ABSTRACT
T. S. Eliot’s mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, was a profound influence on her son’s life and works. Her formative and complex impact is still insufficiently examined.
The ‘Introduction’ provides a history of biographical and critical treatments of Charlotte, noting that maternal dominance and failure are blamed for Eliot’s Prufrockian anxieties as a man and the misogyny of his works, exemplified by The Waste Land (1922). Given this over-simplification, and the continuing release of new Eliot materials, a more balanced, nuanced and thorough consideration of the Eliot mother-–son relationship is needed. The ‘Introduction’ presents the book’s fundamental questions: how and to what extent did Eliot’s intense early relationship with his mother inform his relationships with and opinions of women? To what degree did it inform transformations in the style, content and form of his writings, in addition to his conflicting and changing depictions of women? How and why did Eliot’s relationship with the maternal feminine change in his mid-life, moving into his later years? Moreover, how is this associated with his ongoing search for belief and love?
To answer these questions, the book gives unprecedented attention to Charlotte Eliot’s life and writings. T. S. Eliot’s oeuvre is analysed in its entirety to ascertain the varying pattern in the relation to the maternal. Geary also specifies the importance of Eliot’s mid-career works: Ash-Wednesday (1930), ‘Marina’ (1930), ‘Coriolan’ (1931–32) and The Family Reunion (1939). These writings are crucial in Eliot’s development, relating to substantial subjective, spiritual and poetic transformations, as well as to a notable change in his relation to the maternal feminine. Charlotte Eliot’s death in 1929 is also key.
For this study on the mother, Geary highlights the efficacy of combining standard literary critical methods with innovative feminist, maternal and psychoanalytic theorisations of mother–child relationships, such as those developed by Julia Kristeva, Jessica Benjamin, Luce Irigaray, Rozsika Parker and Jan Campbell. These maternal thinkers argue for the vital necessity and benefit of articulating individual female-maternal subjectivity. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the book enhances understanding of the Eliot mother–son relationship. In doing so, Geary provides a new way to think about Eliot, the complexity of his relationships with women, and the often contradictory and changing representations of women throughout his works.
The ‘Introduction’ provides a brief context and grounding for modernism and early psychoanalysis to historicise male Oedipal treatment, theorisation and understanding of the maternal and the feminine in these inseparable discourses. It explains key terms and definitions used throughout the book, such as ‘motherhood’, ‘mothering’, ‘mother’ and the ‘maternal’. Geary also describes his formulation for recognising and examining Eliot’s maternal poetics, which compels a concept of ‘maternal allegory’—a modern mode of literary epiphany connected to redemptive death and the maternal body.
Finally, Geary argues for expanding and establishing maternal modernism fully as an important category within modernist studies.
