"A Room of One's Own", "Wasteland" and "J. Alfred Prufrock": The Affairs of Society Anonymous

An underlying, general disgust for the opposite sex is one of the sentiments shared by writers Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. While the two authors have similar perspectives on the two genders, both viewing males as the inferior sex, the means by which Woolf and Eliot come to this conclusion are quite different. Likewise, the emotions that arise from their beliefs are quite dissimilar. Writing in the aftermath of WWI, both authors have strong emotions about the society that has emerged from the rubble. Woolf, in "A Room of One's Own", takes on an air of defiance toward the societal implication that men are superior to women, and concludes by picking her way through a jumble of thoughts: that men are afflicted with an inferiority complex that can only be fed by women, and that it is society that perpetuates these circumstances. Eliot, on the other hand, feels that women are superior because they hold power over men; men need women, however disgusted they are by the female gender, because of the innate urge to procreate and because society dictates that man must have a mate. These ideas are portrayed in Eliot's poems "The "Wasteland" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The two...