4

Sara Gardner

Eng 345

Feminist literary criticism is concerned with the ways in which literature reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women. This school of theory analyzes how aspects of culture are inherently patriarchal and yearns to expose the unavoidable misogyny in men writing about women. Feminist criticism is also concerned with less obvious forms of marginalization such as the exclusion of women writers from the traditional literary canon. Feminist literary theory can generally be broken down into three approaches: analyzing female characters, recovering texts written by women, and analyzing how language marginalizes women. T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" can be analyzed for how both its language and its female characters marginalize women.

Though mentions of women are made throughout "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," it is not necessarily a poem about women. This is a prime example of how literature has the ability to marginalize or repress women through language and connotation without stating anything directly. This is demonstrated most effectively in lines 13-14 and lines 62-67 of this poem. Lines 13-14 contain this poem's refrain, "in the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo." Michelangelo is not mentioned anywhere else in the poem, other than in the refrain, and seems to bear no connection to the poem whatsoever other than its connection to women. The meaning I glean out of this short stanza is that the women wander around talking of insignificant things. If interpreted from a feminist perspective, one might think that the author is implying that women only speak superficially. Whether this is because that is what he deems as proper for women to do or it is because women aren't capable of talking about more complex issues one cannot be sure. I think that Eliot chose Michelangelo arbitrarily from a list of things that it was proper for women to speak of at the time i.e. things of little consequence. This was not a new way to demean women, but bolstering the status quo is repressive as well.

The longer excerpt can be broken down even further. The speaker of this poem says "I have known the arms already, known them all—/Arms that are braceleted and white and bare" (l. 62-63). This excerpt supplies an example of forcing all women into one category. It implies that the arms of all women are the same, that there is nothing to distinguish between them. The next line, "[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]" (l. 64) speaks to the importance of appearances in the case of women. The fact that the author chose to add this line in brackets gives the reader a sense that it is being mentioned under the speaker's breath. As though women are not supposed to have hair on their arms and the discovery that they do is something that must be whispered about. Even his use of an exclamation point at the end of the line seems to hold some significance. As if he is saying that light brown arm hair that you can only see under the lamplight is in some way shocking. The female character(s) that are portrayed here seem to be severely bound by social constraints.

Feminist theory is an effective approach to analyzing literature because it has the ability to reveal undertones in the text that the author may not have even consciously intended to place there. This seems to be the case in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" because the author's portrayal of women is clearly degrading once broken down. However this idea of unconscious intention of the author could be seen as its downfall as well. Feminists have been known to be hypersensitive and this form of criticism could take the words of the author and twist them into something they were not meant to be. Another downfall of Feminist critique is that it doesn't stand on its own very well. It is tempting to combine other approaches like Psychoanalytic criticism when discussing what is intentional and what is subconscious and New Historicism when it is tempting to discuss what is appropriate for the time period. Of course, outside of this paper where the instructions were to use one critical theory, it might be considered a strength that Feminism is capable of accommodating other theories.

Works Cited

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Bartleby Bookstore. 27 October 2009 ..