The Waste Land and Rape Culture Anonymous College

Rape ruins women’s lives. Rape is a weapon. It is used to manufacture female fear factory – a collective socialization of females to accept the ever-presence of rape most often by being invited to be vigilant. It traumatizes. It scars. The perpetrators are often characterized by a chilling absence of remorse. The sexist and misogynistic feelings of entitlement of the female body for the sexual consumption of the heterosexual man informs the point-of-view that The Waste Land uses as a point of departure. The long-term effects of rape on survivors as wounding are perpetually prevalent, a site of ceaseless trauma.

The depiction of sexual assault, specifically rape, is handled so dangerously and problematically in Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) poem. The Waste Land should come with a trigger warning, a trigger being the physiological reaction to one’s brain when reliving terror and fear. It is not merely discomfort, upset, but the body flipping all the danger switches and screaming that one is at risk again. A warning is not a courtesy but common decency to warn someone before you (potentially) harm them. So as to allow the reader to engage literature of any mode safely, so that he/she/they have an option to...