SOURCE: “Prufrock's Defenses and Our Response,” in American Imago, Vol. 26, Summer, 1969, pp. 182-93.

[In the following essay, Waldoff examines Prufrock's defense mechanisms of passivity and self-criticism.]

In The Dynamics of Literary Response (Oxford, 1968), Norman Holland writes: “the literary work acts out a psychological process which we introject. That process is the transformation of a central fantasy toward a central meaning” (p. 101). The key term is “introject.” With it Holland shifts our attention from the mind of the author and the supposed minds of the characters to the mind of the reader or audience. This shift, similar to the one toward the appeals of literature in Simon O. Lesser's Fiction and the Unconscious (1957), reminds us that in psychoanalytic criticism we very often read about the motives and actions in a literary work, but seldom about the psychological appeals of the work and our response to it. A good example is T. S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” generally regarded as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and essential to an understanding of modern poetry. It has been read and reread by a variety of critics, often with sensitivity and psychological concern,¹ and at least once with psychoanalytic insight,² but never in terms of response. In this paper, I want to show how our response is controlled by the defenses in the poem. But before doing that we must consider what it is we are responding to—in other words, what psychological problem the poem handles.

“Prufrock” is a dramatic monologue that presents an inner conflict between the need to be loved and the failure to satisfy that need. Or, to be more precise, a conflict between the need for love and two paralyzing fears of acting on that need. When Prufrock asks “Is it perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress?,” he reveals ironically that his love song does not have the seductive aim of Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” (to which he alludes in the line, “To have squeezed the universe into a ball”). Indeed, he reverses the traditional notion of the love song because his real aim is to defend against love's impulses. While his digression (which, in a larger sense, is the entire monologue) enables him to avoid love's impulses, it suggests to us that there is a deep fear of love. We see this fear in all the “visions,” “revisions,” and “indecisions,” in the hesitation to ascend the stair to the room where “the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” and in the repeated questions, “Do I dare?,” “So how should I presume?,” “And how should I begin?” His hesitation reflects a fear of acting on his desires and this fear is the reason he exaggerates the consequences of self-assertion: the call to act is a question of “daring,” the ultimate acts are to “murder and create,” a simple assertion may “Disturb the universe,” or call upon him to “force the moment to its crisis.” But beneath this hesitation and fear of self-assertion is the deeper anxiety over castration, an anxiety that is the source of several of the most important images in the poem: he sees himself “sprawling on a pin,” then “pinned and wriggling on a wall”; he has seen his head “brought in upon a platter”; he sees hostility in the Footman's “snicker”; and he continually fears rejection by women who might cut him off by saying “That is not what I meant at all; / That is not it, at all.” In short, his digression and hesitation over love may be traced to a fear of reprisal and rejection.

But Prufrock has a second fear that his impulse may overwhelm him. Anna Freud describes this fear as “instinctual anxiety,” or a “dread of the strength of the instincts.”³ Just as he exaggerates the consequences of self-assertion, so he exaggerates the threat that his desires will overwhelm (or “drown”) him. We see this anxiety in the very first stanza where the images and associations that “lead” us to “an overwhelming question” are, in a sense, a return of the repressed and lead inescapably back to an instinctual question. We wander, or we are unconsciously led, to an area where lovers rendezvous, or prostitution is found, with “half-deserted streets,” “muttering retreats,” and “restless nights” in hotels. But we also see in these images an anxiety expressed as suspicion and disgust. The romantic evening against the sky is spread out “Like a patient etherized upon a table.” The hotels are “one-night,” and “cheap,” like the “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells.” The streets, and what is done in the hotels lining them, are like an unconscious “argument” leading him to satisfy his desires, but as these emerge into consciousness they are subtly denied. It is a “tedious argument” to Prufrock not only because of its relentless nature, but also because he wants to dismiss it as “boring.” In short, the argument of the instincts is seen as degrading and treacherous (“of insidious intent”) and the sexual urge, because it seems an “overwhelming question,” must be blocked: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.”

To summarize briefly: an important part of the appeal of this poem lies in its handling of two universal fears of love—the first a fear of a crippling reprisal and the second a fear that one's desires themselves are inherently dangerous. The other important appeal of this poem is in the way these fears are handled; that is, in the defenses used against them. Thus, although critics usually see Prufrock as a peculiarly modern anti-hero, his universal and timeless dimension as a man who fears to love is the poem's deepest appeal for the modern reader. Everyone has experienced the fear that his desires will bring upon him a terrifying reprisal and everyone knows the fear that these very desires may in the end betray and destroy him. In addition, we have all known the sense of emptiness and depression that results from a lack of love, the loss of self-esteem because of rejection, the alienation and meaninglessness of a world to which we are unable to attach feelings, a world which seems anesthesized, a life which is a living death. This is the reason the emptiness of reality is an important theme in this poem—indeed, the theme which most critics single out as an anticipation of “Gerontion” and The Waste Land—and this is why Brooks and Warren say Prufrock suffers from “modern damnation,” the “disease of loss of conviction, of loss of faith in the meaning of life, of loss of creativity of all kinds, of feeble purpose, of neurotic self-absorption.”⁴ The internal emptiness and deprivation are transformed into the theme of the cultural wasteland. While each of us may introject Prufrock's fears with varying degrees of intensity, the experience of deprivation and the cry against it are universal. We have all known during the early stages of growth, as well as in adulthood, the sense of self-annihilation that comes from real or imagined loss of love. At its most basic psychological level, this is what “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is about.

But how does the poem give us the feeling that his conflict is being mastered? First, by providing Prufrock with defenses and by acting out, both for him and for us, a resolution of the conflict. His defenses hold pleasure for us because they are, so to speak, a first line of defense, a basic level at which the feelings aroused in us by the conflict will be controlled or managed. This is particularly true of a dramatic monologue, where we read the poem aloud, for both the conflict and defenses are not only “taken in,” or introjected, but quite literally put in our mouths. In a certain sense, and for a brief aesthetic moment, we become Tithonus, Andrea del Sarto, or Prufrock. But at another level we have a second line of defense, for we never really identify with Prufrock. One part of us plays at being Prufrock, another part observes him. To identify with him would leave us in despair at the end since, even though he finds a temporary resolution of his conflict, as we shall see, his fate is far from enviable. No, we see him as he cannot see himself and this perspective gives us a defense Prufrock does not have—an ironic distance. Of course, there are many levels of irony in this poem, not the least of which is Prufrock's own, which is conveyed to us so richly in his self-mocking allusions to John the Baptist, Lazarus, and Hamlet. But there is a level of irony that is not his because it is unconscious. For example, when we see that behind his self-contempt is a good deal of self-pity, or when we see that it is he who rejects the world, not the world him, or when we see that his modesty is more defensive than virtuous. Here is the special advantage of a psychoanalytic approach, for it explores the unconscious depths of the poem and makes them accessible to us. It reaches the profoundest level of ironic meaning in this poem: that his very defenses are his defeat. In this poem, as in all great poetry, defense and response are subtly intertwined, and we must look carefully at both.

Prufrock's primary defense against the fear of reprisal and rejection is regression. There are numerous images and associations that express his desire to regress and that actually steer us away from the instinctual question. For example, Prufrock would rather “turn back and descend the stair” than enter the room where the women come and go. He also wishes he had been “a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” recalling Hamlet's comment to Polonius that a crab walks backwards (II, ii, 205-6). Even the digression caused by the perfume from a dress is really a defensive regression from adult sexuality. In short, he regresses from phallic assertiveness to oral receptivity. We know this because of the special use of oral imagery in all he says. He envisions himself and the “you” in the poem as passive to the “hands / That lift and drop a question on your plate.” Passivity is always “Before the taking of a toast and tea,” and when he thinks of having the “strength to force the moment to its crisis,” it is immediately “after tea and cakes and ices” (italics mine). Passivity is associated with a deep hunger, aggression with the “fullness” and confidence following oral satisfaction. When he says he has measured out his life with “coffee spoons” he reveals to us that his life has been an enervating oral quest. But even more significant is the fact that when he thinks of becoming aggressive and reversing his passive history he says that he might “spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways,” or he might “have bitten off the matter with a smile.” Hiding his phallic impulses with a smile, a deferential and obsequious act, becomes symbolic of his oral defense: he will “prepare a face” with a “smile” to “meet the faces” that we meet, but the fearful world is seen to act aggressively in the Footman's “snicker.”

However, not all of Prufrock's regression is from phallic assertiveness and adult sexuality. Much of it is a quest for the oceanic feeling of primary narcissism. Fenichel says that “There always remain certain traces of the original objectless condition, or at least a longing for it (‘oceanic feeling’).”⁵ We can see this quickly by putting the first words of the poem together with the last: “Let us … drown.” Another way this longing is expressed is in the difficulty (if not impossibility) of determining whether “Prufrock” is a monologue, with someone listening, or a soliloquy. We assume it is a monologue because of the “you” in the poem, yet Brooks and Warren say the “you” is the “generalized reader,” suggesting that there is really no one in the poem, or in the presence of Prufrock⁶. George Williamson, on the other hand, expresses the more common view that the “you” is the suppressed side of Prufrock, “the amorous self, the sex instinct.”⁷ But identifying the “you” in the poem is less important than realizing that the confusion is intentional and relates back to the quest for that first state when the external world was foggy and blurred, when object representation was either non-existent or vague. In discussing primary or narcissistic regression Fenichel says that “the object relationships are replaced by relations within the personality; the patient loses his object relationships by regressing into a phase where no objects yet existed. Depressed patients become aware of this withdrawal of object cathexes by the painful sensation of feeling the world and themselves as ‘empty.’”⁸

Still another way the oceanic longing is expressed is in Prufrock's quest for self-understanding, for it becomes an intellectually acceptable sublimation of the longing for a lost feeling of omnipotence. It is a substitute for the “fullness” and sense of self-esteem he would have if his oral wishes were “fulfilled.” As long as they remain unfulfilled Prufrock, like the “lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows,” will experience regularly a crippling state of semi-severe depression common among orally dependent persons. The depression is a result of oral deprivation. He endures a sense of “emptiness” and a loss of self-esteem because he feels literally “starved” for love.⁹ In answer to the emptiness and depression Prufrock seeks a sense of mastery and omnipotence in self-knowledge. For example, in an almost methodical review of the doors now closed to him, he convinces himself that he has the self-knowledge he needs to gain this mastery:

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
                    Beneath the music from a farther room.
                    So how should I presume?

The idea that he truly “knows” his situation is repeated four times in this stanza, and twice more in each of the next two stanzas, all with the magical, reassuring effect of an incantation. There is a review of a number of possibilities, from being fixed “in a formulated phrase” to being rejected by one who is “settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,” and each one is comfortingly regarded as utterly futile. The frequent questions (“And how should I presume?”) are of course conveniently unanswerable and are asked with a certain smug contentment. Yet, in spite of the transparent self-deception, we see that Prufrock is able to gain some control over his situation. It is not the control we would wish were the situation ours, but it is sufficient to convince us that for Prufrock perhaps it wouldn't have been worth it after all.

In effect, he achieves through regression a movement away from the sources of anxiety to a state of some mastery over his needs and feelings. In our response we move digressively away from the anxiety and take in his defensive understanding of himself as one way of containing the conflict. Prufrock's withdrawal is presented attractively to us as a sophisticated skepticism toward (and distancing from) love's impulses. His understanding of himself, which is his way of answering his feelings, appears to us at one level as largely convincing because of the withering honesty and aggressive self-ridicule that accompany it. At another level, however, we are always aware that ironically he is establishing in himself and us the very sense of confidence and control he so pathetically lacks.

But Prufrock's honesty and self-ridicule are actually a second defense—a masochistic turning against the self. It is not self-punishing in pursuit of pain, but in avoidance of the greater pain of anxiety. Prufrock wants love, but because he fears it, he would rather tell himself he does not deserve it. He insulates himself from failure by never trying. He does this in several ways.

First we note his body-image because it stresses his physical deterioration. We have only his report of his body, but it is clear that he sees himself as a man whose sexual future is already behind him. He says he has “a bald spot in the middle of my hair;” he believes it is noted by others that his “arms and legs are thin;” he thinks of himself as growing old, and he makes himself seem physically ridiculous by suggesting that he will wear “the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” The white flannel trousers, baggy as they are, stress his sense of his thinness and his shrinking body. He sees his body as “empty” and its lack of a forceful physical presence is clearly linked to his view of himself as passive and dead. In short, his body-image serves him as an unconscious defense against the impulse to assert himself. He sees his body as pathetic while for us the real pathos is in his hopeless image of it.

Next we note his image of his relationship with others. Because he has withdrawn his feelings from the world he experiences it as empty. But in his relationship with others the responsibility for the resulting emotional gulf is projected outward. He confuses his defenses (his rejection of the world) with reality. The most prominent images of rejection and self-contempt are the cold, inattentive women who come and go throughout the poem. The first such image is in the line, “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” Whatever else we may say about these shallow women, and their cultural litany, it is clear that they are cold and impersonal. To Prufrock they are les belles dames sans merci. He prepares a face “to meet the faces that you meet” because all faces are cold and rejecting. Such faces seem to say “How his hair is growing thin” and “That is not what I meant at all; / That is not it, at all.” In the end he is convinced that the mermaids, “singing, each to each,” like the women who talk of Michelangelo, will not talk to him. In effect, and in harmony with his oceanic longing, he reduces his world to its original objectless state.

At this point we begin to see that the structure of the poem, as well as the rhythm of our response, is partly governed by degrees of self-ridicule. Prufrock's self-ridicule progresses in intensity until it reaches a climax in the Prince Hamlet passage, which afterwards continues to ring in our ears with brutality and finality. Indeed, it corresponds to and replaces, as it were, sexual release. After it, come only images of isolation, withdrawal, and sleep. It opens with a thundering “No!” which we may take as an answer to the over-whelming question of gratifying the instinctual impulses:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

The negative has the flattering contrast with Hamlet (flattering because it nevertheless invites comparison on the grounds of indecision and the fear of acting) as well as the seeming virtue of modest self-appraisal. Aside from the timely nature of this decisive statement (after such a lengthy digression from the original instinctual question), it also tries to be an honest summary. It is brutally honest when Prufrock says he is “an easy tool,” “a bit obtuse,” “ridiculous,” and “the Fool.” The hesitation in the last two lines suggests the pain of admitting the truth, even in self-defense. Yet the cataloguing of personal characteristics and the unflinching honesty in all he says give the passage a firm and decisive tone, a tone that in turn gives us the feeling that the anxiety is finally being mastered. This is the reason the lines immediately following this passage, beginning with “I grow old … I grow old …”, have a soothing anti-climactic pull. In effect Prufrock has said, “Because I am not worthy of having my wishes fulfilled I need not continue to experience anxiety over them.” No matter how much futility there is in such a statement (and therefore how much potential anxiety), by controlling hope he will be able to control his instincts, the very basis of hope. There are other examples of pretending to self-knowledge as a means of anxiety mastery, but we need not discuss them all. Suffice it to say that the very poem itself, an interior monologue, tries to answer this need.

Finally, I think we can see that Prufrock uses his passive behavior as a defensive posture, as a reaction formation against his self-assertive impulses. We begin to suspect that it is more than just a result of his life's circumstances when we see how much he relishes it. Coupled with his passive attitude is a certain precious and leisurely indecision, a feminine and cat-like reclining into the corners of the evening, an intellectual malingering over literary and biblical allusions, a somewhat compulsive fondling of the same phrase over and over again. This verbal preciosity is part of an elaborate defense against self-assertion. His hesitation, his fear of having a challenge dropped on his plate, his fear of “daring” to act, or to “eat a peach,” or even to presume, all these are cherished ways of saying, “I will think and speak as if there were no reason to decide and act.” In short, his passive attitude is carefully maintained as a defense against any impulse to act.

We first see his passive attitude in the projection of it onto the evening sky, but he later acknowledges it when he compares himself to Lazarus: to face the overwhelming question would be the equivalent of his coming back from the dead. Rather than deal with the question openly, he has “wept and fasted, wept and prayed.” Here we get the suggestion of resignation and even asceticism, traditionally the two most appealing forms of passivity as resistance. But our awareness that this resignation is a somewhat self-pitying defense casts an ironic light on what he says. This is particularly true when we notice that his resignation is continually betrayed by anxiety—for example, in his image of a question dropped on his plate (or shoved down his throat, with the potential of being overwhelmed and drowned) and in his image of himself as “sprawling on a pin” and “wriggling on a wall.” When he says he has seen his head “brought in upon a platter,” the symbolic castration is obvious. What is not so obvious is that the passivity here and elsewhere is a mask behind which aggressions are acted out against the self. Passivity is only a front for self-ridicule and self-destruction, a final and ironic omnipotence over the instinctual life.

Of course, other defenses are used. We have already seen how he projects his self-hate onto others so that it seems they are rejecting him and how he projects his inner emptiness on the world around him. Denial is another defense for Prufrock. When he compulsively repeats “There will be time” we know that he means “I feel there will not be time, but I can still deny it.” Again, when he says “No! I am not Prince Hamlet …” he means that he feels an internal crisis moving toward a climax, but he can still deny it. Or, in his frankest admission, he says “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” But I think the main defenses are, as I have suggested, regression, a masochistic turning on the self, and passivity as a reaction formation.

These three defenses enable Prufrock to transform his hopes and fears of love into a narcissistic, introspective, sometimes painful act of self-understanding and self-love. In other words, an anxiety-ridden fantasy of love has become an act of self-love. Paradoxical as it may seem, his denial that anyone else would love him was from the very beginning a desperate act of self-love through self-pity. Prufrock has deftly said no to the overwhelming instinctual question, yet he has sublimated his desires and satisfied them in an intellectualizing and less frightening way. Here is double irony with a double reversal. We began by saying that one of the ironies of this love song was that it did not have the seductive aim of the traditional love song and instead actually sought to defend against love's impulses. But now we can see that the deeper truth is that while it has defended against love's impulses, it has also offered them subtle gratification. Prufrock has sympathized with himself, gained a sense of mastery over his desires and, like the catfog that licks its tongue into the corners of the evening and then falls asleep, has moved slowly toward an emotional sleep. He opened with “Let us go” and now ends with the suggestion, implicit in the word “wake” in the last line, that sleep follows the gratification gained from the love song. For us, on the other hand, a fantasy of love has become an act of self-understanding through the defensive perspective of irony. We gain an enriching sense of power and mastery over our own destinies through the well-protected and uplifting experience of understanding Prufrock's. In a sense we have regressed with Prufrock in the service of our own egos. This uplifting sense of mastery may seem difficult to reconcile with the seeming catastrophe in the last line, “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” But I feel we have lingered near our basic need of love and effectively answered a transformation of it as self-understanding. The reason we will “drown” is because the objective world, the human voices that will break in on this delicate sense of mastery, will again present us with the instinctual question and the sense of being overwhelmed. So the mastery is by no means final, either for Prufrock or for us; inevitably it is as fragile as the defenses themselves. At some later time, we will again be faced with human emotion and we will again feel the threats of rejection and of being overwhelmed and drowned. But at least “Till human voices wake us” (italics mine), we will have a sense of mastery. And even then, “There will be time.”

Notes

1. See, for example, George Williamson's psychologically alert reading in A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot, 2nd. ed. (New York, 1966), pp. 57-70, and Elizabeth Drew's Jungian reading in T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York, 1949). pp. 31-36.

2. Arthur Wormhoudt, “A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’” Perspective, II (1949), 109-117.

3. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, trans. Cecil Baines (New York, 1946), p. 63f.

4. Understanding Poetry, 3rd. ed. (New York, 1966), p. 396.

5. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York, 1945), p. 39.

6. Op. cit., p. 369.

7. Op. cit., p. 66. Robert Langbaum seems to me to hold the best view of this problem in The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York, 1957): “Prufrock is clearly speaking for his own benefit. Yet he does not, like the soliloquist, address himself, he addresses his other self—the ‘you’ of the first line, ‘Let us go then, you and I,’ and the second party of the ‘we’ in ‘We have lingered.’ Prufrock's other self figures as the auditor who watches Prufrock's performance at the sea party and to whom Prufrock tells what he learns through the performance about his life. In introducing the speaker's other self as auditor, Eliot makes explicit what is implicit in all the dramatic monologues … that it makes so little difference, as long as the speaker's attention is directed outward, whether the dramatic monologue has or has not as ostensible auditor; for ultimately the speaker speaks to understand something about himself” (pp. 190-1).

8. Op. cit., pp. 401-2.

9. Fenichel explains the relationship between oral dependence and self-esteem in the following way: “The hungry infant remembers having been satisfied previously and tries to force the return of this state by asserting his ‘omnipotence’ in screaming and gesticulation. Later on, the infant loses belief in his omnipotence; he projects this omnipotence onto his parents and tries to regain it through participation in their omnipotence. He needs this participation, the feeling of being loved, in the same way that previously he needed milk. Now the succession of hunger and satiety is replaced by the succession of states in which the child feels alone and therefore experiences a kind of self-depreciation—we called it annihilation—and states in which he feels loved and his self-esteem is re-established. … A severe depression represents the state into which the orally dependent individual gets when the vital supplies are lacking: a slight depression is an anticipation of this state for warning purposes” (op. cit., p. 388).