Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text by Martha C. Carpentier

Author:Martha C. Carpentier [Carpentier, Martha C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789057005176
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1998-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

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SWEENEY AND THE MATRICIDAL DANCE: THE EVOLUTION OF T. S. ELIOT’S DRAMA

“Man makes his demons in the image of his own savage and irrational passions.”

— Jane Ellen Harrison, PSGR x

T. S. Eliot evolved his dramatic theory out of a wide knowledge of the entire field of anthropology, from its origin in E. B. Tylor through the Cambridge School of Anthropology. The influence of this group’s ideas on Eliot, particularly Francis M. Cornford’s connection of primitive ritual with the origin of Greek comedy, was first discussed by Carol H. Smith in her 1963 study, T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice, and in her updated, although essentially unchanged, 1984 article, “Sweeney and the Jazz Age.” Smith decried the tendency of much Eliot criticism to consider his drama a lesser achievement than his poetry, as well as the critical inability to explain why Eliot turned to drama in the first place. But if, as the Cambridge classicists believed, the highly formalized conventions of Greek drama were survivals of religious rituals, communal expressions of the spiritual impulse, then drama would be a natural form for “a poet of spiritual experience” with a growing sense of the poet’s “social mission” to choose, particularly one with “a compelling need to make some personal order out of the chaos which he found around him” (Smith 34, 24, 5).

Smith cites ample evidence of Cornford’s and Murray’s influence on Eliot from his 1923 essays, “The Beating of a Drum,” “Four Elizabethan Dramatists,” and “Marie Lloyd,” in addition to a 1924 letter to Arnold Bennett, the 1926 introduction to his mother’s poetic drama Savonarola, his 1933 letter to Hallie Flanagan, who was attempting to produce Sweeney Agonistes at Vassar, and “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism” published the same year. However, the impact of the ritual theory — Harrison’s explication of the evolution of drama out of Dionysian ritual — on Eliot’s dramatic theory must also be considered not only as filtered through her disciples, but directly, since Eliot was just as well acquainted with her work as theirs.

The “Sweeney” poems and their culmination in the dramatic fragment “Sweeney Agonistes” show Eliot’s application of the ritual theory to his art, as well as his incipient exploration of Aeschylean themes. Sweeney is a precursor to Harry, the young agonist of The Family Reunion, since Eliot associated both with Orestes, and the parallels with Aeschylus’ Oresteia in that play need to be explicated. Eliot’s female archetypes transform from the hideous Gorgonesque witch of “Sweeney Erect” to the maiden Kores, Agatha and Mary, of The Family Reunion, just as Aeschylus shows the transformation of vengeful Erinyes into beneficient Eumenides. Unlike Joyce, Eliot denies the Earth-mother and the validity of physical renewal promised through fertility, idealizing instead a purely spiritual patroness aligned with the father-god, much like the motherless Olympian, Athene. Most analyses of the Sweeney poems and their culmination in The Family Reunion have focused on Eliot’s ultimately Christian vision, while the powerful female archetypes in those works and their Hellenic parallels have been largely misunderstood or dismissed.

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