The Burial Of The Dead Critical Analysis

One of the theoretical understandings that has come from the works of second wave feminists is the idea that gender and sexuality are both performative. If that framework is used in real life, what are the applications of the idea of performativity in literature? Among other things, what one chooses to write and how they choose to write it are ways that these identities can be performed. For those writing in times of social upheaval, it can be particularly important to ground their identities, however they see and define them, so that their positions cannot be as easily questioned. In the case of T.S. Eliot, there was substantial desire to perform his masculinity through his writing, as he and other men of the time saw the burgeoning flow of

The opening narrator may be a woman, as by line 15, a narrator is named as “Marie” in a flashback. “My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, /And I was frightened. He said, Marie, /Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.” (Eliot 14-16). Marie is frightened by the prospect of sledding, but is told by her cousin to hold on to him. This creates a dynamic of a young girl and her cousin who is presumably a man in the role of weak-woman and protector-man. The early portion shows some of the assumptions that Eliot had about how such a relationship would

Eliot wrote “'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; / 'They called me the hyacinth girl.'” (35-36). Much argument has been made about who this person is. Some argue that it refers to Emily Hale, a woman with whom Eliot had romantic ties during college (Zavri 76). This argument centers on the idea of a girl being left by her lover, which happened with Hale and Eliot. He told Hale he loved her shortly before he left for Europe, and wrote that he continued to love her after he departed (Pondrom 428). However, the specific usage of hyacinths as the flower given by the lover to the individual invokes homoerotic ideas that leave open the question of the individual being a girl. Queer men have often been referred to as girls for participating in relationships with other men. Hyacinths are named after the Greek figure of Hyacinthus – sometimes referred to as simply Hyacinth – who was a beautiful young man who the god Apollo fell in love with, but accidentally killed with his discus. Apollo then used Hyacinthus’s blood to create the hyacinth flowers. With the implicitly queer associations that the flower had, Eliot’s usage of the flower contributed to questions about who, and of what gender, the “hyacinth girl”