T.S. Eliot’s Hysteria was published alongside his more famous The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917, yet remains one of his more little known poems, overshadowed by the momentous Prufrock and later works such as The Waste Land. Although the short, stream-of-consciousness poem has neither the length nor the literary breadth that Prufrock carries, it nevertheless serves as a good example of many modernist Eliot and his contemporaries championed, while at the same time rebelling against the established norm of Eliot in ways, encompassing elements of an homage, an experiment, as well as a statement that reflects upon Eliot as the developing poet in the early heydays of Modernism.
The poem’s narrative is simple and contained in four sentences, spread out into a continuous paragraph. Here, one can immediately see the difference from the other, structured poems by Eliot, even within the same volume. The poem’s narrative follows the narrator as he is first thrust into the laughter of the woman he observes, and then the visible details of the laughter – namely the woman’s teeth – seems to overtake him, a process which continues in the second sentence, although this time with more line breaks as the narrator attempts and fails to get drawn into the details of the woman’s laughter. The third sentence, however, shows a marked break to the first two, as the narrator suddenly changes his focus to the waiter, whose actions independent of the woman’s laughter suddenly snaps the narrator out of the laughter, allowing him finally in the fourth sentence to focus on a course of action to “collect the fragments of the afternoon,” in a far more lucid and removed tone than the first two sentences yet still focusing on the woman’s laughter. The outward construction of the poem being based on a stream of consciousness from the narrator, the poem does not rely on conventional poetic line breaks, as the prose form does not contain poetic line breaks, but rather, uses punctuation to dictate the rhythm of the poem (Christian 1960). It is within these punctuation stops where one would find a poetic form. The first sentence is split in the middle by a comma, making for two long fragments in the sentence. The second sentence, in contrast, is cut into four, much shorter fragments. However, when one counts the syllables, the first sentence and second sentence both contain forty-two syllables. The third sentence features a long first fragment, followed by two identical fragments of the waiter’s speech. The final sentence reverses the construction and features two fragments of equal length, and a final one of slightly longer length to end the poem. If the poem is arranged as a traditional poem, with line breaks at the punctuations, then there would be twelve lines with a semblance of poetic pattern (Christian 1960).
The poem seems to be remarkably self-referencing in a very deliberate way. The title “hysteria” refers to both the woman’s outward hysteria as well as the narrator’s tumble into her hysteria, especially in the second line (MacDiarmid 2003). The first two fragments of the second sentence also refers to the construction of the sentence – broken up as if a breath is needed during the laughter, with “short gasps” and “momentary recovery” serving to provide both a description as well as the actual stops for breath themselves (Christian 1960). The last sentence might even be a reference to the entire poem, being “fragments of the afternoon” especially in the contrast between the first two sentences and the third, entirely focusing on the waiter and surroundings, before a return to the narrator and the woman. The construction of the last sentence, with more deliberate words than the stream of consciousness in the first two sentences, also seem to be a reference to the “concentration of attention” the narrator chooses to do.
While Eliot himself mentions no definitive source for his outward structural anomaly in his portfolio – “[he] never mentions the poem in his published letters” (Lamos, 83) – the construction of the prose poem can certainly be traced to his reverence to Charles Baudelaire, who popularized the form in French in The Paris Spleen. While other poets, in English and French, have used the prose poetry form in writing by the first decade of the Twentieth Century, including prominent writers such as Oscar Wilde and Arthur Rimbaud, Eliot himself seemed to especially favor Baudelaire as one of his main influences in writing. Eliot further directly references Baudelaire’s verses in The Waste Land and imitates Baudelaire’s Recueillement in his Boston Evening Transcript, a poem also found in Prufrock and Other Observations (Galand 1950). It comes as no surprise that he would imitate Baudelaire’s construction as well. Other parts of the poem are more obviously in reference to both Eliot’s own beliefs as well as the beliefs of his fellow imagists. F.S. Flint’s “Imagism” of 1913 featured the following declaration in terms of what an imagist poem should contain:
1. Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. (Mizuta 1988)
Eliot followed all three “rules”. The poem directly treated the “hysteria”, attacking it directly from the outset with both descriptors of it and the transformation of the narrative into the “thing”. The second and third rules rule was even more evident when one takes into account the actual deliberateness of even some of the sounds the words of the poem makes when pronounced in relations to the progression of the narrative (Lydall, 180). “Squad-drill” is just as effective as the period in stopping the flow of the first sentence. The words “gasps”, “recovery”, “throat”, and “muscles” in the second sentence, all words preceding commas, also serve as stops in the sentence (Christian 1960). The third sentence was a break of theme but to indicate that the hysteria was going on, Eliot used a free-flowing long fragment with short adjectives such as “checked” and “rusty” to indicate a follow-through in the sentence construction, followed by the two identical fragments, resembling the identical syllabic count of the first two sentences, before settling into the final sentence, marked by breaks with the sounds of “stopped” and “collected” with the poem ending on the word “end” as a definitive and poignant finish to the entire fragment (Christian 1960).
The poem’s preciseness in its construction, belied by the chaotic theme and the lack of rhyme, is an accurate reflection on Eliot’s sentiments in his essay “Reflections on Vers Libre” (of the same year). In the essay, he argues that while not only the verse constructed only around the lack of consistent rhyme, meter, and pattern does not exist, but also the use of “contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony” to create interesting verse (Eliot 1917). This poem can even be seen as Eliot’s attempt at satirizing a perceived vers libre poem while asserting his own values. Constant rhyme does not exist in Hysteria, replaced by the use of repetition in the two fragments in sentence three that corresponds to the waiter’s quote, pulling an outwardly intrusive disruption of the flow of thought back into the hysterical mind of the narrator (Wetzsteon n.d.). At the same time, he asserted that “there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos”, and while the poem itself seems like the essence of chaos both in subject matter and construction, its actual deliberateness can be viewed as Eliot’s attempt at defining order that’s not defined by rhyme or outward construction, but rather the internal components of the poem itself upon analysis.
The poem also extends the consistent theme revolving women that Eliot conjured up in the whole Prufrock collection (Lamos 187). Although the gender of the narrator was not specifically mentioned, it is assumed that it’s a male’s voice, as the waiter refers to the man and woman as “lady and gentleman” in the third sentence. While the woman is not named in the poem – indeed the women in Prufrock were not named either – her action and the man’s reaction is the centerpiece of the poem. The narrative is in fact about the narrator attempting and finally succeeding in escaping from the “hysteria” of the woman, collecting his sanity and wits in the end. The narrator seems to be bewildered but at the same time drawn in by the woman’s hysteria, a similar point to the response of the protagonist in Prufrock in relation to “the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” Like Prufrock, the narrator is drawn to the woman, although not voluntarily and not without a degree of pain, evidenced in the “dark caverns,” and “bruised” by “unseen muscles,” but also at the same time ending up with the focus on her breasts in the last line. The breast imagery is more direct than the vague sexual connotations of Prufrock, but vague sexual images, including the teeth and throat, are also prevalent in Hysteria. Colors also play a role, very much in the tradition of the symbolists, as “pink and white checkered tablecloth over the rusty green iron table” becomes the opposite, defining image to “dark caverns of her throat,” the bright colors reflect the state of sanity that contrasts with the dark insanity of the hysterical woman. Furthermore, like Prufrock, the narrator seeks an escape and a claim to superiority. While Prufrock wishes that he were “a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” the narrator in Hysteria views the waiter as an immediate distraction from the woman’s features, and as Prufrock toys with the notion of “disturb[ing] the universe,” the narrator here toys with collecting fragments of the afternoon. Even the notion of “hysteria” at the turn of the 20th Century remains a far more damning word than the connotations today. The word’s root was hystera, Greek for uterus, and female hysteria was a bona fide disease attributed to the lack of sexual satisfaction (Lamos 85). Although by the early 20th Century the diagnosis was disappearing due to improving medical knowledge, the word remained one with strong sexual connotations and certainly a poet who chose his words carefully such as Eliot would not have used it carelessly.
A popular thematic analysis in written works seem to be the attribution of the existence of works such as Hysteria or Prufrock and their portrayals of women as Eliot’s way of asserting his own confused sexuality, misogyny, or conflicting attitudes towards his wife (Lamos 85) . Perhaps this would be true, but Eliot certainly wrote the poem not merely to express his emotion, but a very specific sentiment, a mixture of feelings and emotions, invoked with imagery of literature past. Eliot stated that great poets are depersonalized in the creation of great works in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1920 . In the essay, he stated the belief that poets channel tradition passed down from the literary past instead of the unique thoughts of the individual, and the process of creating art would be an amalgamation of already present feelings and emotions, not necessarily emotions or feelings of his own. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Although it has been argued that this poem is a definite anomaly from his philosophy of depersonalization, it can also be argued that to personalize the poem with Eliot would be imposing a speculation upon his intent on writing this poem at best. If one can assume that with all the deliberate manners that he employed to write this poem, he at the same time have employed the deliberate manners in planning the concept of the poem and the imagery used, then perhaps while the poem was written to express a specific notion – that of the hysterical woman nearly eating the confused yet captivated man alive – Eliot did not intend for it to be autobiographical. Misogyny and confused sexuality certainly are fairly specific sentiments, but what he attempts to express in the poem, and indeed alongside Prufrock and other poems in the volume, is not one of uncertain trepidation towards women, but rather a critique and almost satire of the confused society and dark sexuality of Baudelaire’s world and how also the uncertainly of the un-understandable nature of nature itself as well as the legible, documented, and at the same time, distant, almost dream-like view of women, melding into both his reality and his mind. One must take into account Eliot’s admiration of Baudelaire’s work as well as the Symbolist philosophies in general, and from that perspective, one can see that it is this confusion that marks this poem above all the claims of misogyny and the lack of understanding of women.
To make the case for this, we must review his primary influences, the French Symbolists. Baudelaire remains his main influence. In an example of writing with tradition, Eliot did use bits and pieces of the imagery and emotions expressed by the Frenchman, but his juxtaposition of the diverse and contradictory imagery and emotions would be his own. First, we have ascertained that the construction was borrowed from a form used by both starting with Baudelaire. Baudelaire’s poems, especially The Flowers of Evil, were laden with artificiality and decadence, juxtaposing the decrepit urban landscape full of vice and sin against the ideal of perfection (Brombert 1964). While the cityscape is arguably more evident in Prufrock than Hysteria, Eliot does repeat the theme of juxtaposing the artificial reality – the waiter’s world, the sane world, with bright colors – with the natural but terrifying hysteria of the woman, dark and vague. Eliot encompassed all these images and embraced them, but juxtaposed them into a different conclusion.
Baudelaire’s Paris was both a condemnation and an expose into the decadent yet increasingly economically polarized state in France, juxtaposed with the gritty and debauched streets of Paris during the era (Brombert 1964). Baudelaire himself seldom mentioned plants in his writings, perhaps viewing them as too natural and not artificial enough the essential. In any case, the influence carried on into Eliot’s writings during this point, if not complete homages but also direct reactions of what he attempted to describe in his later, modernist poetry.
Eliot juxtaposed a much more idyllic scene with of the waiter and the gaping mouth and throat, complimented by the teeth, engulfed in hysteria. He further juxtaposed the uncertain but certainly present sentiment of the man being sucked into this hysteria as well as his struggle to remove himself from the situation – the scene regarding him being sucked into the woman’s laughter only to be rescued by the waiter from the outside world. He found solace in this case, by bright light, the civilized society, and other objects of the modern society that and little details surrounding area, elements that contrasted directly with the woman’s inward sentiments that provided an interesting disparity between. The contrast between the two can be found in the view points the two narrators have undertaken in the poems they have written. Baudelaire was almost a documentary with an overwhelming theme, theme of despair and hope, and instead, Eliot, in the end of the poem, despite all the problems, regains sanity and superiority at the end of his descent – unlike Rimbaud, for example, in his Season in Hell. As for juxtaposing tradition and new ways of analyzing such a thing, it simply proved to be a definite ability to borrow from the great masters – Baudelaire for example, but also, Mallarme, Rimbaud, and all the symbolist writers – and making them part of his own, the essence of Eliot’s concept of working upon the shoulders of giants in this view of “tradition”. His blend of mixing the desire for absolute beauty – not so subjectively spoken as in Baudelaire, but rather, his own interpretation, beauty that cannot be explained, merely experienced – created a divide between the two classes, but nevertheless it made sense in its progression as the Symbolists turned into Imagists.
While Hysteria received little critical acclaim and seems to be anomaly in Eliot’s repertoire, his thematic elements and his deliberate way of writing as well as his values at the time of the publication are quite candid in the text. Despite the chaos of the poem, the underlying order and references back to his predecessors is both a statement for his concept of tradition as well as his concept of verse, at the same time paying homage to his major influences. To follow up and expand upon Baudelaire’s ideas, Mallarme established a more direct representation the “idea” described by Baudelaire, and they reflected and exhibited not only of the Although not given the length to fully develop full, coherent themes found in works such as Prufrock, its ability to convey so much in so few lines remain testament to the layers of deliberate meaning Eliot the poet had the ability of inserting into even the simplest of phrases.
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