“The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” opens with a warning that is promptly ignored by teachers of literature: with the first proper line of “Let us go then, you and I,” the reader is warned that while they are invited to accompany the speaker, they are also separate from the speaker and should not over-identify with the speaker. This allows the speaker to obfuscate things that they (he) cannot bear to confess while students often learn to accept what they are told as if it is sincere.
Prufrock has an odd feature, though: the details that were not divulged are available as “Prufrock’s Pervigilum” disclosing how the streets the speakers follows go into seedy parts of the city, his sojourn in the red-light district, and a possibly drug-induced delirium. The intentional omission perhaps makes the speaker more sympathetic to a wider audience who would cast moral judgment on prolonged exposure such activities (but gloss over the terse euphemism of “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels” and was removed from the manuscript prior to publication after Eliot consulted with another writer), but is an ironic retreat from the epigraph, sourced from Dante’s Inferno, which concludes that no discussion is off-limits (translated: “I can answer you with no fear of infamy.”), a point confirmed by the speaker’s insistence that we “do not ask, ‘What is it?’” since “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” anyway. This reversal suggests that the speaker has unresolved ambivalence about his social standing: he will allude to taking actions that endanger his social status, but never directly act on or against his social status.
The speaker’s ambivalence about his social status is visible in the streets he is in: “Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,” and “I have gone at dusk through narrow streets…” Considering the street as a transitional space from one place to another, the street also becomes a threat to social order. As Mary Douglas draws on Van Gennep in Purity and Danger:
Van Gennep had more sociological insight. He saw society as a house with rooms and corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous. Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, ch 6
There are two layers of social danger. The first danger is that there is a rogue element, an element that is not in its proper place, that does not have a proper place, that cannot honorably fulfill its social function because its social function is undefined. Douglas notes that in the best case “These are people who are somehow left out in the patterning of society, who are placeless. They may be doing nothing morally wrong, but their status is indefinable” while also noting that the temporarily-outcast may interact with society as “dangerous criminal characters.” The second danger, the danger Douglas focused on, is that of pollution: the disordered element spreads disorder, pollution, or entropy to adjacent elements that were properly ordered. The apparent potential of an interloper to compromise a social structure is a subtle but longer-lasting danger to other participants in that social structure.
The speaker, Alfred, feels caught between a stifling over-ordered, too-predictable life and his inability to change. While he despairs that “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” and that “I have known the eyes already, known them all” and the soporific and anesthesial effects of excess structure, he also doubts his ability to break out of his situation. When faced with the possibility of being cast down from his social position, “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker … And in short, I was afraid.” This internal conflict results in his dishonorable behavior; he’s trying to provoke major consequences so that he doesn’t have to take any major action.
It is a mixed blessing for Prufrock that he will be thwarted. His lower associations aren’t meaningless, but his attempts to scandalize them will be defused. As Douglas describes:
To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power. … It seems that if a person has no place in the social system and is therefore a marginal being, all precaution against danger must come from others.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, ch 6
Thus while Prufrock wants to assert power drawn from marginal or liminal experience—hence the choice of “I am Lazarus, come from the dead”—his provocations are deflected by the defenders of social order (“one, settling a pillow by her head”) claiming misunderstanding: “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.” As a society woman of circa 1912, she will tolerate Prufrock’s piquant provocations because the perks of her position in the social order are predicated by his presence. The danger to the social structure that Prufrock is trying to embody will be neutralized.
The defense of compartmentalized social order over accountability is a common organizational behavior. In Leadership BS, Jeffery Pfeffer describes how leaders and executives prefer to ignore or even cover for each others’ abuses of power rather than risk exposing their own behaviors to scrutiny or their position to insurrection. Looking back to Van Gennep’s structural depiction of society, people in a particular social station—a room, as it were—are far more likely to redress conflicts or offenses within their social structure rather than risk compromising the integrity of their social structure by (figuratively) defenestrating the offender. Indeed, the act of defenestration has a long history of secondary effects from which the powerful might learn that their first duty is to defend their position and their peers far ahead of the secondary objective of honorably discharging their duties.
The open question is how Alfred got into his position in the first place. After all, he asserts that he is “not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Prufrock’s suggestion that he “should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” instead alludes to the unassuming smallness of a crab in the ocean, but is also notable because crustaceans are aberrant creatures in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Douglas notes that the consistent thread of “abominations of Leviticus are the obscure unclassifiable elements which do not fit the pattern of the cosmos”—for example, scuttling instead of swimming in water—and this makes them “incompatible with holiness and blessing.” That is, despite being flooded by social privilege as a (almost certainly white) man, Prufrock is unable to intentionally exercise or even really acknowledge that privilege in any meaningful way. Furthermore, the structural value his patriarchy-oriented privilege conveys on his person actually works against him; he is “pinned and wriggling on the wall” as somebody else’s trophy.
The twofold irony of the Hamlet reference is not only that Hamlet was also only protected from the consequences of his offenses against the social order by his princely privilege, but also that Prufrock’s lack of awareness on this point demonstrates that his privilege is unearned: while “the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo,” Prufrock’s lack of intellectual refinement blunts his ability to engage as an equal, rendering him a hapless victim of his social station.
To return to the previous question of how Alfred got there in the first place, Pfeffer also explains that social status is conferred on people not because of what they have done so much as in anticipation of what they will do. The corollary of this is the Peter principle: that people will move up from positions where they are capable until they are promoted—in full anticipation of continued success—into a position where they are incompetent. Thus we end up with Alfred whose white-male privilege made people anticipate his future success and positioned him in a social role that he, with telling-but-sincere ineptitude, disavows. The social order will protect Prufrock whether he wants it to or not, as well as many managers and executives, but few people can be happy when they know they have been elevated beyond their ability to thrive.
Indeed, unable to thrive in his position, Prufrock instead attempts to defect against it: this is what he wants the reader to know. But the immensity of the social structure that sterilizes his growth also sterilizes his self-sabotage as is obvious to a reader who understands the women’s position. The key question that Prufrock’s incapability prevents him from asking is: what else could he bring back from the margins?
Recall that Douglas observed that “To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power” and indeed Prufrock himself has observed many things (“lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows”) but since his intent is to engage in repulsive behavior he doesn’t recognize the potential for connective power in everything he sees. His inability to see past his self-loathing closes off his potential for growth.
Conversely, Fitzgerald’s depiction of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby was a man who would cross unsavory boundaries in pursuit of new opportunities and made a point of blurring boundaries to cultivate personal connections. It is doubly-telling that Tom, as the defender of the old-money elites, is not just Jay’s antagonist, but also that he handles the final conflict between them not by referring the matter to the police—a structural force—but by instead sending George. By not recognizing the authority of law, Tom (and Daisy) preserve the social power structure that insulates them from consequences. Thus, when narrator Nick asserts that
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 170
…he is only correct from the outside. Tom and Daisy are actually being quite care-ful inside their social structure to preserve their position, that’s the “whatever it was that kept them together” that Nick doesn’t understand. That’s what the late conversation over cold chicken was functionally doing: Tom was feeling his social position was at risk for the entire book, but Daisy’s vehicular manslaughter brought their social position into crisis. They came together for mutual defense and defended their position against the interloper trying to join their position from the social margins.
But Fitzgerald’s choice of George as an implement is also interesting here: George is perhaps one of Alfred’s lonely men in shirt-sleeves, or the redacted drunk, but to Tom—Tom, who will not sell George a car to flip lest George improve his social station—George is an instrument to be used toward an end. So even though Tom is defending his status quo position, he–like Jay–also engages in limited transgression of social boundary, to both demonstrate and increase his social power.
If Prufrock were able to understand his position, he would be able to bring back more from the streets than scandalous tales that he’s afraid to tell. But he does not understand his position and so he grows old and ignored while the women, who have more social consciousness and capability than he does, act in ways he does not understand. While we know of Prufrock’s indiscretions, the women around him have discreetly told us nothing.