a PowerPoint presentation to show the results of my work with muti-media elements such as Eliot reading sections of the poem.

Tentative Bibliography

Ackroyed, Peter. T.S. Eliot A Life.

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Brown, Dorothy M. Setting A Course: American Women in the 1920s. Boston:

Twayne Publishers, 1987.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. Literature of

the Western World: Volume II. Eds. Wilke, Brian and James Hurt. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001. 1762-1777.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of The Original Drafts.

 Ed. Valerie Eliot.  New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanivick, Inc., 1971.

Gordon, Lyndal. T.S. Eliot An Imperfect Life.

New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988.

Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot.

New York: Harbinger, 1959

Kirk, Russell. Eliot and His Age. Delaware: ISI Books, 2008.

Showalter, Elaine, ed. These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from

the Twenties. New York: The Feminist Pres, 1978.