Some Regimented Evening: The Relationship between Commentary and Representation in "The Dead" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Abstract

As a verb, “worry” has roots in Old English and refers to one person trying to hurt another (choking, harassing, irritating). In the nineteenth century, according to the OED, it changed:  it become a noun that referred to an anxious state of mind, a sense of dread tied to interior fretting rather than external threat. Eliot‘s Prufrock and Joyce‘s Gabriel are, as Helen Pinsent shows, defined by this distinctly modern and modernist worry. Moreover, it cannot be escaped through fantasy even as worry isolates these two protagonists from their social worlds by drawing them inward into repetition, reflection, and regret.  Trapped in what Francis O‘Gorman has dubbed “worry‘s familiar grooves,” the iteration of the underwhelming overwhelms them, on terms that, as Pinsent argues, are both distinctly modernist and distinguishable from each other.

—Julia Wright