SELF-DIVISIONS

If Eliot's study of Bradley argues that things possess identity only in relation to other things; that identity depends on such relation, which leaves it a transitory state; and that things therefore remain, at best, only indeterminate metaphysically, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” endows these propositions with poetical flesh. Philosophical ambiguity, in this case, corresponds to psychic ambivalence, and most theories explaining Prufrock's problems share the concept of doubleness or division.

On one hand, Prufrock recalls a characteristic strain of American Puritanism, the tendency to “auto-machia.” In such “self civil war,” humility and self-denial fuse awkwardly but firmly with personal assertion. The habit flourished long after the theology withered, and Prufrock, straitened by everyday social circumstance yet unbuttoned – even unhinged – in his imagination, tries to master the world by rejecting it. However futile such dominion might seem, Prufrock's vaccinal retreat into the self, refusing infectious social contact, dovetails with a tendency in American literature – and American life – extending back to their earliest Puritan origins.

On the other hand, Prufrock's difficulties stem from the familiar Romantic alienation between frustrated subject and unresponsive object, and from an even more traditional estrangement between spirit and flesh.