Essays on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:Tthe Missing Female :: Love Song J. Alfred Prufrock

The Missing womanish in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock For Eliot, poetic representation of a effective female presence created difficulty in embodying the male. In order to do so, Eliot avoids envisioning the female, indeed, avoids attaching gender to bodies. We can see this process clearly in The Love Song of J. Prufrock. The rime circles around non just an unjointed question, as all readers agree, but withal an unenvisioned center, the one whom Prufrock addresses. The poem never visualizes the woman with whom Prufrock imagines an encounter except in fragments and in plurals -- eyes, fortification, skirts - synecdoches we might headspring imagine as fetishistic replacements. But even these synecdochic replacements argon not clearly engendered. The braceleted arms and the skirts are specifically feminine, but the faces, the hands, the voices, the eyes are not. As if to displace the central human object it does not visualize, the poem projects images of the body onto the landscape (the sky, the streets, the fog), but these images, for all their marked intimation of sexuality, also avoid the designation of gender (the muttering retreats of restless nights, the fog that rubs, licks, and lingers). The approximately visually precise images in the poem are those of Prufrock himself, a Prufrock conservatively composed My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, / My necktie fat and modest, but asserted by a simple pin -- only to be decomposed by the watching eyes of another into thin arms and legs, a balding head brought in upon a platter. Moreover, the images associated with Prufrock are themselves, as Pinkney observes, terrifyingly unstable, attributes constituting the identity of the subject at one moment only to be wielded by the objective the next, like the pin that centers his necktie and then pinions him to the palisade or the arms that metamorphose into Prufrocks claws. The poem, in these