Emma Porter October 7, 2016 Dr. Domestico Modern Poetry “So Rudely Forced”: The Breakdown of Traditional Masculinity in the Waste Land T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land explores modernism, specifically focusing on the troubling of binaries and the breakdown of the traditional. The boundaries between life and death, wet and dry, male and female, and more are called into question in Eliot’s conception of modernity and the waste land. The blurring of gender boundaries—significantly through Tiresias and
In ancient Greco-Roman mythic narrative rape is depicted as a normalised and often essential paradigm that is used to show the gods’ dominance over lesser beings. Numerous accounts represent the gods as having transcended the boundaries of justice and morality by highlighting their exemption from prosecution for rape in contrast to mortal rapists, who cannot avoid punishment. Furthermore, aetiological-rape myths reveal that only the gods could bring about creation through rape, whether it be the