Depression in Eliot’s Characters and Settings
When analyzing Eliot’s work for illustrations of depression, two major themes arise: characters and setting. Eliot suffered from mental breakdowns, and his anxiety and desolation felt during those times reflect in the content of many of his poems, and subsequently how he portrayed such emotions. These two themes in particular portray depression in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, respectively. Rather than expressing depression through a confessional style or writing directly about his experience with mental illness, Eliot gives depression a realm of its own, with its own unique figures and physicality.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Each poem begins with an epigraph, an element key to understanding each poem as a whole. In his reader’s guide to Eliot’s work, George Williamson insists “the epigraph is never to be ignored in Eliot; for while it…show more content… Hamlet’s major character flaw is his inability to act, which parallels Prufrock’s social reservations and anxieties. Eloise Knapp Hay’s literary criticism of T.S. Eliot’s poetic negativity asserts that Prufrock knows his flaws may turn him into “a Hamlet – indecisive and therefore destroyed” (19).
This indecisiveness blends with the following character representation, the archetypal figure of the Fool, which represents the inability to think clearly or make decisions during depressive episodes. The final character symbol of the “sea-girls” refers to mythological water nymphs and mermaids (130). Given the final stanza’s ending wherein Prufrock drowns and presumably dies, the nymphs may represent the overwhelming nature of depression, in the same way water overwhelms a person when he or she
