The first full-length study on T. S. Eliot and the mother, this
book responds to a shortfall in understanding the true importance
of Eliot's poet-mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, to his life and
works. In doing so, it radically rethinks Eliot's ambivalence
towards women. In a context of mother-son ambivalence (simultaneous
feelings of love and hate), it shows how his search for belief and
love converged with a developing maternal poetics. Importantly, the
chapters combine standard literary critical methods and extensive
archival research with innovative feminist, maternal and
psychoanalytic theorisations of mother-child relationships, such as
those developed by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jessica Benjamin,
Jan Campbell and Rozsika Parker. These maternal thinkers emphasise
the vital importance and benefit of recognising the pre-Oedipal
mother and maternal subjectivity, contrary to traditional,
repressive Oedipal models of masculinity. Through this
interdisciplinary approach, the chapters look at Eliot's changing
representations and articulations of the mother/ mother-child
relationship from his very earliest writings through to the later
plays. Focus is given to decisive mid-career works: Ash-Wednesday
(1930), 'Marina' (1930), 'Coriolan' (1931-32) and The Family
Reunion (1939), as well as to canonical works The Waste Land (1922)
and Four Quartets (1943). Notably, the study draws heavily on the
wide range of Eliot materials now available, including the new
editions of the complete poems, the complete prose and the volumes
of letters, which are transforming our perception of the poet and
challenging critical attitudes. The book also gives unprecedented
attention to Charlotte Eliot's life and writings and brings her
individual female experience and subjectivity to the fore.
Significantly, it establishes Charlotte's death in 1929 as a
decisive juncture, marking both Eliot's New Life and the apotheosis
of the feminine symbolised in Ash-Wednesday. Central to this
proposition is Geary's new formulation for recognising and
examining a maternal poetics, which also compels a new concept of
maternal allegory as a modern mode of literary epiphany. T. S.
Eliot and the Mother reveals the role of the mother and the
dynamics of mother-son ambivalence to be far more complicated,
enduring, changeable and essential to Eliot's personal, religious
and poetic development than previously acknowledged.
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