love song of j alfred prufrock epigraph relevance

Prufrock’s balding, weak, neurotic, effeminate, intellectual personality is bewildered and frightened before women. Actually the earlier title of the monologue was “Prufrock Among the Women”. He is extremely conscious of his baldness as hair is considered a mark of masculinity. Prufrock’s paralysis is deeply entrenched in psychosexual unease. The remainder of the monologue speaks of his inability to take action, do something after tea, because he has no courage left or strength left to “force the moment to a crisis” (79-80). His “arms and legs are thin,” and “his hair is growing thin”. The name Prufrock also implies a prude in a frock and the protagonist’s weakening is revealed in two places. Prufrock’s paralysis involves his social and sexual anxieties which are almost closely connected. The element of contrast appears when the cause of Hamlet’s condition, murder and the crooked state of a kingdom, is juxtaposed with Prufrock’s question whether he could “dare to eat a peach” (122) in the presence of sophisticated high-society ladies. Alfred Prufrock, highlighting his concept of the living tradition. Thus Eliot brings up Hamlet’s paralysis to his contemporary world through The Love song of J. Both are subject to this problem but while Hamlet comes out of it at the end, Prufrock is unable to get over it even at the end.

Eliot establishes a parallel and contrast between Hamlet’s paralysis and that of Prufrock.

Love song of j alfred prufrock epigraph relevance