Literary Themes In George Eliot's The Wasteland

The Wasteland is an overwhelming complexity, filled with a plethora of literature references. Ignoring the allusions, the piece itself shifts between different speakers and scenes so blatantly makes this especially difficult to digest. In one moment, a woman is reminiscing about riding on a sled when she was young. Then BAM. She’s suddenly staring at a dead sailor that’s decaying at the bottom of the sea. Needless to say, the plot is probably not the main focal point. Nevertheless, there is a huge reason, at least to me anyway, why Eliot wrote in such a composite way and added in so many references. He wanted to make it very clear that many modern people are indifferent nowadays. They don’t know or care about great pieces of art, spirituality, and so forth. Society is losing its grasp on its culture and becoming mundane.
In particular, I will break down certain parts from A Game of Chess portion to support this thinking. It starts with a woman sitting inside an expensive-looking room as noted of “a burnished throne”. This is a reference to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which references Cleopatra’s throne looking like a golden chair on the waves. This highlights the queen-like sense of the room the speaker is describing. It is repeatedly reminded that this woman is living luxuriously from “fruited vines”, “sevenbranched candelabra”, and “the …show more content…
After all, we have one scene screaming out that everything is fake while the other is just screaming in general. Well, Eliot has proven himself to be a meticulous writer with The Wasteland being a prime exemplar. There is so many underlying meaning in here, it’s unbelievable to think that the placement of these scenes were a coincidence and not having any meaning behind this (fake → breakdown). This is why I think these scenes are beneficial to Eliot’s message. Modern people are so unconcerned whether its fake or not until it's too