ABSTRACT
Hysteria is etymologically a woman’s affliction, but it has also affected men, paralyzing them, sheltering them from exigencies of the bed and the battlefield, opening them up to passivity as a sexual and social position. The Waste Land is a portrait of hysteria over which two men brooded, a repetition, in verse, of Freud’s and Breuer’s 1895 experiment. It is problematic to call The Waste Land collaborative, because standard notions of authorship deem it Eliot’s. In the years preceding The Waste Land, Eliot was preoccupied with nerves, his own and his wife’s; together, they suffered from vague emotional and somatic disorders. Eliot used hysterical discourse to invoke the corrective affections of another man. Together, they performed an ambiguous act: they engaged in a symbolic scene of homosexual intercourse while freeing themselves from imputations of inverted style.
