Panopticon Gaze Superego in Decadent Gerontion Prufrock’s Wasteland

Majid Jafari Saray

University of Neyshabur
(majidjafari08@gmail.com)

Ehsan Emami
University of Neyshabur
(ehsanemamin@live.com)

Abstract

Introduction
Panopticism stems from Greek panoptēs (all-seeing)1, panopticon and panoptic, which can be
traced back to Bentham’s penitentiary annular cells devised in 1787. These cells along with the
central tower formed a core of all-the-time-surveillance over the inmates through influencing
their subconscious minds for automatic internal admittance of ever-maintaining observance from
the guard’s booth through a continuum of time and space. This panoramic view provided the
prison authority with possibility of convincing the prisoners of being under continuous
surveillance to modify their behavior during the sentence tenure. In the modern era, panopticism
reemerged as internalization of self-policing policy on individuals who were inmates in modern
cells of discrete settings distributed throughout the social nexus to give form to their mentality
and identity through time. In Bentham’s model, a back window opening out of each prison cell
provided a background light source to detect the shadow movements of the prisoners in their
cells by creating a silhouette of the victims; hence, reflecting the slightest jerks of the imprisoned
culprits to the observing eyes of the guard who might be present or absent practically in the
central tower situated at the center of the building. The very situation triggered a self-controlling
tendency in the inmates, while the guard was not actually visible to them in the tower whether he
was monitoring the cells and inmates’ behavior or not.

Panopticism as a form of power relationship was later excavated by Michel Foucault, French
philosopher, from the historical documental relics into his discipline, philosophy, and then
extended into literary studies by his followers in New Historicism. Panopticism itself originates
from the notion of emplacement that is encapsulated within the heterotopic differentiation of
individualized subjects through naturalization of their places as socially predetermined sites in a
given context. This relationship contributes to formation of power differentiation affecting the
relationships among the specifically localized members based on the power norms and standards.
An outcome of panopticism as internalized self-policing trend propagated as disciplinary and
penitentiary media in modern societies is definition of the paradoxical individual’s identity as
solitary subject as well as a part of the social structure which forms only a portion although it can
be considered as unity in differentiation on the whole (Foucault 1967).

1
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/panoptic
Modernism and its outcoming hollow man is the question of both panopticism and heterotopic
nonplaces2 in which his identity is formulated based on their "… dried voices, when [they]
whisper together are quiet and meaningless" (Eliot 1925). This does not mean that the voices are
really devoid of any signification, which is innate necessity of any arbitrary utterance, but they
lack communicational meaning between the signifier and the signified and, hence, between the
interlocutors of a given communicational medium, that is, language. Characterization of the
modern figures in Eliot’s poetry enables readers to distinguish a hollow man with internalized
individuation devoid of tangible and established identity derived naturally from environment and
structured with a panoptically defined individuality within a social nexus adjusting his “self” to
the urgently adaptive nature of a modern setting. This article investigates the position of
individual in a setting demarcated within social contexts designated by the speakers of Eliot’s
poetry in compliance with the modern spirit ruling over the identity formation of the social-
solitary-individuals, a paradox that engenders differentiation of subjects in various heterotopias
embedded within discrete unity which detaches them as singles in omnipresent nonplaces, while
simultaneously emplacing them in annular contextual strata with capability of being observed
synchronically even without the presence of any observer. This self-policing strategy provides
individuals with a social identity marred by individuality which is itself only meaningful in
nonplaces in public sites. This bewilderment in the perception of the surrounding environment
and formation of identity as a result of this broken image results in creation of the modern
hollow man triggered to his own suicidal destruction in a cultural and spiritual wasteland
delineated by Eliot. We have taken four of the poems by Eliot, “Gerontion” (1963), “Love Song
of Alfred Prufrock” (1917), “The Wasteland” (1922), and “Hollow Man” (1925), as different
settings of formation and development of modern sites transforming and metamorphizing
individuals as planned by modern power holders to render them more submissive, even if
mentally inactive or mesmerized, to be less rebellious and more controlled.

Panopticon Gaze and Internalization of Self-Policing

Panoptic tower has gained special significance in literature in discussions on novel surveillance
practices and strategies over the last decades. The surveillance has become part of the social
media which provides data or information to the masses in subject societies equipped with
sophisticated high-tech facilities for communication such as the internet and CCTV (Norris and
Armstrong, 1999). However, the new surveillance technics and technologies have led to a variety
of social phenomena such as self-policing, virtual identity and reality, and the modern hollow
man, which are going to be covered in the following lines before plunging into the main
discussion on Eliot’s poems. A coral principal of Foucault’s conception of power related to its
dynamicity and impossibility is located in any given point in a context; it ensues from
everywhere and is present everywhere including “us” (Foucault, 1997). As a matter of fact,
surveillance includes self-surveillance which might take natural or supernatural forms. Self-
surveillance or self-policing refer to the attention individuals pay to their own actions and
reactions as well as thoughts in their extreme forms. This article attempts to excavate more on
self-policing as a way to build identity for an individual and, as a result, to formulate their
mentality and reality as wished by the superior power holders.

2
Non-place refers to public places with mass of individuals who are unknown and unrecognized portions of the
whole context in which they are no body and occupy in actuality no real places discreetly. In such environments
individuals carry a common identity and deletion of any does not affect the whole texture significantly or sensibly.
In modern settings, malformation of the same virtual identity could have been one of the vital
factors resulting in the wasteland depicted in Eliot’s poems reflecting scenes after the World War
I and predicting a more destructive potential world war in the coming years, that is, the WWII. A
similar texture seems to be around in some contemporary societies around the world which has
been targeting the identity and humanity of man since this self-surveillance has the potential
power to generate an ethical substance (Foucault, 1985), negative or positive. The nature of
surveillance is based on the preferences of the ruling power that define some values and
phenomena as ‘true’ and the rest intolerable, enabling the minds of their subjects to comply with
what is considered as right in contrast with those regarded as wrong or deviation from the so-
called right path. Hence, power holders gain a kind of legitimacy for their practices through
representing them as caring and helping their subjects to detect what is defined as threat to the
community and its adopted values. This way, they apparently attempt to save their subjects from
straying from the right path (Foucault, 1997). This trend generates an internal tendency in
individuals to monitor their own behavior in a given and specifically defined context, a feeling
that takes care of what is known as ‘problematic’ since it entails adversarial relations with other
fellows and the environment. This assumption produces self-struggle in the individuals to adjust
their behaviors to ‘truth’ (Nietzsche, 1968) as defined by the ruling system.

The main concern of this article is, therefore, inquiring into the possibility of creation of hollow
man of the modern wasteland through surveillance and the subjective identity based on
heterotopic non-places in a given society as its aftermath that leads to universal turmoil in case
the rectification of conducts is administered by ambitious totalitarian power holders. This study
focuses on the pervasive self-surveillance practices’ induced risk factor as a concept formulating
contemporary political contexts through subjective and hidden panoptic tower. This kind of
surveillance on the -self does not necessarily depend on “invisible” and “unverifiable” power
(Foucault, 1979: 201), but rather it concentrates on normalization of individual judgment on the
“self” in relation to the established ethical values. In the second section of this article, centered
on a discussion of normalizing power, I will stress on a sparsely discussed element of Foucault’s
conception of a ‘productive’ power: that of the production, in reality, of an impersonated ethical
negativity such as the delinquent, the madman or the sexual pervert. This article supports that
extreme self-control imposed and naturalized by dominant power sources on individuals
provides a setting in which individuals gradually lose their active interaction with the
environment and turn into robotic Androids behaving and reacting merely to the programmed
disciplines and ethical values encoded for them through the set norms and standards depriving
them of any potentiality of creative analysis of the self and the surrounding issues. The
Wasteland and Prufrock contain myriad evidences delineating the aftermath of this mental
passivity as a result of continuous panoptical gaze and modification of ethical values through
destruction and thwart of natural evolution of human nature.

Gertrude Himmelfarb’s article on Bentham and his Panopticon published in 1965 suggests a
relationship between the Panopticon and moral decay, witnessed during the first half of the last
century surrounding the two destructive World Wars I and II. A further link is also visible
between total surveillance and the multi-faceted corruption which can be traced up to the utmost
layers of the totalitarian societies. However, Foucault provided the Panopticon with a wider
domain of attention with his Discipline and Punishment in 1975. Foucault considered Bentham’s
Panopticon as “a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism” (Foucault 1977: 197), which
deconstructs the mass and substitutes it with “a collection of separated individualities” (201).
The notion of a Panoptical and disciplinary society formed the framework of many analyses in
the eighth and ninth decades of the twentieth century.

Naturalizing values in dystopian setting is not based on natural selection, but rather it depends on
a force that obliges members of such a society to self-naturalize what is imposed on them by the
ruling power. It is what happens in Orwellian context in which Big Brother (Lyon, 2001) force-
naturalizes the new values preferred by the dominant class but not necessarily employing torture
and external obligation solely, as a result of which Winston is to convince himself into believing
what he has to. Toward the end of the story, we find Orwell’s hero to struggle with himself to
naturalize what he is asked to admit as truth despite his contradictory mind that rejects the
suggestion as a political lie. As Foucault puts it, the subject that is under constant observation,
really or virtually, feels responsible for the limitations the ruling power imposes, letting them
spontaneously affect him, ultimately making him “the principle of his own subjection” (Foucault,
1979: 202). As Lyon (2001) supports, this self-surveillance through self-monitoring complies
with “Big Brother” figure that dominates totalitarian contexts (114). However, self-surveillance
can also be connected to maladies and mental diseases as elaborated by Foucault in Discipline
and Punish through which deterrents are convinced of their congruity and being mismatch with
the disciplined context to be easily discarded from the frontal portion, or they are classified as
non-conformative elements defying “habituated anticipatory conformity,” as Norris and
Armstrong (1999) reiterates, with limitations and restrictions. This way they defuse or weaken
possibilities of any objection to the preferred and confirmed policies being enacted by the ruling
power (6).

For Ian Hacking (1986), “anticipatory conformity” neglects the internal monologue taken place
in individual minds, as in case of Prufrock. This imperative subjective drive that is heard from
within and labeled as conscience (236), keeps the track of ethical issues and behavior in a given
context. Normalizing judgment function results from the relationship between internalization and
identification as it occurs in religious ideology where an omniscient and omnipresent Almighty
observes His subjects incessantly and permanently in all moments of their lives. The difference
between panopticon observations in prisons and religion is lack of faith of the inmates. The
prisoners attempt to defy the camera or guard’s eye whenever possible and there is not an
internal disciplined reward and punishment division in their actions in the beginning although
they may gain such robotic self-policing habit through long term imprisonment with the same
observation over them. For Nietzsche (1968), every individual having faith in this division of
reward and punishment is liable to be mentally torn between good and evil in all his deeds in his
life (528). In the following section, three of Eliot’s poems are going to be analyzed from
panopticism point of view to see how internalization of ideologies could miscarry unexpected
outcomes and turn to be destructive rather than constructive if the values naturalized for the
subjects of a society go astray.

The Panopticon could also be utilized by power holders as a device or power tool to test or
subvert and alter the individual behavior, and ultimately the social conduct, of their target
subjects, in order to rectify them according to their objectives. This process can be considered as
a type of experiment with the monitoring machines to see the effects they create. This way, not
only could the power holders test a variety of punishments on inmates, based on the characters
and crime types of them, to discover the most effective ones, but also the methods and
techniques tried out could be allied to the social settings and masses who were in a wider context
than a contention site. The same techniques could simultaneously be taught to the employees and
workers to arrive at the best monitoring and controlling ones. Pedagogical experiments – or also
known secluded education enacted in prisons as well as organizational institutes such as schools
and universities, targeting young children and orphans – train the youngsters in a way to prepare
them for a future context predetermined and programmed by the ruling powers. The result of the
experiment usually comes out after a decade or two when the subjects graduate and are engaged
in the social responsibilities and activities. As each of the trained subjects seeks to form a family
and reproduce offspring and educate them, forming a major part of their identity, the ideology
and discipline enter into the family through which oozes out again into the social context in a
wider range.

As the French philosopher and man of letters, Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715—1771) stated, in
order to verify how much and what one has learnt, “the genealogy of every observable idea”
should be followed. According to this premise, different children could be brought up according
to various thought systems, making them have real belief in what they are taught, even if
contrary to logical interpretations, as witnessed in ideological systems. For such environments,
two plus two may not result in four and the firmament is not an empty space but a dome shaped
cover for the Mother Earth. Then the trained children are missioned into the society as young
adults who will form the main cells of the social texture, not as they want but as they are
programmed by the dominant educational system. Therefore, it can be claimed that the
Panopticon can play the role of effective experiments on human beings in general to analyze and
interpret the realized transformations in them with high certainty. Panopticon further provides an
opportunity to supervise itself and its own system. Panopticon mechanism, which is prevalent
today through all modern societies in the form of new devices such as CCTV and other
eavesdropping applications, enables educators and managers to spy easily on their staff and
members such as students, teachers, nurses, doctors, drivers, and even guards and policemen
(along with the director himself) to judge them incessantly according to the witnessed behavior.
This way, the altering effect of the monitoring or gazing at the behavior and conduct imposes the
preferred ways on the subjects through setting the established behaviors and conducts in the
unconscious psyche of the subjects. An inspector’s unexpected presence at the CCTV room
would provide him with some data to judge the members of the system thoroughly to report on
the real functioning of the whole establishment. However, all the security the monitoring or
gazing director enjoys could easily yield to a sudden revolt from the staff.

The gaze is also considered as one of the significant and effective factors leading to formation of
self-policing attitude the subjects take to force adjust their behavior, as well as mentality, to the
defined and established norms and values in the given community. For Garland-Thomson, gaze
is a tool for the power holders to dominate their subjects (“staree”) colonizing them to be driven
to the remote marginal regions away from the center which is the standpoint of the gazer. The
colonizing stare considers the self as legitimate observer and the staree as alien. This stare gains
a collective social ritual form to look at anyone outside the domain as an Oriental, to use Edward
Saeed’s term, to refer to outsiders. This kind of stare “fixes” the individuals in the specifically
defined communities and classes such as sex, race, ideology, etc. attempting to dominate and
control them (Garland-Thomson 2009, 42-3) more effectively. It is this classification that
partially forms the identity of the subjects enforcing self-policing upon them which takes on a
superego role through time. Manipulating and managing any of the essential factors forming this
self-policing machine, the gazers in power positions attempt to dominate and control their
decisions and actions even in their privacy. As the Panopticon is defined as a type of power
laboratory in which power tools are experimented and exercised to be applied in real target
contexts, due to its comprehensive observing mechanisms, it is able to efficiently penetrate into
and alter the subjects’ behaviors; “knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new
objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised” (Foucault 1995: 195-
228).

Eliot’s poetry focuses on decadence of old generations’ values and norms replaced by the newly
defined ones based on modern environment which is now leading to decay of human entity
overall. There seems to be a relationship between Eliot’s poetry and decadence brought about by
the ethical values through panopticon gaze and identity formation through the recent centuries, as
delineated in his verse. As Vincent Sherry (2011) states in his “‘Where are the eagles and the
trumpets?’: Imperial Decline and Eliot’s Development,” Eliot’s poetry demonstrates myriad
number of manifestations of decadent sensibility prevailing his poetry from the earliest to the
very last poems including The Waste Land. According to Sherry, the two World Wars
transformed Eliot’s experience with the decadent themes and forms in a “historically enriched
poetics of literary Decadence” (96). It can be argued that the “end-of-empire feeling,” as
identified by Sherry, is pervasive in The Waste Land and his other poems as well, extending both
political and personal anxieties created by the gaze of the ruling class.

In the wake of cultural dominance, an important core element, i.e. ‘self-policing policy’, frees
the ruling powers from applying more military and apparently inhumane forces to control and
rectify the individuals in the groups (Branningan 52). Instead, they monitor the subject nations
constantly and closely through the self policing policy lest they may deviate from the imposed
values and realities. This kind of ensured dominance is made possible particularly through the
mass media and education which shape the mentality and form the personality of the individuals
and make them see the world through the offered lenses, namely the norms and standards of the
imposed culture. Postcolonial and neocolonial power possessor’s mission as an authority seems
to be skillful utilization of language, history and literature, as part of the universal mass media, to
realize the world he intends for his people through his displayed speeches and actions, regardless
of the respectability of the realities of others.

Harbinger to the Dystopic Wasteland

“Gerontion” is a monologue by an old man complaining about the problems a man of his age
encounters which embitter the experiences of the elderly as a result of a mechanism known as
“late-life depression” or “dementia” which ensues from the decadence occurring in psychical and
physical structure of old people. From psychological aspect, it is rather amazing to see how
“Gerontion” betrays the complex psychology a young story-teller experiences and demonstrates
when facing an identity crisis, which discriminates the minority in a society and the desire for the
“strong” holding power position, as described in Eliot’s later poem, “The Waste Land” (Wigand
and others 2016). “Gerontion” is regarded as a prediction of the wasteland which Eliot delineates
in his later poem under the same title The Wasteland, where all is already lost and the “hollow
man” is banished into the dystopia of his own art constructed through eras of frustration and
deprivation of spirituality and logics. However, to arrive at this climax of self-destruction, one
needs to be transformed mentally and psychologically to convert the identity first and form a
subaltern character in the individual subjects in target societies. Gerontion is providing an
account of a world in which communication is the target of attack, where words are just “signs”
without being able to transfer the meaning the interlocutors intend since the individuals are not
comprehensible agents for each other due to the same metamorphic shift they make from
humanity and spirituality under superego dominance:

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign”:

The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.

Words are not complicated per se, but rather they become complex by confused minds that
complicate and bewilder, in turn, the expression and communication interlocutors attempt to
convey. This is the beginning of individuation, policing and self-policing discreet minds through
control of individuals and rendering them automatons following the prescribed treks and values
like hollow men. The gerontic is suffering from a “decayed house” with a Jew “squatting on the
window sill,” touching an anti-Semitic sentimentalism leading to the destruction of the continent
and decadence of the human society spiritually and culturally through “a dull head among windy
spaces” (“Gerontion”). This can be considered as panopticon surveillance as well since Jewish
intelligence overcomes later Europe of the post war era. However, in this poem it is apparently
depicted as the face of dominant destitute, not only financial but cultural and humanistic as well.
This decadent mood of spirituality and humanity ensues from a rather empty space devoid of any
values which are already nullified and discredited through decades leading to the modern era as
well as early modern period when panopticon gaze gains wider ground in modern settings
through novel surveillance devices. The very continuous gaze leading to self-policing mood in
individuals turns out to be a tool shaping the mentality and identity of the target subjects to
passivize them to the desired and preplanned status. The outcome is the hollow man who forms
the main structure of the modern society with depleted humanity and spirituality.
 

The Hollow Men under Panopticon Gaze

Eliot’s “Hollow Men” displays individuals suffering from spiritual and mental derangement
resulted from the non-place created by the modern world void and deprived of any purpose or
vision of life lacking faith. The “straw” stuffed “headpieces” and “dried voices” whispering
words that are “meaningless,” “As wind in dry grass / Or rats’ feet over broken glass / In our dry
cellar …” (HM). The initial lines depict the crucial concept that pervades through the poem by
employing images that resonate the futility of the life lived by the “hollow men,” who half-exist
like shapes without form. The hollow men in the poem denote “a cavity” or “a hole inside”
(Quirk 778), which implies ‘blankness’ and ‘emptiness,’ connoting further “the lack of genuine
value or significance” (1651), referring paradoxically to “abundance” in the meantime. This can
be considered as a paradox that juxtaposes abundance and depletion as in “Headpiece filled with
straw,” which represents the individuals with stuffed minds replete with nonsensical and absurd
mentality draining their psyche making them empty and worthless. The same paradox is visible
in expressions such as “paralysed force” and “gesture without motion” which substantiate the
claim that men are mentally hollow under a supervising gaze imposing the ideology of void and
passivity on them. It is the same unnamed force that impels the metamorphosed minds forward
while they are unable to act or move paralyzed in a physical, mental and spiritual stagnation
brought about by decadence.

As in “The Waste Land”, “The Hollow Men” is also using some images to depict the
inconsistency and contradiction that has penetrated into the modern man’s mind and life in a
time after the post-World War Hades created by the ruling spirit which has rendered modern man
devoid of any spirituality and humanity in its real meaning. The references Eliot makes to spatial
and extraterrestrial images such as the Sun and Hades (or afterlife realm) highlights a “dream-
like kingdom” which is filled with smashed and scattered images of “broken column / There, is a
tree swinging / And voices are / In the wind’s singing / More distant and more solemn / Than a
fading star” (HM). The dwellers of the modern world are inaudible and invisible estranged and
alienated demon individuals that are residing within haunting terrestrial nightmares which
gradually and constantly transform their life into a hell. This vision can be considered as a
dystopian image of the modern man’s setting in which man is falling anew and buried alive,
resulting in his spiritual annihilation and alienation from the self and community devoid of
sensitivity and empathy or ability to communicate with other fellows through the nonsensical
utterances they produce as an outcome of mental and spiritual metamorphic decadence. The
ruling superego has rendered them only passive interlocutors producing incomprehensible
prayers to tellurian deities who provide them with no meaningful responses in turn.

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone. (HM)

The above lines depict men as living in the “dead land,” while, despite the hollowness making
the “[tremble] with tenderness,” they are in quest of spiritual salvation through physical
affection, that is, apart from love, all other attempts are expected to end up in mere failure. As
Spurr (1984) puts it, the hollow men in the poem apparently long for a nostalgic union that seems
to have already been lost and the emptiness and nothingness are driving them into their final
phase of destruction (54-55). Possibility and harmony, defined as the “other,” reside without the
illusory realm of the experience of the hollow men, alienated and demonstrated in terms of an
iconography, that is eyes, that are “sightless, unless” they “reappear / as the perpetual star /
multifoliate rose/ Of death’s twilight kingdom” (Helsztynski 431). Despite the hollow men’s
groping together and “[forming] prayers to broken stone,” whispering inarticulate and senseless
words, the poem probes to end up in hollow abstraction: “This is the way the world ends / Not
with a bang but a whimper” (HM).

It is worth noting that the poem follows the nature of the hollow men it depicts, through
repetition and negation, which creates a childish and mesmerizing mood which transforms the
hypnotic hollow men to robotic subjects who have lost their own distinguishing power and have
become mere blind and sightless followers of the imposed ideologies: “The eyes are not here /
There are no eyes here” (Helsztynski 432). When the above-mentioned lines are taken into
consideration, (“This is the way the world ends…”), the regular repetition of the line brings the
apocalypse of the world to the mind contributing to creation of a dreadful and gloomy mood, that
leads to moral degradation and spiritual ruin as a result of the dominant cultural and spiritual
decadence pervasive in the modern human society. The repetition of the kids’ song (“Here we go
round the prickly pear”) can be taken as an implication of the future of the world, which is
awaiting a “fading star” suggesting a failed hope in the final salvation under the immature hands
and skeptical minds giving new shape to the world with new ethical values predefined for them.

Skepticism is one of the significant outcomes of the modern panopticon gaze forming the
mentality of the subjects. Skeptic view of the cultural and ethical values, as stated in the
discussion of “The Waste Land,” is yet another motif pervading the poem, “The Hollow Men.”
The blurred perception and befuddled understanding skepticism engenders thwarts the sensitivity
and creativity of the modern man of the waste land. All this happens through the educational
system that is reshaping the youth to mold their minds into the predefined and preferred passive
robotic minds. The reformed individuals become subjects who find the borders of values blurred
which they cannot distinguish any connection “Between the conception / And the creation /
Between the emotion And the response” that are segregated by “the shadow,” of ignorance and
passivity:

Between the desire

And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends (HM)

The lines reveal the confusion and skepticism of the hollow men which is undermining his faith
and spirituality as well as humanity. A “shadow” (which can be the same skepticism and
disbelief) comes between the heavenly and abstract concept and empirical and earthly ones
creating a chasm gaping between God and man. The closing lines clearly demonstrate the
hesitation in finding a word to convey the intended signification which falls vacant and ends up
in the recurrent and repeating apocalyptic lines denoting the end of faith and the world in human
life (more spiritually). In this poem, Eliot’s despair is notable, that is, the poet prefers despair and
resignation as the sole alternatives to the thoughtless and unthinking residents of the modern
Waste Land (Spurr 51). Spurr believes that in “The Hollow Men,” the anguish of the inhabitants
is controlled by the basics of intellectual order, that is, experience is assessed in abstract terms,
distinguishing antithetical status of existence and establishing the archetype of chaos to the
illusory order of visionary experience (51-52). Eliot uses abstract concepts to depict the despair
pervasive in the Western society during and after the world war including the issues such as
ethical debasement and value decadence.

Prufrock in “The Waste Land”

In “The Wasteland”, the reader finds a dystopia which is different from the dystopic settings
created by mythical sources. The Wasteland is the aftermath of human actions which gradually
deteriorated human ethics as well as the supernatural values. One of the elemental features of
modernism is discarding traditions and values upon which human ethics and values are founded
without offering a reliable platform to reconstruct a new substitute foundation. A similar
atmosphere is detectable in Prufrock as well, a vein which discourages the protagonist to thwart
his own action which is supposed to be taken but never finds itself in any proximity of
enactment. Marie’s memories of her childhood and older days in the Wasteland are recounted as
golden old days, however, already over, not because of any external exotic forces, but from
within, being racial preference, when she is asked from, the speaker emphasizes on her own race,
rather than any other values.

The established standards can from time to time lead to self-destruction of the subjects as a result
of the determined policies by the power holders. Since the subjects are transformed into self-
policing robotic figures, they are mesmerized to automatically tune their own mentality and
conduct to feel more acceptable into the ruling system. As it is agreed upon by modernist
scholars, such as Eliot and Arthur Miller3, modern era is a time when spirituality and humanity
were stepped upon and crushed down by inhumane boots that resulted in the two destructive
World Wars to undermine the ethics and humanity of human beings in a way that is believed as
unprecedented in the history of human in its scope and impact. The decaying body of Phlebas the
Phoenician is an extension of the Gerontion kicked off at the sett-off of the new century by
annihilating the human values inherited from the older generations and substituting them with
the newly defined ones. This trend is also visible in the flashback Marie recounts from her
childhood days when she felt free “in the mountains”:

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

3
Arthur Miller’s (1915-2005) Death of a Salesman (1949) is a modernist view of the modern man in which he is
diminished into a mesmerized panoptic figure who lives in his cocoon of earthly values based on capitalism.
 Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. (WL)

In these lines, entertainment is accompanied by reading which symbolizes intellectuality and

verve of learning. Reading makes mind think critically, a trend that may create rebellious citizens
through time. However, in later decades of the modern century “a heap of broken images” has
littered the setting of the modern man. The images form the atmosphere in which modern man is
shaping and reshaping his own image and identity accordingly to be tuned to the norms set by
the power holders. Furthermore, the self-destructive decadent bodies demonstrate the extreme
nationalistic heat which leads to self-annihilation detected in “The Wasteland” and “The Hollow
Men”. This is in direct contradiction with Eliot’s intellectual characterizations refuting the
squalid alteration of the body which is only redeemable via spiritual discipline, barred by the
constant staring observation of the panopticon gaze over the recent generations forming their
psyche through the fabricated superego dominating individuals in masses. Hence, “The Waste
Land” is not considered as a happy poem pervaded with racial, political and sexual anxieties
ensued from spiritually decadent body only, but also a decadent cultural body that is physically
leading to the tragic destruction of humanity. The anti-Semitic subhuman image of the landlord
as depicted in “Gerontion,” is a harbinger to the inhumane Waste Land, which is now a cradle
for all the above anxieties.

The intense version of inhumane decadent modern man is depicted in the intercourse we witness
in in the violent rape scene of Philomel, as well as the typist, either literally or figuratively, of
which the ultimate outcome leads to the same point (Lockerd 2016). In Query’s words, Eliot’s
depiction of sexuality in his poetry is never “something untroubled, natural, and life-affirming”
(Query 351). To Query, Eliot’s verse is abundantly saturated with sex images as troubling and
troubled. However, what is ignored in this argument is that Eliot’s poetry depicts sexuality that
can be healthy only outside the modern setting of the unreal city devoid of any physical and
spiritual maturity characterized by degradation and spiritual disappointment a well as panopticon
gaze. Conversely, the corruption depicted in Eliot’s verse exceeds physical boundaries and enters
into spiritual and mental realms, despite its apparent manifestations in the physical life of the
inhabitants of London who are currently residing in self-created turmoil. The spiritual and mental
consternation is pervading the streets of the city ending in confusion about the future of the
inhabitants as delineated in the following lines:

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?” 

“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street 
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow? 
“What shall we ever do?” 

The broken marital loyalty is evident in the lines where Lil is awaiting her husband to come back
from the battle front. The speaker encourages her to make herself look “smart” and more
attractive to her man and is asking about the money Albert, her husband, had given for her teeth,
but she has spent it somewhere else, that is abortion. She is now warned if she doesn’t satisfy her
husband after four years coming back home, “there’s others will” (WL). The antique look Lil is
wearing is justified by herself as coming from the “pills” she has taken “to bring it off,” abortion,
which was meant to avoid having offspring. This can be one of the symptoms of modern era
when family is also under threat of being dismantled through extramarital intercourse and
avoiding having children who might limit the parents to their family. In reality, the war in “The
Wasteland” seems to have meant to serve as purgative to cleanse the corrupted citizen spirits
proceeded solely to expedite the civilizational and spiritual decline. However, there is usually a
hope in Eliot’s dystopic panopticon settings regarding the destructive decline which believes that
“[t]here will be time to murder and create” (Prufrock) anew. In his Revisiting The Waste Land
(2005), Lawrence Rainey reiterates the difficulty of interpretations and making clear sense of
Eliot’s verse, which wanders the reader among its lines despite the “magnificent” style he is
utilizing, as he calls Eliot’s work as “Immense, Magnificent, Terrible” (128).

In the fourth section of “The Waste Land”, “Death by Water,” Eliot continues into a new account
with a narrator who is not sufficiently clear for the audience. The death of Phlebas is another
representation of deterioration of the old values which leads to the decadence of morality and
humanity in the rest of the account under the mesmerizing gaze of the penetrating ideological
transformational alterations in the ethical settings of the subjects. In reaction to Seamus Heaney’s
expression which labels the world of “The Waste Land” as “profit-and-loss people of the city of
London,” Eliot modifies the course of the story from a decadence condemned to be the final
phase of humanity and introduces another revival plot for the story course (Heaney 37), saving
the Elpis4 for the possible salvation of mankind. Hence, Phlebas turns out to be the “handsome
and tall” offspring of an ancient empire playing the role of the sole reasonable and courageous
character in the course line of the poem defying the panopticon gaze. “Phlebas the Phoenician” is
dear for “a fortnight,” and has “forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell / And the profit and
loss.” This can be taken as a contrast between traditional and modern values that, in Phlebas’
case, is referring to a purgatory process which refines him physically and mentally as the Lethe
purifying the dead souls in Plato’s myth of Er before reincarnation. However, the deep
metamorphosis has already occurred in the identity and psyche of the modern man through the
stare of the panopticon gaze diminishing him to a Prufrock constricted into his own mental world
divorced from the world without as a result of the lost confidence in the self, like … the evening
… spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table (Prufrock).

In the section titled “What the Thunder Said” in “The Waste Land”, the narrative course turns
back to lack of living again, but this available living is now leading to dying, not only a physical
death, but a spiritual stillness which is reflected in the nature around as well, as reflected in the
utilized imagery affecting the inanimate phenomena:

Here is no water but only rock 

Rock and no water and the sandy road 
The road winding above among the mountains 
Which are mountains of rock without water 
If there were water we should stop and drink 
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think 
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand 

4
Personification of Hope in Greek mythology after Pandora let out all the maladies but entrapped Hope at the last
moment by closing the jar door.
The rock reflects the petrified nature of human mind which has converted him into a non-
thinking robotic automaton mainly through the ruling superego which has led the humanity into
decadence as a consequence of putrefaction from within. Eliot makes the salvation conditional
from the spiritual self-destruction resulted from transformation of identity and mentality by the
power holders through panoptic surveillance and imposing fabricated values on the subjects. For
Eliot the citizens of London (and human being in general) are stagnated “amongst the rock” with
their “feet … in the sand”. This is what gaze has brought about consternating the inhabitants of
the modern world through depredating the humanity of the earlier times. All this could reverse
“If there were water” “But there is no water” (WL); and hence, no visible hope for salvation
despite the wish for it by Eliot and some of his characters.

The last section of “The Waste Land” initiates with the stillness and decadence that has taken up
the whole civilization. The images employed in this section retain the effect of the self-
destruction prevailing the earlier sections in the poem although the imagery implicitly refutes the
self-destructive death desire applicable to the manipulation of mind and identity in panoptical
setting. Instead of offering an immediate recuperation tool for the current decadence, Eliot puts
the way out on a long course which might need more durable struggle for salvation. However,
the salvation that intrudes into the context in the final section comes apparently from without
“Western culture” rather than from “within,” that is from “tentative principles of moral structure”
with Hindu and Sanskrit values which form the Eastern spiritual traditions and ancient beliefs
(Levenson 205), something that European inhabitants are believed to have lost the course based
on them as echoing in the “murmur of maternal lamentation” swarming in “hooded hordes.” The
whole, mainly Western civilization incarnated in “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna
London,” enshrouded in the image of the “falling towers,” has turned into “unreal,” that exists
only in the mind of the subjects rather than in reality. “The empty chapel” is foreshadowing lack
of spirituality in the society. However, the spiritual advices by the thunder are intermingled with
the falling towers and bridges, an image that warns a too late reversal action although, as
mentioned earlier, Eliot leaves a room for salvation despite the lack of window in the chapel with
“dry bones” that “can harm no one” anymore, leaving religion in desperate passive stagnation
too.

Conclusion
This article investigates the notions of panopticon and gaze in the recent history line to trace the
formation of cultural values and identity of subjects in a modern context which form the mental
status and living shape of them as individuals ruled by the fabricated superego powers in a
preferred way by the power holders. Bentham’s Panopticon gaze system provides the subjects
with illusory monitoring mechanism and non-places to drive them toward more self-policing
system in which individuals monitor their own behaviors to adjust them to the predefined values
by the ruling ideological systems. The divorce of modern man from the traditionally long
adopted values by discarding humanity and spirituality, paves the way to another fall as depicted
in “The Waste Land” of T. S. Eliot. However, the delineated waste land has its roots in his other
poems which give form to the mentality and identity of the individuals in those contexts which
can be taken as precursors to the apocalyptic waste land. The analysis of Eliot other poems such
as “The Hollow Men,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and “Gerontion” substantiates the
claim that the modern dystopic environment has been created through the panopticon gaze
through the late centuries leading to the two world wars
Eliot gives credit to this kind of discipline which can pave the way to rebirth or reincarnation and
ultimate tranquility that goes beyond human comprehension. Yet Eliot’s preference is not a
definite solution to the current spiritual mess and destruction. He looks at the spiritual discipline
as Elpis to salvation while giving special credit to the necessity of the balance that is believed to
exist between life, death and reincarnation. For Eliot, the salvation from the current turmoil of
the decadent spirituality and humanity resides in a kind of resurrection that has been promised in
the Scriptures and other sources coming down from pagan ideological systems from the ancient
world. The spiritual corruption threatens to annihilate the demo and the polis altogether, while
Eliot, although hesitatingly, hopes for imperfect purgation that is available in spiritual
enlightenment, in the first place, and then bodily resurrection as a consequence to that, while
freeing the self from the ever-impending gaze that metamorphizes the spirit and mind of
individual and masses. His attempt was to create a way to recuperate the despair scarring the face
of the modern life and replace it with the hope for spiritual salvation. However this despair
remained in Eliot’s verse and the decadent body did not disappear from Eliot’s work even after
“The Waste Land” and his later turn to Anglo-Catholicism, in poems such as “Ash Wednesday”
that are pervaded with depiction of destruction that is due to the spiritual corruption, as a result
of identity and self-policing cultural misconstruction, and the possibility of spiritual and physical
resurrection is only a “hint half guessed, the gift half understood” (“The Dry Salvages”).

Panopticon gaze is an effective tool in permeating and shaping the mentality of individuals
through self-policing methods which leads finally to formation of mentality and identity molded
by the dominant superego. The superego is the ideology constructed by the ruling power holders
who define values anew for their contemporary subjects apart from the traditionally approved
ones through past generations. In the early modern era, the very innovation of values simply led
to misconstruction of mentalities as well as humanity values and, ultimately, to alienation of man
and his spiritual depredation. It is the panopticon gaze through creating non-places that lead to
marginalizing the citizens not fully tuned to the propagated values and cycles. For Eliot, man has
lost his spirituality, however, it has occurred though identity crisis which is believed to enshroud
modern man in the new era. Sometimes Eliot hopes for a kind of salvation which is not know
from where it may come. It might be reincarnation after death or reimbursement of the lost
spirituality through metamorphosis, which has transformed the inhabitants of the wasteland into
living dead figures and mesmerized and passive robotic citizen as witnessed in Prufrock and The
Waste Land.