Son and Lover in T. S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”

The present paper attempts to vindicate misogyny in T. S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”. To the best of our knowledge, no full length study has examined the effect of mother love in Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”, and its interrelatedness with misogyny. In the poem, the young man and the lady live in an isolated togetherness, because the young man is dispossessed of any sense of emotional and human commitment. Inspite of the lady’s abiding love, which is avowed via bombastic rhetoric, her attempts to awaken his passive and latent desire end with an utter failure. The man remains shut off from the world of passion. He strives to control himself in front of the lady whose desire is bestial and threatening to his very masculine identity. The man splits his lady into mother and lover. Hence, his mind becomes torn in an admixture of attraction and repulsion. As the paper evinces, mother love, which is in his entrails, prompts his visceral hatred of the feminine and renders him deficient in his capacity to love.