Essay - The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and Pearls and Swine by Leonard Woolf

Question: How do writers on this course use space or setting to assess key themes?

The analysis of history and literature are a means of analysing key themes within difficult time periods. In The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot and Pearls and Swine (1921) by Leonard Woolf, both authors traverse the reader through various settings, commanding atmospheric imagery, narrative journey, and temporal slippage between past and present to critically analyse what both view as the decline of modern civilization. 

Within both texts, atmospheric imagery not only forces the reader to be encompassed by the changing settings, but works to evoke a sense of moral decline through which both writers can critique the ideas of their time periods. The Waste Land is a weighty poem written post-WW1 that references a London changed by the war, which, coupled with Eliot’s numerous literary allusions, highlight the modernist movement’s search for meaning within the literary past (Pappalardo 2015). Early on in the poem, in order to make evident the waste land’s setting as a place of desolation, dryness, and loss, Eliot describes a “dead land” (Eliot 2), and questions what “branches grow… out of stony rubbish” (Eliot 19-20). The usage of “stony” and “rubbish” are Eliot’s means of describing the dissolution of society post-WW1, an idea expanded upon by Jean-Michel Rabaté in his essay The World Has Seen Strange Revolutions Since I Died’: The Waste Land and the Great War (2015) in which he acknowledges the war as having caused “radical change” within society.

Furthering the idea of the post-war period as a time of spiritual drought, Eliot’s allusion to the “son of man” (Eliot 20) who knows only a “heap of broken images” (Eliot 22) depicts the Biblical Jesus as a figure who has been placed within the poem to observe the waste land, and mourn the unchanging nature of society within desolation. By displaying multiple allusions within his imagery Eliot creates a space in which the poem’s various characters are attempting to make sense of the waste land by turning to modernist values of examining traditional literature to hunt for meaning within societal transformation. His “fishing in the dull canal” (Eliot 189) references the mythological Fisher King from Chretien de Troyes’ addition to the Grail (Kleiman 2008) ruling over a land made “dull” (Eliot 189) to indicate hopelessness. Eliot’s further, “nymphs are departed” from the “brown land” (Eliot 175) returns the reader to a time of Ancient Greek mythology in which nymphs embodied fresh water (Lazzaro 2011). Comparing fleeing nymphs to drought indicates a lack of hope for renewal within the waste land. 

By contrast, Pearls and Swine’s atmospheric imagery does not engulf its reader in an environment of loss and emptiness, but one of sensory chaos that serves as a means of depicting the rot of colonialism alongside the “anti-imperialism leaning” (Haghshenas 2024) of Woolf. The piece is set in a comfortable “smoking room” with the “civilised aroma of whiskey” prevalent as the characters discuss British control over India (Woolf) by means of sharing a story about a pearl fishery in colonised India. By initially framing colonialism and control within an environment of luxury whose inhabitants have never visited the “East” (Woolf) Woolf highlights early on the irony of the story’s twofold settings. His shift into an oyster farming encampment and his use of discomforting sensory overload such as the reference to “billions of [flies]... buzzing, crawling” and the “smell of millions of decaying oysters” (Woolf) envelops the reader in a setting that, compared to the civilised hotel in Torquay whose inhabitants– including a commissioner and an archdeacon– reap the benefits of colonialism. Here, the imagery becomes a stinking, overwhelming place contradicting the story’s initial, more comfortable setting, serving to establish a visceral spatial divergence between the two and indicate rot from colonialist presence.

The atmospheric imagery of both pieces contradict each other in their display of bleakness versus chaos, yet both create their settings to be places inhabiting societal flaws and thus force the readers into analysis of the themes they criticise. Eliot uses desolation and emptiness amidst literary allusions to criticise the constancy of human suffering in the post-war era, while Woolf analyses struggle, but does so against a backdrop of luxury that critiques the act of colonisation.

As acknowledged by David James’s Space and Style (2010), space “create[s] anew even the most familiar of geographies and histories”, which is employed by both writers when analysing temporal slippage between the past and present. For Eliot the character of Tiresias, a famed Greek prophet, symbolically critiques moral decline in the world by “throbbing between two lives” (Eliot 218), which positions him to move between the past and the present. As an example of this Eliot writes about Tiresias’s witnessing of a sexual assault by an “expected guest” (Eliot 230) in order to acknowledge the prevalence of bodily violence that exists within his present-day decrepit landscape. Tiresias’s description of the modern flat in which this occurs being the same as “Thebes below the wall” (Eliot 245) implies having observed similar violence in the ancient past. His role as a spectator being one who has “foresuffered all” (Eliot 243) forces the reader to acknowledge within both timelines the continuation of moral depravity and violence, carrying over from the past into the present to indicate Eliot’s continued disillusionment with the modern world. Tiresias, as a victim of simultaneous time periods and the one who truly “sees” into the depths of the poem, presents human suffering as tragically eternal, leading Eliot not only to present numerous settings to the reader but to trap them within inescapable, post-war fragmentation by alluding to two timelines of suffering (Scully 2018).

Comparatively, Woolf’s short story slips between the comfort of a “smoking room” and that of India as a “barren wilderness” with “blazing sun” (Woolf) to define colonialism as something which is constructed from both the present and the past. The pearl fishery’s storyteller, a commissioner who lived in India for 15 years, speaks in the past tense, which creates a sense of disconnect from the reader. This allows Woolf to explore time slippage through analysis of the present, a story set in the past, and older religious allusions that justify colonialist feelings of superiority. To begin with, Woolf’s storyteller describes feeling “the immensity… of the whole earth waking up” to embody mystique and a sense of wonder evoked by India, but compares it to a negative experience of turning on and off the “electric light” in present-day England (Woolf). By doing so, Woolf pulls the reader briefly from his awe-inspiring descriptions of India to the remembrance of ‘reality’ as experienced by the inhabitants of the smoking room, which, as the space first introduced by Woolf in the story, is where the reader primarily inhabits whilst experiencing dual timelines between India and England. 

In addition, while Woolf’s storyteller employs Biblical allusions in an attempt to indicate superiority, his framing it alongside scenes of age and majesty within India critique the practice of colonialism instead. With the storyteller’s description of oyster fishing a method that felt “old as the Bible, old as Adam” and his declaration that “Providence”, or ancient foresight, “designed” (Woolf) a shore to be filled with oysters for the colonists, he describes Christianity as an overarching religion that transcends time and space, and God a being that assists in commanding oversight of India via colonialism. The juxtaposition of a “civilised” hotel and the harsher continent allows the figures within the story to think of themselves within a modern, civilised present and so create India to be a biblical, ancient past in order to justify ruling it. The unnamed narrator’s critical perception of the other men speaking with “fat, full fed voices” without “having been there [the East] themselves” yet also acknowledging, “they [Tamilians have] been there since the beginning of time” (Woolf) contributes to the irony of men in a single room attempting to control vast swathes of an old continent. The spatial separation allows for the conceptualisation of the East as a resource rather than a place of acknowledged life and movement. Both texts serve to use temporal slippage as a means of distancing the reader from the story whilst also instructing them to analyse themes of decline and colonialist harm.

In addition, the movement through different settings and shared spaces within both texts embody the idea of journey, by moving the reader to force a confrontation of deterioration and decline within society. By transforming the setting into an ongoing state rather than a static background, both authors indicate an ongoing process of decay. Circling back to London as both a physical setting and a symbolic means of understanding journey, Eliot’s description of an “Unreal City” (Eliot 60) in which a London crowd was “undone… [by] death” (Eliot 62) directly quotes Dante’s Inferno (1321) to evoke the sensation of journey through the waste land. By comparing London to a work of literature that depicts its author travelling through the desolate landscape of hell, Eliot makes a clear allusion to the post-war desolation of London (Mcevey 2016) as having caused suffering for the people and the land itself. Following this Eliot’s “brown fog of a winter dawn” and his later “brown fog of a winter noon” (Eliot 61-208) indicate the sensation of day-long journey for the reader through a still-desolate space, encapsulated by dense, atmospheric descriptions of weather that hang heavily over the poem. From here, Eliot’s powerful description of London as a “falling tower” (Eliot 374) and his alluding to other cities such as Jerusalem and Alexandria (Eliot 375) creates an apocalyptic image of globalised decay, utilising the phrase “Unreal” (Eliot 377) to indicate his disbelief and sense of unreality at post-WW1 fragmentation. This sense of journey between various cities indicates the post-war effect on what Eliot depicts as harm and fragmentation on a globalised scale.

A similar sense of psychological displacement is seen towards the end of the story where Woolf’s imagery powerfully links the two settings, with a description of a “dawn broke red” in the East during the peaceful funeral rite for an Arab man and then, abruptly in the “silent smoking room” the storyteller looks into a fire with a “few red coals” (Woolf). By making the connection between red imagery in the East and red imagery shortly thereafter Woolf utilises sensory atmospheric imagery to create the sense of journey between the two spaces as coexisting, with comfort and discomfort stemming from the same harmful idea of empire. Woolf pushing the reader to connect the smoking room to the colonised land is furthered by his description of two deaths which occur on the same day, that of a white man who died in the “screams and prayers of [a] madman” and that of an unnamed Arab who looked “very calm [and] dignified” (Woolf). The comparison between the two existing in the same space of India is done to depict colonialism as a form of infestation, in which the colonists infringing upon the land are ultimately harmed by their attempts at conquest. The undignified death of the man named White– titled such to be a stand-in for his race– when compared to the Arab man makes the “supposedly superior race obviously inferior” (Gerzina 2014). By doing so Woolf allows the reader to become an observer, encouraged to criticise the movement from England to the colonised East. 

Both of these texts embody movement through the past and present, and steep the readers in imagery in order to indicate a sensation of journey undertaken by the reader with the authors’ characters. Eliot’s criticism of post-war modernism by way of writing a poem steeped in traditional literary allusions serves to seek comprehension of a fragmented society from the past to the present, while Woolf’s movements from the present to the past and back are undertaken to negatively depict colonialism in the region of the East. While their themes differ, both authors’ movement through space and setting encourage the reader to critically comprehend their key ideas.