Representation of women in Eliot's "A Game of Chess"

In Eliot's "A Game of Chess," there are two different settings in which women
have different kinds of sufferings, regardless of the class they belong to; women
are all in a depressive mood. The section "A Game of Chess" begins with a clear
description of a luxurious house "The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne".
The woman is sitting on a chair "like a burnished throne" (77). Other details about
the room make us visualize the setting in our minds. It is pointed out that the
setting is a rich one that the woman belongs to the upper class or may be to
aristocracy "Seven-branched candelabra" (82), "her jewels" (84) and antique
mantel" (97) are all details that signified the prosperity of the women's
immediate surrounding. However, We can understand that this woman is
desperately waiting for somebody perhaps a man, because we see "footsteps
shuffled on the stairs" (107). Hence, we may conclude that the comer is a male
because earlier in the poem we see to Cupidons waiting for the right moment. As
the title of this section alludes, a story of seduction may follow the give setting.
While the woman is doomed to wait forever coming her hair in her magnificent
chair, the man will never appear and the Cupids will have to hide and wait forever
because the scene depicted in the poem will remain the same forever. As a result
the depicted characters will remain forever as they are. This woman's suffering is
not a physical but rather a psychological one because she is lonely and
desperately waiting for the man whose footsteps she hears. Yet, she will never
get to see him and her loneliness represents modern men's isolation and
disillusionment.

In the second setting of this section we see at least two people talking and we
know for sure that one of them is a woman. The poetic persona's sex is not clear
yet we can assume with a sexist approach that the poetic persona is a female
because they are gossiping about another woman. The converser complains
about the poetic persona's indifference and little speech insistently tries to make
her speak. We understand that it is late at night because we hear the frequent
repetition of the bartender calling out "Hurry up please it is time", as it is nearly
the closing time. The poetic persona starts talking about Lil and her "demobbed"
husband. It is the first reference to a war going on. We also learn that Lil's
husband has been in the army for four years. If we believe that the poetic persona
is a female, we will have to admit that she is so patriarchal-minded because she
sympathizes more with Albert and takes his side regardless of her sex. She is also
traditional and irrational that she asks Lil "What you get married for if you do not
want children?" (164). She seems to be a shallow character. Form her point of
view, even if Albert cheats on his wife, he has a light to do it. She puts all the
blame on Lil, even for her abortion which was about two result in Lil's death.

Above all, those women working in the bar had the chance of working because
all hard-working men were in the army during World War I. Among the
mentioned women, Lil is he only one with a male by her side. At the same time,
We only hear of her problems. This situation suggests the suppression of women
in men's presence. Even her husband's presence is enough to make her feel ugly,
incapable and worthless despite the fact that he is the demobilized one. We
should bear in mind that one would not get discharged from the army unless he
has a kind of mental or physical deficit. However, we do not hear of such a thing
because the setting takes place in a society where male's defects can be
overlooked, whereas women's ones should be exaggerated. So, It can be stated
that women in the second setting suffer from lack of communication which is a
general problem caused by modernism improved as an outcome of World war I.
Secondly, They suffer because of the psychological suppression and stress
brought about by men. Also, physical sufferings play a crucial role as a result of
their poor living conditions and nurture.
 Unreal City

These lines are quoted from T.S Eliot's "The Waste Land". This poem was
published in 1922. It consists of five sections of 434 lines. The Waste Land is
regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central
text in Modernist poetry. The poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the
October issue of The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue
of The Dial.

These lines are from the final stanza of the first section "The Burial of the Dead".
In this stanza, the speaker goes on to present a new idea, “the unreal city”. The
phrase "Unreal City" is actually a reference to Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal.
The city is unreal because people seem lifeless. The speaker remembers watching
a crowd flowing over London Bridge like zombies, and says he "had not thought
death had undone so many". Here, Eliot is definitely talking about the circles of
hell in Dante's Inferno, and is comparing modern life to living in hell where all the
dead people are. The people in this scene are sighing and staring only at the
ground in front of their feet, "And each man fixed his eyes before his feet". They
seem pretty unsatisfied with their undead lives. The speaker mentions a landmark
street in London, and notes how a church bell (Saint Mary Woolnoth) let out a
"dead sound on the final stroke of nine". Here, we are associating with religion
and death.

In the following lines, the speaker recognizes one of the crowed, Stetson, who,
according to the narrator, was at the battle of Mylae with him. The speaker asks
Stetson if "That corpse [he] planted last year in [his] garden has begun to sprout",
he thinks that planting a body in the ground is like planting a seed that's supposed
to grow. This line, also, implies the dysfunctional relationship and the modern
desolation of life, in which resurrection is no longer possible, are brought to the
reader’s awareness. The speaker then gives the Stetson man advice about
keeping the dog and the frost away from where the corpse is planted. In the last
line of this stanza, there is another reference to Baudelaire's "To the Reader",
"You hypocrite lecture!-mon semblable-mon fere!". "To the Reader" is the
reference to preface to Baudelaire's first and most famous volume of poem
"fleurs du Mal" (The Flowers of Evil). The whole collection speaks of hypocrisy,
corruption and a state of spiritual boredom. The implication is that Elliot speaks
of his, and our, complicity in bringing about the spiritual lethargy and emptiness
of the wasteland. However, this implies a need for sympathy rather than
condemnation on the part of the writer. At the end, we can see that what the
speaker is trying to communicate is that we are all like Stetson. In other words,
we are all an undefined mass that walks as the burial procession proceeds.

In this regard, we should refer to that, this section ends of with the words “Unreal
city” (60) which again stresses this theme of darkness because instead of saying
fantasy which can be something happy it says unreal which has a negative
connotation. Then Elliot writes about a brown fog which covers the city which
blocks the sun and creates more darkness. The author cries out to Stetson who
has recently buried a corpse and asks him if anything has begun to grow in the
soil on top of the corpse. This can also be talking about the city which Elliot is
describing as a corpse with brown fog that could be soil and there is nothing
growing in it yet because of all the darkness and death in the city.
 Theme of death and life

At first, we have to refer to the epigraph of "The Waste Land". "The Waste Land"
begins with “For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar,
and when the boys asked her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered, ‘I want
to die.’” The quotation is followed by a dedication to Ezra Pound.
The first section "The burial of the dead" refers specifically to this theme. The title
of this part, "The Burial of the Dead", is a central metaphor because it introduces
us to the theme of this section together with "breeding lilacs out of the dead
land". The speaker portrays the ravaged, torn and dead earth after WWI. The two
lines signify that death resulting from WWI encompasses both the dead who died
in battle and those who still breath.

At the beginning of the poem, the narrator stresses the idea that April is the
cruelest month because the lovely image of lilacs in the spring is associated with
the desolate or "the dead land" and it promises some kind of regeneration that
will not come. There are some words, "cruelest", "dead land" and "dull roots",
whose meanings "convey the idea of life in death. The speaker also sticks to
memories that would seem suggest life in all its hesitation and wonder. In fact,
this idea is taking from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", in which the speaker says
that April is the sweetest month. The speaker also, implies that when one feels
bad, he had better be forgetful and survive on the little bits of joy as if they were
"dried tubers".
In the line "coming over the Starnbergersee", there is a reference to "
Starnbergersee", a German lake, where Ludwig II died because of water. In the
second stanza, the speaker goes on to describe the land of the "stony rubbish". It
is a biblical reference because the speaker quotes "Ezekiel" and "Ecclesiastes".
The Biblical language seems to construct some kind of a dialogue between the
speaking voice and a higher power. "Son of man, You cannot say, or guess". “Son
of man”, referring to the Hebrew Bible, is Ezekiel who was called by God to warn
Israel to repent upon their idolatry and to prophesy the destruction of Jerusalem
and the enslavement of its people. Yet, an eventual restoration will follow. Here,
son of the man is in search for signs of life, but he can only find dry stones, dead
trees and a "heap of broken images. The "heap of broken images" recalls the idea
of fragmentation. "There is shadow under this red rock"; in this line, the speaker
invites his interlocutor to come under the shadow of the red rock because it is
the only place where one can find protection. In the following line, there is a
reference to "Wagner's Tristan und Isolde", "Od' und leer das Meer." (which
means the empty sea), where a watchman tells Tristan, who is dying that he does
not see Isolde's ship on the horizon.
In the third stanza, Sosostris pulls cards, and the first one shows "the drowned Phoenician Sailor"
(47). The Phoenicians were a group of people from around 1,000 B.C.E. who really knew their way around a
boat. The allusion to the drowned sailor references death and foreshadows the Phlebas
who drowns later in the poem.

The next line has Sosostris telling you that "Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!" (48). This line is taken from
Shakespeare's The Tempest, and it describes how a person lying at the bottom of the sea for a long time has had his
eyeballs turn into pearls. Eyes are windows into the soul, and if a person's eyes have hardened into pearls, it's a
logical assumption that the soul is completely hardened and dead, too.

In the third stanza, Madame Sosostris says that she cannot find the hanged man
among the cards, so she concludes that "I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear
death by water". Here, the idea of water is usually considered a symbol of life and
rebirth

Also, what complicates matters is that death can mean life; in other words, by
dying, a being can pave the way for new lives. Eliot asks his friend Stetson: “That
corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom
this year?” Similarly, Christ, by “dying,” redeemed humanity and thereby gave
new life. The ambiguous passage between life and death finds an echo in the
frequent allusions to Dante, particularly in the Limbo-like vision of the men
flowing across London Bridge and through the modern city.

In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. His characters wait for
water to quench their thirst. Although water has the regenerative possibility of
restoring life and fertility, it can also lead to drawing and death just as in the case
of Phlebas the sailor from "The Waste Land". Eliot draws upon the Christian
traditional meanings of water.

The Fisher King is the central character in The Waste Land. It is taken from a book
called "Ritual to Romance" by Jessie L. Weston. It focuses on the grail legend and
the Fisher King, whose infirmity affects the fertility of the kingdom itself ; the land
is also, doomed to barrenness. Traditionally, the impotence or death of the Fisher
King brought unhappiness and famine. In Eliot's poetry the Fisher King as symbolic
of humanity, Christ and other religious figures associated with divine resurrection
and rebirth.

Vegetation Myth

Before writing the poem Eliot was seriously reading James Frazer’s "The Golden
Bough" and Miss Jessie Weston’s "From Ritual to Romance". Pinto makes a
comment on the use of myth in "The waste land" saying "The central conception
of The Waste Land is sexual impotence which is used as a symbol for the
spiritual malady of the modem world. This is the vegetation myth with the rites
of fertility based upon it which is found in the Eastern cults described by Sir
James Frazer in his Attis, Adonis, Osiris to which Eliot acknowledges a particular
debt. Weston’s theory was that the story of the quest for the Holy Grail which is
based on the vegetation myth. The Grail romances tell of "Waste Land", ruled
by an impotent Fisher King. This king is freed from his impotence and the land
from its aridity by a deliverer who makes use of certain magical instruments
which clearly symbolize sexual activity. This Fisher King represents damaged
sexuality (according to myth, his impotence causes the land to wither and dry
up). However, the infirmity and death of the fisher king brings about both
unhappiness and famine.
In The Waste Land, also, there are other characters that are sexually frustrated
such as : Tiresias who represents confused or ambiguous sexuality, and the
women chattering in “A Game of Chess” who represent an out-of-control
sexuality. Also, the first woman in the second section "A Game of Chess" will
never become a cultural touchstone rats among dead men’s bones. The woman
is explicitly compared to Philomela, a character out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
who is raped by her brother-in-law the king, who then cuts her tongue out to
keep her quiet. She manages to tell her sister, who helps her avenge herself by
murdering the king’s son and feeding him to the king. The sisters are then
changed into birds, Philomela into a nightingale.
The title itself "A Game of chess" recalls the ancient vegetation or fertility myths
associated with the sterility of a land affected by the impotence of its ruler. The
waste land is infertile, and therefore incapable of letting anything grow. This ty
symbolizes the spiritual and intellectual death that has happened in modern
society, where it is impossible for any new hope of faith.

Water has two distinct, contrasting meanings in the poem. On one hand, water
has the regenerative possibility of restoring life and fertility. On the other hand,
it can also lead to drowning and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor
from The Waste Land.

Here we have to refer to the story of Ishtar according to the Greek mythology.
In the poem, the well-being of the Earth is the result of the love climax between
the Goddess Ishtar and her lover the God Tammuz. In the ancient Near East,
Ishtar was an important and widely worshiped mother goddess for many Semitic
peoples. As a result, People worshiped Ishtar as the goddess of sexual love and
fertility. Also, the first strophe in "A Game of Chess" shows a woman
unapproachable. The appearance of the throne icon could liken her to the "Ishtar
of Lilith's origins”.

Also, the sexual imageries are unproductive: sex is present as a lustful

functional device but devoid of the necessary fertility The second and third parts
of the poem throw light on the failure of sex relationship in the modern waste
land. The two women of the section "A Game of Chess " represent the two sides
of modern sexuality: while one side of this sexuality is a dry, the other side of
this sexuality is a rampant fecundity.
There are brief references to Queen Cleopatra riding her golden barge down the
River Nile at the start of Part II. The close of this section takes us to the court of
King Claudius in Denmark with the crazed Ophelia’s famous lines: "Good night
ladies... good night, sweet ladies etc. There is also a reference to the rape of
Philomela by King Tereus. Also, Lil’s case is typical of the fertility-sterility
dialectic in modernity: she is a fertile woman who is forced to mutilate her fertility
because of poverty.

Finally, the waste land is infertile, and therefore incapable of letting anything
grow. This infertility symbolizes the spiritual and intellectual death that has
happened in modern society, where it is impossible for any new hope of faith to
grow.
one of the women recounts a conversation with her and chides Lil over her failure to get herself some false teeth,
telling her that her husband will seek out the company of other women if she doesn’t improve her appearance.

one of the women recounts a conversation with their friend Lil, whose husband has just been discharged from the
army. She has chided Lil over her failure to get herself some false teeth, telling her that her husband will seek out the
company of other women if she doesn’t improve her appearance. Lil claims that the cause of her ravaged looks is the
medication she took to induce an abortion; having nearly died giving birth to her fifth child, she had refused to have
another, but her husband “won’t leave [her] alone.” The women leave the bar to a chorus of “good night(s)”
reminiscent of Ophelia’s farewell speech in Hamlet.

Isolation

In "The Waste Land," the great despair of modern existence doesn't just
come from a sense of meaninglessness, but from a very deep loneliness.
This loneliness, in turn, is something Eliot thinks we create for
ourselves by constantly pursuing our own selfish interests. It's pretty
simple: you can't spend your whole life trying to beat the people around
you, then turn around and complain about being lonely. Modern
existence, with its emphasis on individualism, is a breeding ground for
isolation and loneliness, and the major problem with modern people is
that they don't seem to realize that they're responsible for the isolation
that's always eating at their souls.

Infertility

Eliot envisioned the modern world as a wasteland, in which neither the

land nor the people could conceive. In The Waste Land, various
characters are sexually frustrated or dysfunctional, unable to cope with
either reproductive or nonreproductive sexn uality: the Fisher King
represents damaged sexuality (according to myth, his impotence causes
the land to wither and dry up), Tiresias represents confused or
ambiguous sexuality, and the women chattering in “A Game of Chess”
represent an out-of-control sexuality. World War I not only eradicated
an entire generation of young men in Europe but also ruined the land.
Trench warfare and chemical weapons, the two primary methods by
which the war was fought, decimated plant life, leaving behind detritus
and carnage. In “The Hollow Men,” the speaker discusses the dead land,
now filled with stone and cacti. Corpses salute the stars with their
upraised hands, stiffened from rigor mortis. Trying to process the
destruction has caused the speaker’s mind to become infertile: his head
has been filled with straw, and he is now unable to think properly, to
perceive accurately, or to conceive of images or thoughts.

Water imagery

In Eliot’s poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliot’s

characters wait for water to quench their thirst, watch rivers overflow
their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth, and pass by fetid pools
of standing water. Although water has the regenerative possibility of
restoring life and fertility, it can also lead to drowning and death, as in
the case of Phlebas the sailor from The Waste Land. Traditionally, water
can imply baptism, Christianity, and the figure of Jesus Christ, and Eliot
draws upon these traditional meanings: water cleanses, water provides
, and water brings relief elsewhere in The Waste Land and in
“Little Gidding,” the fourth part of Four Quartets. Prufrock hears the
seductive calls of mermaids as he walks along the shore in “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but, like Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey (ca.
800 b.c.e.), he realizes that a malicious intent lies behind the sweet
voices: the poem concludes “we drown” (131). Eliot thus cautions us to
beware of simple solutions or cures, for what looks innocuous might
turn out to be very dangerous.
Mythic and Religious Ritual

Eliot’s tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual, academic works, and key books in the literary
tradition informs every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with references to both the obscure and the
well known, thereby teaching his readers as he writes. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot explains the
crucial role played by religious symbols and myths. He drew heavily from ancient fertility rituals, in which
the fertility of the land was linked to the health of the Fisher King, a wounded figure who could be healed
through the sacrifice of an effigy. The Fisher King is, in turn, linked to the Holy Grail legends, in which a
knight quests to find the grail, the only object capable of healing the land. Ultimately, ritual fails as the tool
for healing the wasteland, even as Eliot presents alternative religious possibilities, including Hindu chants,
Buddhist speeches, and pagan ceremonies. Later poems take their images almost exclusively from
Christianity, such as the echoes of the Lord’s Prayer in “The Hollow Men” and the retelling of the story of
the wise men in “Journey of the Magi” (1927).

For Eliot, one of the single greatest causes of Western civilization becoming "The Waste Land" is the fact
that religion doesn't really have the influence it once did. In the old days, people didn't have to worry so
much about questions like "Why am I here?" or "What's the meaning of life," because religion already had
answers for these questions. In the modern world though, Eliot has seen a decline in the power of religion,
and one of the side effects of this decline is that more and more people are feeling like they're in a funk or
suffering from a full-blown spiritual crisis.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images […] (19-22)

Since Eliot borrows from the book of Ezekiel in this passage, the speaker here might actually be God. Or at
least it might as well be, because the person speaking asks you (yeah that's right—you) what hope you can
possibly have for finding comfort in the "stony rubbish" of the modern world. People in the past had total
faith in the Bible, and this faith allowed them to think that everything in their lives happened for a purpose.
But you, the modern reader, "know only / A heap of broken images." In other words, you might know a few
things here and there about religion, but you don't live it as a day-to-day reality. This passage brings up the
image of a spiritual whole that's been shattered or broken into fragments by modernity, and in this sense,
Eliot conveys the sense of spiritual uneasiness that dominates the modern world.
The first woman is associated by allusion with Cleopatra, Dido, and even Keats’s Lamia, by
virtue of the lushness of language surrounding her (although Eliot would never have
acknowledged Keats as an influence). She is a frustrated, overly emotional but not terribly
intellectual figure, oddly sinister, surrounded by “strange synthetic perfumes” and smoking
candles. She can be seen as a counterpart to the title character of Eliot’s earlier “Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with whom she shares both a physical setting and a profound sense
of isolation. Her association with Dido and Cleopatra, two women who committed suicide
out of frustrated love, suggests her fundamental irrationality. Unlike the two queens of myth,
however, this woman will never become a cultural touchstone. Her despair is pathetic, rather
than moving, as she demands that her lover stay with her and tell her his thoughts. The
lover, who seems to be associated with the narrator of this part of the poem, can think only
of drowning (again, in a reference to The Tempest) and rats among dead men’s bones. The
woman is explicitly compared to Philomela, a character out of Ovid’sMetamorphoses who is
raped by her brother-in-law the king, who then cuts her tongue out to keep her quiet. She
manages to tell her sister, who helps her avenge herself by murdering the king’s son and
feeding him to the king. The sisters are then changed into birds, Philomela into a nightingale.
This comparison suggests something essentially disappointing about the woman, that she
is unable to communicate her interior self to the world. The woman and her surroundings,
although aesthetically pleasing, are ultimately sterile and meaningless, as suggested by the
nonsense song that she sings (which manages to debase even Shakespeare).
The second scene in this section further diminishes the possibility that sex can bring
regeneration—either cultural or personal. This section is remarkably free of the cultural
allusions that dominate the rest of the poem; instead, it relies on vernacular speech to
make its point. Notice that Eliot is using a British vernacular: By this point he had moved to
England permanently and had become a confirmed Anglophile. Although Eliot is able to
produce startlingly beautiful poetry from the rough speech of the women in the bar, he
nevertheless presents their conversation as further reason for pessimism. Their friend Lil
has done everything the right way—married, supported her soldier husband, borne
children—yet she is being punished by her body. Interestingly, this section ends with a line
echoing Ophelia’s suicide speech in Hamlet; this links Lil to the woman in the first section
of the poem, who has also been compared to famous female suicides. The comparison
between the two is not meant to suggest equality between them or to propose that the first
woman’s exaggerated sense of high culture is in any way equivalent to the second
woman’s lack of it; rather, Eliot means to suggest that neither woman’s form of sexuality is
regenerative.