ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 sees Eliot’s turning to Shakespeare’s late plays Pericles and Coriolanus as models for ‘Marina’ (1930) and ‘Coriolan’ (1931–32), respectively, indicating a continuing, if uneven, sea-change in his thinking about the maternal and the feminine. First, the chapter re-examines the two recognition scenes in ‘Marina’ taken from Shakespeare’s Pericles and Seneca’s Hercules Furens to reveal a hidden maternal narrative playing alongside the poem’s more open theme of paternity. Second, implementing Luce Irigaray’s critique of Friedrich Nietzsche in The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1991), the chapter demonstrates how ‘Marina’ contrasts starkly with Eliot’s pre-1927 works. The poem reinstitutes the marine imagery and symbolism linked to the maternal that The Waste Land (1922) excludes or denigrates. Third, the chapter shows how male symbolisation of the maternal-feminine in ‘Marina’ brings about re-identification with the pre-Oedipal (m)other. Also, Jessica Benjamin’s theory of pre-Oedipal gender ‘overinclusiveness’ informs how mutual recognition in ‘Marina’ discovers a lost female remnant of the male psyche. These achievements have positive transformative, transcendent and ethical implications for the male subject. Having re-assessed the impact of recognition in ‘Marina’, the chapter looks at recognition in Eliot’s ‘Coriolan’ (1931–32) poems, ‘Triumphal March’ and ‘Difficulties of a Statesman’. Although quite different to ‘Marina’ in vision, sentiment and symbolism, Eliot’s mature development and final manifest articulation of the Coriolanus passion scene in ‘Coriolan’ is as important as ‘Marina’ in marking a significant change in his thinking on the maternal.
