33730 Beyond beauty: The skin as a site of exposure, merging, and multiplicity in Modernist poetry

From ancient mythology through contemporary art, the skin and hair have long served as surfaces of polarized symbolism, delineating good/evil, god/monster, hero/villain. Following dermatology’s “age of enlightenment,” Modernist poetry of the early 20th century combusted narrative cohesion and archetypal duality. In the work of T.S. Eliot and Anne Spencer, disruptions of the cutaneous landscape unfold across fragmented time, space, and subject to create multiple iterations of meaning. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Prufrock’s “bald spot” (mirroring Eliot’s own alopecia) renders him subject of another’s narrative—“the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase...: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)” The hair’s discontinuity becomes a site of exposure upon which narrative multiplies across the narrator, those around him, and the writer. The description of the “carbuncular” clerk in The Waste Land invokes several images at once: a cluster of infect(ed/ious) furuncles and a ruborous, radiant gemstone. This dermatologic ailment in context merges the grotesque, the beautiful, the mundane. A similar concatenation emerges in Spencer’s “At the Carnival,” whose subject is the beautiful “Girl-of-the-Diving-Tank” in the grotesque setting of the carnival. The girl resembles an Anigride “Naiad,” bestowing “vibrant health” upon “itching flesh.” However, she cannot remain nymph-like as the “years...seep into [her] soul/The bacilli of the usual.” By recognition of mutual skin, porous and permeable to the exterior and to time, the narrator finds herself in the subject, and so the heavenly, the grotesque, and the regular mingle.