Gender and Misogyny in Some of the Early Poems of T. S. Eliot

The problem of the feminine had been T. S. Eliot’s arch-bugbear since his early years. This work vindicates misogyny in his early poems. Laden with abhorrence of the feminine, man’s psyche, in these poems, is split into two. This dissociation of sensibility is the utter failure to yoke together body and soul, the intellectual and the emotional, man and woman. In his vituperative and repulsive representation of the feminine, the bard grapples with the dialectic relationship between body and mind/soul in which man strains too hard to transcend the body, emotions, and the female through mysticism/religion, because they are threatening to masculine identity and contaminating to sainthood and spiritual purity.