Her conversation with her husband portrays her as somewhat pathetic. While we may be slightly persuaded to pity her or feel for her, it appears that she is desperately over emotional, “My nerves are bad tonight…Stay with me. / Speak to me.” This shows us her insecurities in that she requires someone to stay with her and keep her company. She feels she cannot be alone. We may see her to some extent as a rather self-destructive character. The way she doesn’t wait for a reply from her husband shows us that she immediately looks too deeply into things. She assumes there is a reason why her husband is not responding straight away, “Why do you never speak? Speak”.
Here, we see similar characteristics that we see in J. Alfred Prufrock. Both are neurotic, self destructive and internally frustrated. Prufrock suggests that the women that he meets at tea parties will be judging him and making fun of his looks and clothes, “They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’” This may suggest that while Eliot chooses to attack the role of women in this way throughout this passage, he has the consensus that it is in fact men and women of this class that seem to share the same insecure negative qualities.
The form of this half of the poem seems to be mostly in blank verse, however, as the poem continues the line length and meter of the poem seem to get more irregular and less predictable. This mirrors the insecurity of the woman once we are introduced to her direct speech. Eliot only provides us with her side of the conversation in direct speech, which may suggest that the husband here is in connection with the narrator. The increasing irregularity creates the effect of deterioration; this might imply that the woman is losing her stability in life.
Eliot uses great hyperbolic language when describing her surroundings, creating a vivid image of this woman’s over exaggerated purchases, as said before, arguably to compensate for her inability to express what she really feels. This is accompanied with similes such as “like a burnished throne” which further adds to the woman’s expensive taste and allows us to imagine her in her rich and almost royal environment. Use of words such as “drowned” give us a real feeling of perhaps not only what the reader ought to imagine any guest in that room would feel, but debatably what this woman is also feeling as a result of her sterile, worthless life and although she finds all these items visually gratifying, in the end, they are no replacement for any form of real meaning in her life.
Throughout the second half of this passage, Eliot takes a look at the much poorer woman who, on the surface, perhaps seems a little simpler than the previous woman in the passage. Here we are given the story of a couple, Lil and Albert. The speaker tells us of how Albert is returning from the war and that she has told Lil that Albert will have wanted her to get some new teeth before he returns because she is looking too “antique, (And her only thirty-one)”. Lil exclaims that she would have bought new teeth had it not been for the pills she needed in order to induce an abortion as she nearly died from her fifth child and Albert “won’t leave her alone”.
The information in this passage may come across as shocking and deplorable to the readers, perhaps opening their eyes to what the real lower class is like. Eliot doesn’t hold back in terms of details about Lil and it makes it rather blunt. Lil’s friend seems rather unsympathetic towards her and somewhat impatient about Lil’s attitude towards getting new teeth and having an abortion. Lil’s friend thinks that there is no sympathy for Lil as she shouldn’t have got married if she didn’t want children. With the lack of pity from Lil’s friend and the shocking details, the reader may be made to feel sorry for Lil and the position she is in.
Eliot presents this woman in contrast to the woman in the first half of the passage. Here, we see that Lil is uncultured and is faced with rapid ageing, something that we assume to be no issue for the other woman, with all her money. Eliot also compares both women to specific women from literature. In the first section, there are brief references to Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, “like a burnished throne”, in which Cleopatra ends up committing suicide. In the second half of the passage, Eliot makes references to Ophelia’s last speech in Hamlet, another female character to commit suicide. This shows that, although the two women in Eliot’s poem are both very different, perhaps they have certain aspects of despair in common. It seems that Lil has tried to do everything right by her husband, and yet she isn’t leading a very happy life.
Eliot uses colloquial dialect for this half of the poem, emphasising the distinction between the higher and lower societies. He adds a sort of refrain from the barman of “Hurry up please it’s time”, informing us of the setting for this conversation and also giving a sense of regularity about it, amongst the irregular meter and structure. The refrain gets more frequent towards the end of the section, hence the woman saying her goodbyes. There is no regular rhyme or meter used here, which creates a more realistic effect for the reader, perhaps making it appear more believable because its more like a real conversation. The repeated use of “I said” and “he said” emphasises the colloquial dialogue that is occurring throughout, reminding the reader that the characters are from the lower class.
Overall, Eliot seems to be criticising women throughout this poem for what seems to be the ever-changing influences of society. Clearly with the second woman, she is influenced to have five children even though she possibly didn’t want them and the first woman has become highly neurotic and self destructive due to her lack of expression.
These ideas about women seem to be reflected throughout other works of Eliot, especially in Portrait of a Lady. Here we see the same neurotic, frantic woman that we see in the first half of A Game of Chess. However, one difference here is that the woman in Portrait of a Lady seems to a lot more confident on the surface than the women of A Game of Chess appear to be. The relationship with her male friend, however, does appear to have the same insecurities that the first woman had, forever asking what he is thinking and acknowledges that they haven’t progressed into friends, “You hardly know when you are coming back”.
In conclusion, Eliot seems to portray women in very negative way and seems to be somewhat criticising society through the roles of these women from both higher and lower class. However, we see that, although it is only attacking women in these poems, it is perhaps a more general attack on society as a whole as oppose to just the female population. We note this throughout The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock where Eliot mocks the same insecure and self-destructive characteristics of the male population. Overall, Eliot condemns the progression of the human race into a corrupt and disintegrating society.
