The Role of Mother Love in Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady' and Its Connection to Misogyny, Slides of Music

Download The Role of Mother Love in Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady' and Its Connection to Misogyny and more Slides Music in PDF only on Docsity! Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literature Vol. 6, No. 2, 2014, pp 141 - 162    JJMLL Son and Lover in T. S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” Leila Bellour Department of Foreign Languages, Mila University Center, Algeria Received on: 5-6-2014 Accepted on: 7-11-2014 Abstract The present paper attempts to vindicate misogyny in T. S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”. To the best of our knowledge, no full length study has examined the effect of mother love in Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”, and its interrelatedness with misogyny. In the poem, the young man and the lady live in an isolated togetherness, because the young man is dispossessed of any sense of emotional and human commitment. Inspite of the lady’s abiding love, which is avowed via bombastic rhetoric, her attempts to awaken his passive and latent desire end with an utter failure. The man remains shut off from the world of passion. He strives to control himself in front of the lady whose desire is bestial and threatening to his very masculine identity. The man splits his lady into mother and lover. Hence, his mind becomes torn in an admixture of attraction and repulsion. As the paper evinces, mother love, which is in his entrails, prompts his visceral hatred of the feminine and renders him deficient in his capacity to love. Keywords: Mother love, Portrait of a Lady, mother complex, misogyny. Eliot’s misogyny, which is still a momentous query among Eliot’s critics and scholars, is partly rooted in his infantile love for his mother. His emotional frustration is a re-enactment of the anxieties of child-mother relation. Mother love surfaces in Eliot’s recently published letters. In a letter to his mother, dated 3 October 1917, Eliot, whose heart aches with the pain of longing to see his mother, writes: “Don’t talk about not seeing me again; it is too painful, and besides you shall see me again. I remember all those occasions you mention, and a great many more, usually beginning with the ‘Little Tailor’ and the firelight on the ceiling. But you must not doubt that you will see me directly the war is over” (Eliot 2009, 222).The insistence on ‘seeing’ emphasizes the importance of physical approximation. Eliot feels that he will not rest until he sees her in front of him. The childhood memories are still dwelling in his mind. He still remembers “Little Tailor”, a song she used to sing to him. In another letter, dated 12 January 1919, Eliot writes to his mother: “You have not been long out of my thoughts since then, I have been over all my childhood. I don’t feel like writing anything in this first letter except to say again how much I love you-if only I could have been with you these last few days. I do long for you, I wanted you more for my sake than yours-to sing the Little Tailor for me” (2009, 316). In this letter, Eliot behaves more as a little child than as an adult. The poet still imagines himself a babe avowing declarations of love to his mother, and waiting for her to sing again a song that she used to sing to him while he was young. Eliot seems to be entrapped in a stage of childhood, and he finds it difficult to transcend this stage even when he is old. His experience of infantile anxieties, fears, and needs is probably due to the fact that Charlotte Champe Eliot was not so close to him in his infancy. According to Ackroyd (1984, 20), Eliot’s mother “was not […] Bellour 142   ‘particularly interested in babies’, and in fact Eliot’s closest infantile relationship was with his nurse.” Charlotte was not deeply involved in the everyday upbringing of her babies. For Eliot, she brought a nurse, because she was always busy with social reforms and other matters. Eliot’s need to appease maternal longing is also intense in a letter to his brother, Henry Eliot, dated 15 February 1920. In the letter (2009, 442), he states that his happiness will never be fulfilled until he sees his mother. He says: “Consider my position. I am thinking all the time of my desire to see her. I cannot get away from it. Unless I can really see her again I shall never be happy..” Inside that adult, there lurks an infant, who is terribly afraid of being separated from his love object: his mother. In a letter to his mother, dated 15 February 1920, Eliot becomes more obsessed with seeing her, repeating that he will experience no bliss in his life unless she comes and makes him see her again. He writes: “Now is this worth it, while you are still physically able to come here? For you to come and have time, settle down for a time and live with us? Unless I can see you once again for something better than the breathless visit I have described, I shall never be really happy to the end of my life.” (Eliot 2009, 443). Eliot continues, “I only repeat that if you cannot come, if I can never again see you for more than ten days or two weeks, that I shall never be happy. And if you come, it must be quickly, soon.”(444). Eliot seems to be mad in love with his mother. He views her as a romantic lover or as a babe. The letter was written while Eliot is in England very far from his mother in America. The pain of absence from his mother is reinforced by childhood anxieties caused by his feeling of isolation from her. These memories are still in the layers of his mind. Murrary H. Sherman contends that Eliot’s sexual problems are inherent in his separation from his mother in his infancy. He states that “Eliot’s severe sexual inhibitions seem to have derived from his mother’s emotional absence during his infant years, her later domination of him, and his father’s abhorrence of sex.”(Sherman 2007, 272). His mother’s absence left an emotional vacuum in his heart. Eliot discusses mother love in an essay where he commented on D. H. Lawrence’s mother love in Fantasia of the Unconscious. In his commentary on the book’s chapter entitled Parental love, Eliot writes: “What he says about mother love in the Fantasia is better than all the psychoanalysis.”(qtd in John J. Soldo 1983, 43). In his review of John Middleton Murry’s “Son and Woman”, which is a commentary on D. H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers, Eliot praises Middleton’s interpretation of mother love as the fulcrum around which all of Lawrence’s works swirl. Eliot states: “What Mr. Murry shows, and demonstrates with a terrible pertinacity throughout Lawrence’s work, is the emotional dislocation of a “mother-complex” (1930, 770). Eliot’s love for his mother might also be explained in terms of the so-called mother’s complex. To prevent readers’ interpretation of his works in the light of Lawrence’s mother complex, Eliot denies that this psychological problem is in vogue during the modern times. He writes: “Now, the ‘mother-complex’ of Lawrence does not seem to me in itself a sign of the times. ” (1930, 770). Eliot’s puritan mother was a looming presence in his early life. She exerted an overwhelming influence on her child, and she assumed a full responsibility towards him. Mother love remained deeply ingrained in the layers of his memory as he grew old. According to Ackroyd, the “burden of maternal longing can last a lifetime, even in his sixties, at the time of his greatest public triumph, he confided to a Son and Lover in T. S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” 145   push the person to turn to Madonna as a substitute mother. This might explain Eliot’s revulsion at sexuality and his repudiation of the feminine. He sometimes views the woman as a mother or as a Virgin. The first part of “Portrait” opens with an epigraph, which alludes to John Webster’s The White Devil, a play which depicts women as victims of a patriarchal society. Adultery and murder are also among the play’s major themes. The words of the epigraph, “I have caught an everlasting cold” (Eliot 1996, 317), are uttered by Flamineo while he is dying. John Webster is one of the most famous misogynists in Jacobean drama. In his plays, he represents the female’s body as dangerous and threatening. In his comment on the epigraph and its relevance to the thematic concern of the poem, Christ Buttram Trombold states that in the context of Eliot’s poem, the line, from Webster’s The White Devil “seems to underscore ironically the emotional coldness of the speaker or to introduce the impending presence of death for those involved in empty, polite social ritual.”(1997, 94). The epigraph, which is pessimistic, is in sharp contrast with the title of the poem, which evokes a Mona Lisa-like portrait. In the opening lines of the poem, which invoke a funeral setting, a lady arranges for a meeting with a young man. They meet in a darkened room with “four wax candles” and “Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead”(327).The lady, in the room, seems jovial and affectionate, trying to bully him into reciprocating her romantic urges. She tries to make her lover stunned by her profuse gentility. Thus, she uses romantic melodies to mesmerise him. The candles, in the room, suggest that she wants to burn lamps to make him see her and to brighten the conversation. The room where the lady invites the man was “prepared for all the things to be said”(327), which suggests that her love is not genuine and spontaneous like that of Romeo and Juliet. Her vows of love to him seem to be lies and her claims are pseudo-amorous and outmoded clichés. Though the description of the setting seems redolent of romantic love stories, the young man finds the atmosphere and the candlelight setting reminiscent of Juliet’s tomb. Like his early poems, in “Portrait”, the union of lovers is described by alluding to tragic love stories. The lady is like a witch with a babe face. She also resembles Keats’s “the beautiful lady without pity.” She lulls the young man, pretending to be passionate only to gain his confidence and trust. The lady plays the role of Romeo’s beloved, Juliet, in her sincere and whole hearted love. However, the young man rejects the Juliet-like beloved and resists her sexual promiscuity. In the room, there is a pianist transmuting delicate “Preludes, through his hair and finger tips”(327), which indicates that the music springs from the kernel of his heart. It also emphasizes the deep-seated romanticism of the lady, who seems to inhabit a Chopin-like world full of love and romance. The conversation, which is a mere commentary on Chopin’s preludes, that are sung in the room, slips suddenly “Among velleities and carefully caught regrets/Through attenuated tones of violins/Mingled with remote cornets”(327). The lines indicate the man’s emotional passivity and his reluctance to respond to the lady. His velleities resemble those of Prufrock who merely wishes but never advances towards any action. The tones of violin, which obtrude upon his thoughts, vanish from his ear slowly. The sullen lover, who is listening to the violently passionate lady, murmurs that he is not romantic. He says: “Indeed I am not social-you knew it? Oh, I knew you were not blind”(327). In the line, there is an implicit reference to the woman’s eyes, which are always terrifying in Eliot’s early poems. These eyes Bellour 146   must have read the young man’s interiorized identity. To activate his passions and lure him towards her, the lady profusely praises the man’s rarest attributes; she says: “how rare and strange it is, to find/In a life composed so much, so much of ways and ends […] To find a friend who has those qualities/So rare and strange and so unvalued too/Who has, and gives/Those qualities upon which friendship lives”(327). The word friendship, here, has sexual connotations. The quality of reciprocity, which makes true friendship, is absent in the young man. In the poem, there is no actual direct conversation between the man and the lady. Their speeches are disconnected and their utterances do not relate. The cliché-ridden language of the lady, which is mingled with Chopin’s preludes, induces boredom and ignites neurosis in the man’s head. He says: “Inside my brain a droll tom-tom begins/Hammering a prelude of its own/Capricious monotone”(328). The man is absorbed in his own thoughts. He is psychologically confined, living in a world of his own. The young man’s intellectual privacy excludes the woman from his life. In the whole poem, the woman is the only one who speaks; the reader overhears the man’s thoughts, which indicates his deepness and the woman’s superficiality. The flood of the lady’s emotions fails to whip his passions, and it makes him wild with anger. The young man resorts to “tobacco trance” to escape the lady’s lures and to remain in a state of emotional dormancy. According to Laurie J. MacDiarmid (2005, 28), “The ‘tobacco trance’ that Eliot’s narrator slips into to escape the Lady’s sexual impositions serves as an inept escape from her conversational advances”. Very much like Prufrock, in “The Love Song”, the young man, in “Portrait”, keeps delaying and postponing a romantic encounter with the lady whose heartfelt affection fails to cure him of his feeling of irremediable isolation. The man tries to avoid the seduction of the lady and to defer the fulfillment of his fantasies; he says: “Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,/Admire the monuments/Discuss the late events/Correct our watches by the public clocks/Then sit half an hour and drink our bocks/And pay our reckoning and go home again”(328). The man decides to banish the lady from his mind, and he refuses to succumb to her dreams and longings. Indeed, the man is afflicted with aboulie, a paralysis of will to act. To hide his paralysis of will and desire, the person plagued with aboulie usually resorts to futile actions. In discussing Hamlet’s reluctance to act, Ernest Jones states that he “eagerly seizes every excuse for occupying himself with any question rather than the perform-ance of his duty, just as on a lesser plane a schoolboy faced with a distasteful task whittles away his time in arranging his books, sharpening his pencils, and fidgetting with any little occupation that will serve as a pretext for putting off the task.”(1910, 87). In “Portrait”, the male protagonist avoids action; he, instead, goes to “Admire the mountains/Discuss the late events/Correct our watches by the public clocks/Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks”(328). The man suffers from an emotional desiccation, which makes him trapped in a state of hibernation. This emotional restraint makes it impossible for him to have any personal relationship with the lady. In fact, the first part of the poem ends with no promise or hope of any romantic relationship between the young man and the lady, because the man resists the lady and her romantic world. The parentheses in the poem may suggest their separation. This alienation is also reinforced by the fact that the scene takes place in a closed dark room. This depiction of women inside closed rooms attests to the poet’s misogyny. Very much like in the patriarchal Victorian age, Eliot believes that women must be Son and Lover in T. S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” 147   incarcerated in houses. An example of this representation of the feminine is “The Waste Land” whose epigraph tells the story of the Sybil of Cumae, who is imprisoned in a cage and desperately waits for death. The second section of this poem, “A Game of Chess”, also takes place exclusively in a room. The original title of this section is “In a Cage”. Interestingly, in a letter to John Middleton Murry, dated Sunday 1926, Vivien Eliot writes: I am in pain, in pain. I have been in gilded cages 11 years. One cage after another. I have never grown up. I don’t know anything. Can’t you tell Tom it is nicer to see birds free than in cages? People have always said to me, but why don’t you go away & do what you like? John, I never dared. First, it meant losing Tom. (Losing my hold on Tom). Now, it means hurting Tom, & losing myself,doesn’t it? (2012, 223). In the second part of the poem, the man and the lady meet again after a certain lapse of time. This second meeting occurs in spring, the season of love and romance. This part opens with an epigraph, which is taken from Christopher Marlow’s The Jew of Malta. The epigraph is read as follows: “Though hast committed-/Fornication-but that was in another country/And besides, the wench is dead”(328). The epigraph expresses the young man’s view of the woman as a prostitute with ravishing desire. In the second encounter, the lady’s passion shows no sign of abating. She uses the smell of the lilacs, which are symbolic of youth and beauty, to gain the man’s interest. As the woman speaks, the man observes her twisting of the lilacs between her hands. Her repressed anger and aggression against the man unconsciously comes to the surface in the act of twisting the lilacs. This act suggests that the lady threatens to twist his very masculinity and virility. The lilacs, which she holds between her hands, are reminiscent of Baudelaire’s the flowers of evil. The woman’s twisting of the lilacs suggests that love is interwined with destruction. The hands are the only corporeal parts of the lady, which are mentioned in the whole poem. Eliot always depicts the body as fragmented and dismembered in his poems, plays, and essays. In a letter to Conrad Aiken, dated 30 September, 1914, he writes: “Anyway it’s interesting to cut yourself to pieces once in a while, and wait to see if the fragments will sprout.”(2009, 64). The letter attests to Eliot’s intense revulsion of the body. Despite her herculean efforts, the lilacs cannot captivate her lover, who remains reluctant. The man’s avoidance of any representation of the lady’s physical portrait is an inkling of his misogyny. The only physical parts of her body which are described, as mentioned above are her destructive hands. Klaus Herding states that “the interpretation of the hand as a symbol of sexuality-or the plenty of life in general-is common knowledge to connoisseurs of Renaissance art”(2000, 351). Living under a ban of emotional inhibition, the young man erases the female’s body in the poem. The title of the poem is misleading because there is no exalting female portrait in the whole poem. Judith Buttler criticizes the view of women as shapeless and formless creatures. This view goes back to Plato. According to her, “Plato clearly wants to disallow the possibility of a resemblance between the masculine Bellour 150   Greek myth: “You are invulnerable, you have no Aschilles’ heel./You will go on, and when you have prevailed/You will think: at this point many a one has failed”(329). According to the myth, Achilles was the strongest hero in the Trojan war. When he was born, Achilles’s mother Thetis dipped him in the River Styx in order to ensure his eternity and permanence in life. But Thetis held him by one heel; hence, it remains vulnerable and liable to the destructive power of death. During the Trojan war, Achilles died when an arrow penetrated his heel, which was untouched by the water of the river Styx. The lady assumes that the youth will triumph only if he asserts his masculine vigor by striking up a relationship with her. Refusing to give up, the woman reminds him of her impending death, which might be a shock to him. But her warning to the speaker of her death is, probably, to gain his sympathy and to arouse his passion. To strengthen his confidence in her, the lady assures the man that what she will give him is “only the friendship and the sympathy/Of one about to reach her journey’s end”(329). The lady’s romantic yearnings are mingled with lamenting her lost youth. The line suggests that the lady is afraid of death before fulfilling her desire. She is obsessed with time because old age makes her beauty and charm vanish, and this, in turn, diminishes her power of seduction. In fact, Eliot always depicts his women as old and vulnerable. In her waiting for death, the lady looks like the ageing Sybil and Tiresias in “The Waste Land”. Time, like women, was one of the enemies of perfection for Eliot. Though the man shows a reckless disregard for losing the lady, her words seem to have touched his sensibility, and he feels impolite not to reciprocate her gentle feelings verbatim. In response, he says: “You will see me again in the park/Reading the comics and the sporting page”(329). His escape from the room to the garden indicates his escape from the feminine sphere to the masculine one. The man reads about murder and default, which are at odds with the romantic conversation the lady aspires to establish. The young man particularly remarks that “An English countess goes upon the stage (329). The countess who goes upon the stage does not just refer to the lady’s pretentions but also to her transgression of social norms. The Greek who was killed at a Polish dance relates to the young man who is with the lady in a room where a Polish composer’s preludes are sung. Because the lady’s pallid appetite is threatening to his masculinity, the man refuses to succumb to her seductions and to be involved in any kind of relationship with her. He feels that her gentility hides a cruel purpose. He says: “I keep my countenance-/ I remain self-possessed”(329), which implies that marriage might rid him of his freedom. For him, to love means to give oneself completely to an Other. The man struggles vigorously to sustain the integrity of his self and to keep his status as an authentic man. According to Anthony Cuda (2010, 35), “[q]uestions of self-control-and the doubts and fears associated with relinquishing it-assumes a singular urgency in Eliot’s early poems. And it is clear that this urgency intensified during his philosophical studies at Harvard a few years later.” Though she tries with all her might to control the young man, her endeavors are doomed to failure. Her beauty does not captivate him and her entreaties for love, which are ‘full of sound and fury’, signify nothing to him. The man asserts his manhood and independence from her. He feels that any relation with the lady is laden with insecurity. To assert his manhood, he strives to resist the lady’s seductive power and her glamorous femininity. But his approximation of the lady is important for defining his gender identity. In this context, Sedgwick posits that “«to identify as must always include Son and Lover in T. S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” 151   multiple processes of identification with. It also involves identification as against; but even did it not, the relations implicit in identifying with are, as psychoanalysis suggests, in themselves quite sufficiently fraught with intensities of incorporation, diminishment, inflation, threat, loss, separation, and disavowal” (2008, 61). Thus, identity formation necessitates penetration into a space, which exclusively belongs to the Other. Gail Mac Donald quotes Eliot, who recollects a scene from his childhood. He says: “I was always on the other side of the wall. On one occasion [..] when I ventured into the schoolyard a little too early when there were still [girls] on the premises and I saw them staring at me through a window, I took flight at once”(qtd in MacDonald 2004, 176). Eliot was always separated from girls in his childhood. He did not even play with them in the schoolyard. Whenever he met them accidentally, he used to flee out of shyness. Later, as he grew older, Eliot remains encumbered by a feeling of fear from women. In “Portrait”, the male speaker’s entrance into the woman’s room represents this slip into the feminine space. The speaker, then, decides to depart abroad and leave the feminine forever. The room mirrors the interiority of the lady. One might say that the existence of the lady is so important for the speaker to define himself and assert his manhood. Despite her love and sympathy, she remains scaring for the man, who is afraid that she might penetrate the boundaries of his one-ness. The flowers and the music cannot distract the male speaker from his own self-absorption. He considers the woman’s gestures as mere extravagant romantic clichés. Hence, he remains irresponsive to her demands. He diverts his attention to the street music as a luring reveler for him. The man was attracted to “a street piano, mechanical and tired” which “Reiterates some worn- out common song”(329). So, the man resists captivation by the kind of music the lady prepares for him. He seems to be more inclined to the street piano than to Chopin’s preludes. Despite the music and the smell of the lilacs, which threaten his masculinity, the young man sustains his self-possession. The lady does not seem to have any magnetism for him. The smell of the hyacinths awakens the young man’s dormant memories. He says that “the smell of hyacinths across the garden-/Recalling things that other people have desired”(329).These things are romantic longings. Though he is moved by the smell for a while, he soon comes back to reality. Contra to the man, who is silent, the lady is very talkative. She is like a witch, who seduces and enthralls through language. She whispers extravagant and irresistible words in the man’s ears. Her flood of emotions aims at whipping the man’s passions. It swallows his voice and renders his thoughts unverbalized. His icy silence, which marks Eliot’s early poems, emphasizes his aloofness and emotional detachment. The lady uses seductive and lethal rhetoric to stir up the man’s emotions and penetrate the kernel of his heart. Her passionate words are the tools she uses to hypnotise him and stimulate him to put an end to his celibacy. However, her power of rhetoric blocks out the young man’s voice and drives him into withdrawal. He resists captivation by her automatic and theatrical speech. In her discussion of the power of language and its productivity, Butler argues that it is a bodily deed. She postulates that saying is another bodily deed. And the body that speaks its deed is the same body that did its deed, which means that there is, in the saying, a presentation of that body, a bodying forth of the guilt, perhaps, in the saying itself. The speaker may be relaying a set of events in the past, but the speaker is Bellour 152   doing something more: the speaker, in speaking, is presenting the body that did the deed, and is doing another deed at the same time, presenting the body in its action.(2004, 172). By avowing her fornication in Paris, the lady is beseeching the man to accept her sordid invitation. Butler states that “[s]poken words are, strangely, bodily offerings tentative or forceful, seductive or withholding, or both at once.”(2004, 172). However, the lady’s romantic rhetoric fails to ring in his ears and her beauty does not lure his eyes. Though Butler ascribes to language a devouring power, the lady remains outside the man’s inner life despite her bombastic rhetoric. Inspite of being loaded with romantic sentiments, the poem is devoid of true romantic love. Using Eliot’s biography, one might explain the man’s indifference to the lady by his spiritual vision, which does not match with a life of eroticism. The young man feels disgusted of a life of communion. He rather opts for a life of solitariness, preferring to shut women and all amusements from his life. This dispensing of all enjoyments of life in search for the Absolute is rooted in Eliot’s early mystical sensibility. In a letter to Geoffrey Faber, dated 18 September 1927, Eliot writes: There is another good thing of life too, which I have only had in flashes. It is the sudden realization of being separated from all enjoyment, from all things of this earth, even from Hope; a sudden separation and isolation from everything; and at that moment of illumination, a recognition of the fact that one can do without all these things, a joyful recognition of what John of the Cross means when he says that the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union until it has divested itself of the craving for all created beings (2012, 712-13). The man’s silence, in the poem, indicates a kind of mystical/spiritual vision. His emotional detachment is probably an attempt to atone for his deep-seated desire, which he considers as sinful. Lyndall Gordon remarks that 1910 is a critical year for Eliot. At that time, women, time, and the absolute started to weigh heavily on his mind. She states that “ there was in the spring of 1910 some critical intersection of Eliot’s private problems-is social isolation, his uneasiness in Boston, his resentment against women, his fear of time and decay, the encounter with the French poets and Arthur Symons, and the secret wish to know the absolute.”(1977, 35). In the third part, the man meets the lady for the third time in October. Though nearly a year crept by since the first encounter between the lady and the young man, there is no advancement in their relationship. The times of the protagonists’ meeting do not suggest any romanticism. In the three sections of the poem, they meet in the afternoon. As he was approaching the room of the lady, he feels “ill at ease.” The young man tries to transcend his state of emotional paralysis; he” mount[s] the stairs and turns the handle of the door”(330), but this makes him feel degraded and imbues him with a sense of humiliation. It makes him feel “as if [he] had mounted on [his] hands and knees”(330). The image suggests a lack of courage and masculine vigor. He seems frail like a new born babe. The man fails to love the woman, because he has a callous and unfeeling heart. Despite feigning callous indifference to the Son and Lover in T. S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” 155   a circular movement marked by stagnation and the absence of any advancement in the relationship between the lady and the young man. The woman has withered away from the young man’s mind and memory. Despite his repulsion for the lady, there is also a feeling of attraction towards her. In the poem, there is a fantasy of being loved by the mother. Regarding the lady’s old age, one is inclined to suppose that she is like a nursing mother, serving tea to her child. The child’s deep love for his mother might have an everlasting influence on his life. The young man projects aspects of the personality of his mother onto the lady. In addition to her bestowal of love, the lady is too considerate towards him, as a mother nursing her babe. So, the lady, who serves tea, represents one positive aspect of the mother, which is feeding. Drinking tea might be a substitute for maternal nourishment, which is unavailable. One might also compare the young man and the lady to Christ and Madonna, who should be worshipped in the light of votive candles. In her narration of the story of Fabian-Fruges, the critic Melanie Klein (1984, 158) states: “The wish to see the baker-woman in the light of the candles would thus express the desire to see her pregnant with all the children he would give her. Here we find the ‘sinful’ incestuous desire for the mother as well as the tendency to repair by giving her all the babies he had destroyed..” The young man seems to be tormented by an unbearable nostalgia for a communion with his mother. The room, which the man visits three times represents a maternal shelter that he needs to frequent in order to be sealed in her passion. The poem might be read as a hibernating memory of the male’s early childhood love relation with his mother, which results in an emotional inertia. In the first part, there is, like in “The Love Song”, a fluctuation in using the pronouns “I” and “we”, which evinces the man’s fragmented self. Klein states that in «adult patients, states of depersonalization and of schizophrenic dissociation seem to be a regression to these infantile states of disintegration»(10). The infant sees the mother as an ideal object, but he also finds a bad aspect in her, which is whoring. David D. Gilmore (2001, 156) posits that “matriphobic form of misogyny” is “founded on the proposition that the boy’s feelings toward mother are fiercely ambivalent and that she is always perceived in starkly dualistic terms: as both engulfing and nurturing, seductive and castrating, and consequently as good and bad.” The second part of the poem opens with an epigraph, from The Jew of Malta: “Thou hast committed-/Fornication-but that was in another country/And besides, the wench is dead”(328). The man identifies the lady in the room with the one in the epigraph. Klein maintains that, in the infant, there are “infantile impulses to murder the mother, whose sexual relation with the father is not only felt to be a betrayal of the infant's love for her, but is altogether felt to be bad and unworthy. This feeling underlies the unconscious equation between the mother and a prostitute which is characteristic of adolescence”(Klein 160). In the poem, there are a lot of hints at prostitution. In addition to the epigraph, the lady’s “buried life” in Paris suggests immoral relationships that she may have had. It reveals the woman’s vicious nature. Since she has a lot of friends who frequent her room for tea, it is possible to think that she is a prostitute working in a brothel. The view of mother as a bad object, a prostitute, emanates from the infant’s unsuccessful attempts to deal with Oedipus feelings. This results, according to Klein, in “division into two trends, described by Freud […] as ‘heavenly and profane’”(160 ). The Bellour 156   epigraph, which refers to the act of fornication, might also be read as an unconscious fulfillment of an incestuous desire with his mother. The tenderness and coquetry of the lady cannot touch the shell of his heart, because his mother’s ardent love precludes his romantic relation with anyone from the opposite sex. Hence, he denigrates human love. According to Ernest Jones, The maternal influence may also manifest itself by imparting a strikingly tender feminine side to the later character. When the aroused feeling is intensely "repressed," and associated with shame, guilt, etc., the memory of it may be so completely submerged that it be-comes impossible not only to revive it but even to experience any similar feeling, i. e., of attraction for the opposite sex. This may declare itself in pronounced misogyny, or even, when combined with other factors, in actual homosexuality.(97). The lady’s sexual advances are horrifying for the young man, because of his childhood relation to his soothing and gratifying mother. Memories of infancy, which burst to life involuntarily, make the man’s emotional relationships dry and never fulfilled. In the poem, the smell, which is intricately linked with the female body, reminds the man of his childhood. Esther Bick observes that in the early stages, the infant does not feel the unity of the different parts of his personality. Hence, the skin helps him experience a ‘binding force’ among these parts. According to Esther Bick (2011, 134), the “internal function of containing the parts of the self is dependent initially on the introjection of an external object, experienced as capable of fulfilling this function.” What might help the infant keep the parts of his personality together is the “nipple in the mouth, together with the holding and talking and familiar smelling mother.”(Bick 134). Any sensual object might hold the parts of the personality together like light, smell, and voice. The mother’s voice and her smell help console the infant and bring him bliss, because they help him experience a sense of wholeness. The fact that the smell and the voice of the lady do not appeal to the young man can be explained by the fact that the real mother is absent, and this lady cannot fill the emotional vacuum of her loss. The smell rather separates and distracts him from the lady. So, his needs are unfulfilled and his desires remain ungratified. The woman, in “Portrait of a Lady”, thinks that she pulls the man to her like a babe by the music and the flowers’ smell. Hence, she assumes that the man understands how much she loves him. She says: “I am always sure that you understand/My feeling, always sure that you feel”(329). In the pre-verbal stage, the babe feels that he is completely understood and united with his mother through bodily communication, which includes the smell of the mother and her voice. In this stage, the unity between the child and the mother is via the body as the infant is unable to communicate. According to Klein, this “unity means being fully understood […] at best, such an understanding needs no words to express it, which demonstrates its derivation from the earliest closeness with the mother in the pre-verbal stage.”(188). In the third part of the poem, the man, in a pensive mood, ponders the possibility of the woman’s death. In fact, he wants a severance from the lady to form his identity and get the freedom to go Son and Lover in T. S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” 157   on with his own life. This separatedness can be possible only by the young man’s journey abroad or by the lady’s death. In psychoanalysis, for the infant to start speaking, he must be severed from his mother. The man says: “Well! and what if she should die some afternoon [..] should die, and leave me sitting pen in hand”(331). In fact, writing might replace speaking as a means of communication. The fact that the man is silent throughout the poem suggests that he is still in the pre-verbal stage. As the lady speaks, she receives no response from the tongue tied man who just smiles. This smile is reminiscent of the smile of Mona Lisa in Leonard Da Vinci’s portrait. Strangely enough, critics have overlooked the possibility of some influence on Eliot by Leonardo Da Vinci. In his interpretation of the smile of Mona Lisa, Gustav Kobbé states that “the laughing were nothing else but the reproductions of Caterina, his mother, and we are beginning to have an inkling of the possibility that the mother possessed that mysterious smile which he lost, and which fascinated him so much when he found it again in the Florentine lady.”(1916, 70). The man might have recalled the smile of his mother when he was young. Hence, his smile is that of a child smiling at his enchanting mother. The smile also evinces that the young man is trapped in an Oedipal stage, and he is unable to express himself through language. He smiles, because, like the infant, he cannot verbalise his thoughts. In his attempt at interpreting the smile of Mona Lisa, Herding views the smile as the projection of the artist’s ambivalent feelings of desire and fear from women. He states: “Threat and desire-these are the antipodes that determine the artist’s relations to women, the (re) construction of his childhood in his paintings, and the famous smile. A manifestation of Leonardo’s trauma in his art can be found in the ambiguity of threat and desire that is best expressed in the smile.”(Herding 346). The young man, in Eliot’s poem, is torn between these two feelings of desire and fear, which are fused in his puzzling smile. Critics of the poem have not noticed the homosexual desire, which is interrelated with misogyny and mother love. This theme is invoked by the hyacinths, which recall the homosexual love of Hyacinthus and Apollo in the Greek mythology. In her commentary on the significance of the flowers of hyacinth in the poem, the critic Marja Palmer (1996, 69) states that “the function of the myth of Hyacinth implied in the reference to the flower is to underline the painful absence of love. Suffering and death are involved in the yearning for love..” Hyacinths recall to mind the Greek myth of Hyacinthus, which tells the tragic end of love. According to the myth, Hyacinthus was an extremely beautiful boy who was very much loved by god Apollo. Once, Hyacinthus and Apollo were throwing a discus to each other. Zephrus, the god of west wind, who also loved Hyacinthus, deflected the discus out of jealousy. Consequently, the discus swerved and killed Apollo after hitting him on the head. The memory of the hyacinths indicates that the man is mourning the loss of a beloved, who is now lost or dead. 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