The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock- Close Reading

Question 2

The poem begins with an invitation for the reader to go for an evening walk with Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

The stanza hints at a certain aloofness of the character, Prufrock. Referring to half-deserted streets and an etherized patient indicates the state of Prufrock's unhealthily developed and immature personality. To be mature, a reader would assert that, “the infant will grow and succeed in the maturational process if there is a facilitating environment”. In the analysis of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” it could be discussed that 'not good enough mothering' in Prufrock, as a plausible reason for his inadequacies in adult relationships with women.

Eliot portrays his male character as having emotional problems such as the disability to integrate relations from part object to a whole object and the disability in unifying emotional relationships in one whole object (e.g. in the eighth stanza). However, at the same time, his female characters are portrayed and supposed as not good-enough maternal figures for the male character. Prufrock pinpoints the women when he hesitates on facing a possible relationship with them; asking:

"Do I dare?" …, "Do I dare?" (38)

The child needs the maternal provisions which define good-enough mothering. All object relation theorists unanimously believe that maternal care is the basic element to achieve a healthy life and lack of this element leads to some personal anxieties which can result in an inability to transfer from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. From this standpoint, Prufrock is a character with a developed false self inside his personality. His growth of false self makes his ego weak - his self-consciousness about his physical appearance, for example - and his internal conflicts and anxieties do not allow his ego to be unified well and to be able to unify his emotional relationships in one whole object (e.g. the ninth stanza). Therefore, for him, good and bad objects are separate and they have not been unified and well internalized.

Prufrock's presentation of his imperfections before the women betrays his internal anxieties and conflicts, which are discussed through projective identification. The story of Prufrock and the women illustrates the first relationship of the mother and a child, when a child tries to relate with the first good object (mother's breast) to keep and internalize it. At the same time, he feels the breast as the bad external object which leads to feelings of persecution and frustration, and this splitting of the breast of the mother as a good and a bad object results in a severance of love and hate, the same as Prufrock's feelings toward the women. Through the analysis, it will be seen that Prufrock also suffers from a lack of well-introjection of good object and lack of integration of relations from the part ...