Feminine Conflicts in Eliot’s Early Poems

Feminine Conflicts in Eliot’s Early Poems

Every biography of T. S. Eliot emphatically records his blissful childhood and his choice of an improbable woman as his spouse, which led to a tragic married life. This writing, prompted by the improbability, is an attempt to read the emotional swirls expressed in his early poetry from the perspective of archetypal psychology. Psychologically the mother-ruled childhood should hand over its dominance to the anima, the spouse archetype, which helps the personality become an autonomous grownup. It seems that Eliot had his mother-ruling period prolonged, which was a cause for his explosively rebellious act involved in his first marriage. However, it seems that he was dispositionally attached to the mother and that his wife was not a proper receptacle of his anima. This conflicting psychological status of Eliot’s is reflected on three different kinds of women in his works: the benign mother, who nourishes and protects the personality as kindly goddess; the terrible mother, who threatens to destroy his existence and welfare; the anima figure, who charms and attracts male characters, but easily succumbs to the power of the existing mother-ruled structure. His divorce marks his disunion from the ill-working anima and return to the mother’s world. His conversion, naturalization, and religious themes of his later works all seem to be the acts of compliance with his mother-oriented psychological propensity.