The Wasteland 2

 In class this week, we discussed the possible homosexual relationship that may have helped guide Eliot in writing parts two and three. I’m not going to say I agree or disagree. I think reading it this way means looking beyond the surface, and looking at the reader, something Eliot wouldn’t have agreed with. However, if we do look at his personal life, it is interesting to compare his own feelings with those associated with the weakness of love. If Eliot felt that loved failed, he may have felt personally vindicated by love because he was unable to experience his true feelings for another man. Also, it is interesting to think that in part two, each of the relationships are destroyed by women. In the first relationship, a woman messes up, and ironically so with another woman. I think this plays into the idea of homosexuality that can be associated with the poem. This shows the way love between man and woman fail, not necessarily how love fails.
 Also, in the relationship of the people on the lowest socioeconomic level, there is a death of a child. If Eliot is truly feeling let down by heterosexual love, then he kills the child intentionally, to show that a child can’t save a relationship and that the union between man and woman. Also, if a child represents the true bond between and man and a woman and he kills the child then he is destroying the union between man and woman.
 These things aside, I think Eliot blurs the line of lust and love. I think part 3 is not about lust, but instead about something else. I think it is about some sort of control that man has over woman. I think this type of control, as we said, contrasts Prufrock. In the same way, I think the speaker is striving to find a connection between man and woman by forcing it. If this relationship is forced, than it reflects the relationship he has with his wife, despite his sexual orientation.