Perhaps the central image of his anxiety is his being "pinned and wriggling on the wall" (58) under the unflinching gaze of women (exacerbated since the women's eyes, much like their "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare", seem eerily disconnected from their bodies). ![]() The original title of the poem was "Prufrock Among the Women," and Prufrock, as a balding, weak, neurotic, effete intellectual, is both baffled and intimidated by women. The rest of the poem is a catalogue of Prufrock's inability to act he does not, "after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis" (79-80). ![]() Eliot intended Prufrock's name to resound of a "prude" in a "frock," and the hero's emasculation shows up in a number of physical areas: "his arms and legs are thin" (44) and, notably, "his hair is growing thin" (41). Indeed, Prufrock's paralysis revolves around his social and sexual anxieties, the two usually tied together. Alfred Prufrock." Parodically, because Prufrock's paralysis is not over murder and the state of a corrupt kingdom, but whether he should "dare to eat a peach" (122) in front of high-society women. Shakespeare's Hamlet is the paragon of paralysis unable to sort through his waffling, anxious mind, Hamlet makes a decisive action only at the end of "Hamlet." Eliot parodically updates Hamlet's paralysis to the modern world in " The Love Song of J. Paralysis, the incapacity to act, has been the Achilles heel of many famous, mostly male, literary characters.
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