ABSTRACT
T. S. Eliot’s childhood years were formative. The chapter reconsiders Eliot’s childhood years and Unitarian upbringing in St. Louis, Missouri, with focus on Charlotte, his mother. Evidence details Charlotte’s ambivalence towards patriarchal motherhood and the mothering role, as well as young Tom’s experience of this. Charlotte’s social, political and religious activities and writings were essential for her creative management and utilisation of maternal ambivalence to achieve a sense of individual female autonomy and selfhood. Her Unitarian faith and private devotion to the Virgin Mary were also crucial.
Having provided this background, the chapter revisits Eliot’s most misogynistic and sadomasochistic early texts in the context of mother–son ambivalence. These include ‘Mandarins’ (1910), ‘The Love Song of St. Sebastian’ (1914), ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), ‘Hysteria’ (1915) and The Waste Land (1922). Geary utilises D. W. Winnicott’s and Melanie Klein’s object-relations theories, as well as the work of feminist, maternal and psychoanalytic theorists Julia Kristeva, Rozsika Parker, Jessica Benjamin and Jan Campbell. Charlotte’s maternal ambivalence is a determining influence energising and shaping Eliot’s early ambivalence towards the maternal feminine and his representation of women in his early poetry (1908–22).
