Modernism – Araby and the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Essay Example

boy’s home alludes to the biblical Garden of Eden with its “central apple tree” – a symbol of religious enlightenment. However, this tree is overshadowed by the lifeless garden, symbolizing the spiritual and intellectual stagnation of the boy’s world. The second kind of paralysis in Joyce’s “Araby” is seen in the boy.

He secretly watches and fantasizes over the girl but lacks courage to even speak with her. Images of him “[standing] by the railings looking at her” and “[lying] on the floor…watching her door” effectively communicate his frustration and immobility. At the end of the story, after the boy acts on his feelings and arrives at the bazaar, “the light was out” and he “[gazes] up into the darkness”. The motif of light and dark reappears, symbolizing that the grim reality forms a final impenetrable barrier that stops him reaching his idealized goal, even after overcoming his inability to act.

It is the ultimate paralysis of the individual as a result of a paralyzed world. T. S. Eliot also expresses this restriction of the individual due to society. Prufrock’s incapacity to act revolves around his social and sexual anxieties, the two usually tied together. The name “Prufrock” itself is connotative of a “prude” in a “frock”, showing the idea of social constrain. To reflect Prufrock’s point of view as ‘real’ as possible, Eliot adopts the poetic form of a dramatic monologue and uses stream of consciousness to directly portray Prufrock’s deeply fragmented thought processes.

The audience observes his paralysis through the looping interruptions of self-interrogation and self-consciousness in his train of thought. Prufrockian paralysis is rooted in the poem’s structure as well. Eliot deploys refrains, such as

“In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo” (13-14, 35-36) and “And would it have been worth it, after all” (87, 99), to underscore Prufrock’s tendency to get stuck on a problem. Influenced by 19thC Imagists and French Symbolists, Eliot employs specific and symbolic imageries throughout his work.

The central image of Prufrock’s anxiety and immobility is his being “pinned and wriggling on the wall” (58) under the unflinching gaze of women. The “pin” is an example of what Eliot calls “objective correlative” which grafts emotional meaning onto otherwise concrete objects. The product of paralysis is alienation – another dominant feature of the reality modernists try to reflect. In “Araby”, North Richmond Street is described with adjectives such as “blind,” “quiet,” “uninhabited,” “detached,” “square” and “imperturbable”. This lexical chain establishes the place as a corner of a larger society to which it is close-off.

The inhabitants, who are “decent”, adds to the situational irony as they are smugly complacent and will, therefore, not make any attempts to reconnect with the world. Hence, the boy begins disconnected from the wider world. Joyce continues to isolate the boy from his environment, his friends, his family and his adored. Through mixed imageries of his fantasies, such as the saintly light upon the girl’s hair and potential sensuality of “the white border of a petticoat”, the discrepancy between the real and the boy’s ideal is highlighted through contrast with his dreary surroundings, disconnecting him from it.

The audience also understands that his dreams of first love are more mature than his friends’ “child’s play”, explaining his drift away from them as well. Deepening his isolation is the “blindness” around

him. This atmosphere is created by Joyce through characterization. First, the boy’s family comprises of his uncle and aunt, not his parents. These characters deprive him of the feeling of belonging that is common to normal family units. Their lack of awareness to the boy’s anguish escalates his loneliness.

In fact, the uncle who “had forgotten” is a symbolic figure reflecting the idea in Joyce’s contemporary society that God “had forgotten” the world. Finally, the boy’s complete isolation is attributed to the girl, to whom he desperately wishes to connect. She is not conscious of the boy’s love, erecting the first barrier between them. To penetrate this barrier, the boy breaks what few connections he had with the world. Hence, alienated from his friends, love, family and surroundings, the boy in “Araby” is used by Joyce reflect the alienation in modern life. T. S. Eliot’s poem also explores the alienating effects of modern society.

However, unlike the boy in “Araby”, Prufrock is highly aware of his disconnection. This is expressed through setting too. The poem begins with the unpleasant modern world. Sterile and deathly imageries form a collage of the lonely city. The night sky looks “like a patient etherized upon a table” (3) below which are “half-deserted streets” (4). The use of scientific jargon in the simile coupled with the description of urban landscape emphasizes Prufrock’s feeling of immobility and isolation in the modern world. Once again, Eliot utilizes “objective correlative” in his metaphoric imagery of the fog as a cat.

Unable to enter, it lingers pathetically outside the room full of fashionable women, expressing Prufrock’s avoidance and desire for physical contact. The window is the symbolic

barrier that represents his disconnection from the women due to his paralysis. The biblical allusion to Lazarus is another great example of Eliot’s isolation of Prufrock. It implies that, just as “Lazarus [came] from the dead” to tell the living, Prufrock feels that he is trying to approach the woman from an entirely different, and much worse, world. It reflects the vast gap he sees between the woman and himself and the impossibility of connecting with her.

Through this, Eliot is able to alienate his character to express the disconnection he observes in his contemporary society. On the whole, paralysis and alienation are two aspects of modern life modernists seek to portray. In “Araby”, James Joyce highlights issues such as spiritual and individual paralysis, as well as social and individual alienation. He reflects them through dreary atmospheres, the contrast of realistic settings to idealistic imageries, motifs of light and dark, symbolism, allusion, lexical chains, situational irony and characterization.

T. S. Eliot also explores themes of paralysis due to society and alienation due to modernization in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. He also uses modernist fragmentation techniques of setting, symbolism, imageries, allusion, stream of consciousness, repetition, figures of speech and, notably, objective correlative. Similarly, all modernists hope to achieve a realistic portrayal of society by experimentation with literary forms and techniques.