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T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the Discourse of Hysteria

This paper, perceiving the different voices and fragmented language in Eliot’s The Waste Land as a rupture into a hysterical mode, examines how Eliot taps the power of words to protect himself from an existential void or horror of death. Focusing on the writing cure that Wayne Koestenbaum suggests in his reading by aligning Eliot’s alleged homosexuality with his compositional innovations, this paper argues that Eliot shows how writing enables the subject to confront trauma. Eliot’s mysogynistic descriptions of females in The Waste Land imply his struggle with his own sexual feelings, which is fundamentally homoerotic. The text of the poem, then, becomes the site for an unconscious struggle, in which hysterical discontinuities and liminal gender is asserted. This paper finally suggests that Eliot is in Kristevan terms a writing subject, who can be interpreted symbolically as a phobic, successful in protecting himself from the unnameable void by using metaphor.