Discussion In The Waste Land, Eliot uses women as a window to show the dissolution and distortion of love and desire. Eliot creates a progression from invitation, to violation, to automation through the use of three distinct female characters: the hyacinth girl, Philomela, and the young typist. These women give the reader an understanding of how the wasteland came to be. As the reader observes the changing landscape, the women in the landscape gradually transform from young, pure girls into sterile, mechanical beings. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The erosion of intimacy is documented in these three crucial parts, which show a pre-corruption world, a tragic in-between world, and the final product: the wasteland. In these scenarios, Eliot's women show the weakness and suffering that are a necessary part of the human condition. However, transformations from pure love to a pale imitation of love show that they are harmful to the landscape of desire. The prefiguration of the dissolution of love begins with an invitation to the consummation of love in the hyacinth garden. This is represented through a bright memory of purity associated with fertility and fulfillment: "You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl." Yet when we returned, late, from the hyacinth garden, with arms full, and your hair wet, I could not speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither alive nor dead, and I knew nothing, looking into the heart of the light, the silence. (Eliot 34-40) The liveliness and natural setting of this scene provide a stark contrast to the bleak depictions of love that appear later in the poem. The narrator's inaction turns out to prefigure, not indicate, the dissolution of desire. Critic Cyrena Pondrom reads this scene as a specific entry into the wasteland itself: “In the agonizing light of the expectation of male dominance in literal physical and erotic connection, the speaker cannot connect in any abstract way” (Pondrom, 428). The premature identification of this particular male impotence as “agonizing” leaves no room for the memory of a world before the wasteland, which seems to be the crucial point on which the first portion is composed and the subsequent parts are built. However, it does not even leave room for an intermediate phase. Even in the moment of failure, it seems that the purity of love is still preserved. The male speaker's nervousness and inability to act stems from love, the “heart of light” (Eliot 41). Since the memory of this scene mixes the “memory and longing” of the opening lines, it signifies the world before the fall (Eliot 2-3). However, the event in the hyacinth garden and the failure of the male counterpart to accept the hyacinth girl's offering foreshadow the wasteland to come. The role of female suffering in The Waste Land shows the "violation" part of the text: the middle scene in our progression to the wasteland. This violation is shown through the agonies of Philomel, whose rapist cut out her tongue so that she could not speak his name: The changing of Philomel, by the barbarian king, so brutally forced; yet there the nightingale filled all the desert with inviolable voice and still cried, and still the world chases: "Jug Jug" to the dirty ears. (Eliot 99-103) Through the rape of Philomela, Eliot portrays the opposite of the nervous excitement and inaction displayed in the hyacinth garden. The affirmation of desire becomes a desperate overcompensation of demandmale in power previously failed. The desire for the “heart of light” is replaced with a fulfillment “so brutally forced” (Eliot 41, 100). The sexually available but virginal hyacinth girl is replaced with the violated and mute Philomela. Interestingly, Eliot does not recognize the second half of Ovid's tale, in which Philomel weaves a tapestry that tells the name of her rapist (McRae, 34). Instead he weaves a version in which the nightingale's mangled syllables are, after much difficulty, able to convey the name of her rapist: “Twit twit twit/Jug jug jug jug jug jug/So rudely forc'd. Tereu” (Eliot 204-207). This image of suffering and inability to speak morbidly echoes the lost actions and unspoken words in the hyacinth garden. In this scenario, however, male and female roles have been tainted and violently distorted. It is important to note that the roles in the two scenarios mentioned above still possess passion and struggle, which are erased in the mechanical world of the typist that Philomel's story is about. precedes. The mistreatment of women embodied by Philomel's story gives way to the final destruction of love and desire. At this point, Eliot emphasizes his poetic presence as an observer by identifying himself as blind and bisexual Tiresias. With this entry, Eliot presents his vision of how intimacy operates in a fully developed wasteland. Tiresias obtained his female parts as punishment for striking two mating snakes. Eliot's version of Tiresias is ironically forced by his agonizing prophetic powers to predict the scene of a sterile, muffled copulation between two characters in this ruined landscape. Through the character of Tiresias, Eliot justifies his prophetic abilities and is able to express his anguished observations without risking poetic vulnerability. He states in his notes on The Waste Land that “the two sexes meet in Tiresias” (Eliot qtd. in Rainey, 105). Tiresias' dual sexuality allows Eliot to switch between a male and female voice and justifies his ability to discern both perspectives: At the purple hour, when the eyes and back turn up from the desk, when the human engine waits, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, the old man with the wrinkled female breast, can see in the purple hour... (Eliot 215-220, emphasis added) Eliot uses images of machines and automata to synchronize the death of love with the acceleration of industrialism. It is significant that the woman in this tale is unnamed, referred to only as “the typist at home at tea time” (Eliot 222). She is directly identified only by her profession: a “human machine” (Eliot 216). His body, numb to external touch, only feels a pair of “exploring hands” in place of intimacy (Eliot 240). His “pimply young man” is apathetic about whether his actions are recognized or reciprocated. Philomel's rape finds a strange echo when the young man "attacks immediately" after a failed attempt to "engage her with caresses (Eliot, 239; 237)." Eliot scholar Philip Sicker distinguishes the young typist from her predecessors by her lack of sexuality. desire: “All pretense of genuine feeling has disappeared, and the typist, unlike her predecessors, does not appear to possess even a real sexual 'appetite'" (Sickler, 428). The "lovers" become two separate, mechanical entities. Even in her home, the typist is still an insensitive automaton, she states that the remnants of her sexuality lie in "an unstimulated, almost unconscious prostitution, in which only the body participates, or participates half" (Sickler, 428,). “unconscious prostitution in which only the body participates” implies an intentionality of the body that does not appear to be the case, 1984.