The Waste Land and French Lieutenant's Woman as Modernist Texts

Introduction: Defining Modernism and Post-Modernism

Modernism and Post-Modernism are considered the dominant literary movements of the twentieth century, with Post-Modernism continuing into our own century. Each was an artistic movement representing a clear break with the past, and their literary components were especially unique, revealing the myriad unexplored forms that literature could take.

Although famous, these movements are difficult to define because their canons are composed of highly unconventional works that resist easy categorization. Both movements are impossible to define through common features alone. Therefore, classifying a text — such as The Waste Land or The French Lieutenant's Woman — as Modernist or Post-Modernist involves much more than identifying features from a checklist.

The terms Modernist and Post-Modernist cannot be understood without an understanding of the social, political, and cultural contexts out of which these literary works were born. This paper will analyze not only the literary features that these works exhibit, but also examine them as responses to the social, political, and cultural forces influencing their creators.

The central argument is that these texts are exemplary not because they possess the greatest number of Modernist or Post-Modernist features as those terms are understood today. Rather, they are exemplary because, at the time of their creation, each was unlike any work before it — and unique in a way that could be articulated with the understanding and terminology of that time.

Background: The Realist Period

Before the Modernist period, the artistic world was heavily influenced by Realism. Realist literature was primarily concerned with showing what life was actually like, much in the same way a photograph showed what a scene actually looked like. For many writers, this meant depicting human thoughts and social relations in a new way (Fried, p. 11). For instance, Dostoevsky depicted, expertly and dramatically, the petty, neurotic thoughts of a repentant murderer in Crime and Punishment (Snow, p. 87).

In literature, the Realist trend affected both content and style. Writers began to include the mundane details of everyday life, especially middle-class life (Fried, p. 13). They also abandoned flowery, elegant turns of phrase for unadorned prose, preferring bare, detailed imagery to poetic or metaphorical description.

The Waste Land is a 434-line poem by the Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot, published shortly after the First World War in 1922 (Eliot). It is a highly unconventional poem, lacking a dominant tone or style. The narrator seems to be based on Eliot himself. The poem is heavily fragmented and disjointed, composed largely of literary quotations and references, which it incorporates into scenes from modern, urban, and industrialized Western society. It is considered a quintessentially Modernist poem and one of the most important poems of the twentieth century.

The Waste Land and Its Modernist Context

Modernist literature was partly a reaction to the increasing dehumanization of Western civilization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The societies and cultures of Western nations were undergoing rapid industrialization, urbanization, and secularization (Low). These trends made Western nations more hostile — to non-Western nations, to each other, and to the natural environment.

The culmination of these trends, for Modernist artists, was the disastrous First World War, which left continental Europe — particularly France and Germany — in shambles. Modernist artists lost the sense of certainty and promise instilled by the Enlightenment, yet could not revert to the comforting notion of a benevolent, all-powerful Creator, which the Enlightenment had itself discredited. Modernist artists came to feel that individuals were alone in a hostile universe (Merriam-Webster, p. 1236).

The Waste Land conveys a deep disillusionment with human civilization. Part of this disillusionment stemmed from the exceptionally brutal Great War. The First World War seemed to thwart all of the promise that Enlightenment-age values held for human civilization, demonstrating that Western civilization would utilize reason and science only in the creation of weapons, not in the negotiation of political disputes. This indicated that mankind, though equipped with more sophisticated weapons, was as barbarous as ever.

Modernist writers were artists who were unwilling to conceal their awkwardness as individuals in society. They wanted to convey that no real human being was truly fit for such an inhumane world. As a consequence, Modernist literature tends to place great value on the individual's sensitivity and integrity of mind, while the individual's actual efforts are rendered less significant by the pervasive sense of futility and despair running through these works.

Modernist writers like Eliot were individuals who felt alienated from the dominant societal institutions of their day. They did not adopt the dominant narratives, views, and interpretations of society (Baym, Vol. D, p. 17). Thus, although Modernism makes heavy use of creative works from the past — through allusion, incorporation, and satire — these works are usually presented out of context, stripped of their traditional narrative frameworks.

The Waste Land represents the evils of an industrialized, hostile society — embodied in the World War — through the perversion of human sexuality. Just as the natural world was being stripped bare and used for inhumane purposes and base impulses, the female body was being objectified as a source of pleasure, without acknowledgement of its sacred creative purpose (The Waste Land, III.237–244; III.249–256). The impossibility of pure, true love is echoed in the narrator's own romantic self-frustration, demonstrated in the hyacinth scene, where he shies away from the love of a beautiful young woman to whom he had given a hyacinth (The Waste Land, I.40–42).

Modernism was also a reaction against Realism and its focus on the objective depiction of life as it was actually lived. Modernist writers derived little artistic pleasure from describing the concrete details of the material world and the various human activities within it. Their greatest concern was in expressing the angst, confusion, and frustration of the individual who must live in that world (Merriam-Webster, p. 1236).

Modernist writers used novel means for expressing these newly intense emotions. They did not always convey the individual's confusion and frustration by relating an inner monologue. Instead, they manipulated the structure, style, and content of their works to cultivate a certain effect on the reader (Baym, Vol. D, p. 17), aiming to make the reader experience directly the disconnection and dehumanization felt by the individual.

The Waste Land is not characterized by a single style or rhyme scheme. Some would classify the poem as free verse, but it is not entirely unstructured. Rather, it is a pastiche of different literary conventions, in which Eliot uses famous styles and quotations from literary history to illuminate the problems of the modern world.

Eliot juxtaposes a number of different modes and tones, drawing from the Bible, classical antiquity, the Renaissance, Symbolism, and more exotic sources from the East. He switches between different speakers, locations, and time periods. In the first section, he moves from a biblical, prophetic tone to fragments of a dialogue between the narrator and a romantic interest — an idyllic scene reminiscent of the Romantic period (The Waste Land, I.35–39). Later, he discards English altogether and quotes Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in German: "Od' und leer das Meer" (The Waste Land, I.43).

The French Lieutenant's Woman and Its Post-Modernist Context

The poem makes a bleak estimation of the ability of the individual to live a full life within modern civilization (Rainey, p. 27). All of its scenes are marked with disappointment and frustration — a sort of world-weariness not acknowledged, or even recognized, in the familiar works of literary history (The Waste Land, I.35–42). The poem references these earlier works to show that the seeds of modern disappointment and frustration already existed within them (The Waste Land, I.30–34; I.42).

In The Waste Land, the natural world's barrenness is mirrored in the barrenness of the human psyche. This barrenness is revealed by modern artists themselves, who no longer felt capable of true creativity when constantly confronted by the weight of literary tradition. Rather than create afresh, Modernist writers chose to appropriate the creative works of earlier periods, breaking them down and reprocessing them to explain contemporary problems — in the same way that trees were broken down and reprocessed for the daily newspaper, the enduring and the sacred sacrificed for the transient and trivial.

The Waste Land references literary works of the past to provide thematic structure for its sections and stanzas. The third section is named after the Buddha's Fire Sermon, in which the Buddha preached that the world is on fire, inflamed with desire — represented in the poem as lust (The Waste Land, III.308). Just as the Buddha preached that nothing satisfies for long, Eliot illustrates a "tired, bored" young woman who makes love to a random young man, only to comment after his departure, "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over," before smoothing "her hair with automatic hand, and put[ting] a record on the gramophone," seeking another diversion for her restless mind (The Waste Land, III.253; 256–257).

The genius and beauty of such classics were publicly admired by the modern literati, much as the industrialist extols the sacred beauty of nature — yet in both cases, the object of admiration is never deemed admirable enough to leave in its original state. The great creative works of the past were chopped up, referenced, analyzed, parodied, incorporated, and alluded to. Eliot, in a separate essay, called this process "a dialogue with tradition" and identified it as the mark of a truly original work (Eliot, 1919).

The Waste Land is also marked by the extensity and confusion that characterized Western civilization itself at the start of the modern era. Western nations were already penetrating much of the known world through trade and imperialism, and the appropriation of past creative works extended beyond the familiar into the exotic and obscure — including sources from India. This sophistication and erudition was often what distinguished the most iconic Modernist writers: the T.S. Eliots, Ezra Pounds, and James Joyces of the world. Joyce's Finnegans Wake, much like The Waste Land, was virtually impossible to understand without some commentary, whether secondary or drawn from the author's own notes (Eliot, 1971).

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel by John Fowles, published in 1969 (Fowles). It is a romantic novel set in Victorian England, depicting a love triangle between an idealistic aristocrat, his nouveau-riche fiancée, and a mysterious social outcast who is educated but destitute. The novel is marked by numerous interruptions of the narrative by the author himself, who reflects on the story as it progresses and comments on the creative process. It has a highly ambiguous ending, presenting three possibilities for the fate of the protagonist Charles: that he stays with his fiancée, that he reunites with the mysterious woman, or that he is rejected by her.

Post-Modernism is even harder to define than Modernism and is perhaps more accurately described as a time period than a coherent artistic movement. Like Modernism, it was partly a response to the end of a war — in this case, World War II rather than World War I. Post-Modernism as an artistic movement is generally considered to have begun sometime in the 1940s. However, at the time The French Lieutenant's Woman was written, the term "Post-Modernist literature" as a genre had not yet been fully conceived.

Post-Modernist literature was both a continuation of and a response to Modernism. In many ways, The French Lieutenant's Woman echoes the Modernist period. Like The Waste Land, it is concerned with the oppression of the individual by a hostile and unreflective society. Charles and Sarah are heroes because they are sensitive individuals — not because they are strong, certain of their desires, and ultimately triumphant. Indeed, it is possible that both end up miserable at the novel's close. Nevertheless, both are strong enough to resist the dictates of Victorian society as well as the conventions of literary genre (Fowles, Chapter 10, p. 30).

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a love story set in Victorian England and France, written in the form of a Gothic romance novel, with a heroic male protagonist attempting to rescue the beautiful female protagonist (Brantlinger & Rothblatt, p. 341). The female protagonist is typically trapped in some unfortunate situation, usually under the control of a malicious figure. Instead of focusing on industrialization and alienation, as Modernist authors did, Fowles highlights the absurdity of class and social conventions and their effect on society's perception of individuals.

Fowles's novel can be seen as a throwback to popular pre-Modernist literature. Certainly, it would be hard to imagine any Modernist writer choosing to work in the genre of Gothic romance (Brantlinger & Rothblatt, p. 341). Fowles, however, does not mean to rehash or parody the Victorian Gothic novel. He uses the flat and rigid format of that genre to highlight the roundness and complexity of his main characters, especially Charles and Sarah. It is not clear that the reader ever truly knows Sarah, nor is it clear that Charles knows himself.

With the end of World War II, artists were no longer responding to common political events that had dominated public discourse during the first half of the century. There was no longer a single Zeitgeist to which all artists had to react or at least acknowledge. Thus, artists were able to pursue lines of thought and ideas that would not have occurred to them during the Modernist period.

Post-Modernist literature discarded the Modernist view of industrialized society as bereft of literary value, as Eliot had expressed in The Waste Land. In fact, some Post-Modernist works reassess the Victorian society that preceded Modernism — the very society against which the Modernists had been reacting. Post-Modernist authors such as Fowles noticed unrecognized literary value in the rigid, subdued Victorian world of the nineteenth century.

The absence of a universal Zeitgeist made the Post-Modernist period more heterogeneous in its themes than the Modernist period. Avant-garde writers no longer felt compelled to convey the individual's frustration and alienation from society, though some did. Such alienation and frustration had come to seem normal. Without a Zeitgeist to react to and criticize, many artists turned inward, beginning to use themselves and their craft as subject matter, examining their work with a new kind of cynicism as well as playfulness (Lewis, p. 97).

The most conspicuous distinction between Fowles's novel and Modernist literature is Fowles's explicit self-consciousness as a participant in his own story. Modernist authors were self-conscious as well; however, in their works, this self-consciousness took the form of opinions and commentary expressed by the characters themselves, usually the protagonist. The characters were meant to teach certain lessons by voicing the author's own sense of angst and frustration.

In Fowles's novel, by contrast, the characters are not the author's mouthpiece or pedagogical instruments, as they were in Modernist works such as Joyce's Ulysses or Eliot's Waste Land. The thoughts of the author are clearly demarcated from the thoughts of the characters. Fowles appears in the novel as an observer and self-conscious narrator, commenting on his characters, the historical context, and the creative process in general (Fowles, Chapter 11, p. 33). Before The French Lieutenant's Woman, such commentary would only have been found in an author's own notes — such as those in the annotated edition of The Waste Land (Eliot, 1971). This self-reflexivity was to become a defining feature of Post-Modernist literature.

Conclusion

The common defining feature of both Modernist and Post-Modernist literature is the intense self-consciousness of the author. In these movements, the author functions as both artist and critic, acutely aware of her place in literary history. The difference between the two is that Post-Modernist authors are more comfortable with their critical impulses, going so far as to incorporate them as formal elements of the work itself.