Greek Models in T. S. Eliot's 'The Family Reunion'

With the demise of T. S. Eliot, the world of English literature lost a staunch and resolute advocate of the Greek tradition in modern literature. The precise interaction between this tradition in which the poet believed so firmly and his own five verse dramas proves it amply.

Murder in the Cathedral, written for the Canterbury Festival of 1935 and The Family Reunion are case in point. No wonder, in 1941 Eliot was invited to become the president of the Classical Association and his presidential address delivered at Easter 1942 was also entitled The Classics and the Man of Letters.

In the course of his lecture Eliot remarked: "It should be apparent that our prime concern in considering the education of the man of letters is not the amount of learning which a man acquires, or the degree of scholastic distinction which he attains-what is of prime importance is the type of education within which his schooling falls... Shakespeare's education, what he had of it, belongs in the same tradition as that of Milton: it was essentially a classical education."

Eliot goes on to observe: "Without knowing any Latin you may write English poetry; I am not sure whether without Latin you can wholly understand it " Same may be said about his views on the knowledge of Greek Classic literature.

The eminent Liberal statesman Lord Samuel chose to discuss Eliot's plays in the course of his Presidential Address to the Classical Association in 1953. He remarked, "Mr. Eliot tells us, in his published lecture on Poetry and Drama, that his play The Family Reunion was founded on the Orestes myth in Aeschylus and The Cocktail Party on the Alcestis of Euripides ... For all their literary skill and dramatic interest, both plays leave a feeling of disappointment. The climaxes do not grip.

The Greeks were genuinely interested in the Eumenides, Ananke, and the like; but we are not ready to believe they have anything to do with what may be going on today at a family gathering in a country-house in the north of England or at a lively cocktail party in London. It is noteworthy, however, and perhaps significant as a sign of the times, that precisely the same tendency is to be found simultaneously among some of the principal dramatists in France."

T S Eliot observed, "I do not know whether it is pertinent for your purpose to call attention to the uses made of Greek drama on the contemporary French stage. The first important example within my memory was Jean Cocteau's La Machine Infernale, a new version in contemporary French idiom of Oedipus Tyrannus. He was followed by other dramatists, notably Giraudoux, and more recently, Anouilh in Antigone, as well as Sartre in Les Mouches, but the method of all these French dramatists is in some ways diametrically the opposite of mine. They have retained the names of the original characters and stuck rather more closely to the plots of the original dramatists, the innovation being merely that the characters talk as if they were contemporary French people, and in some cases employ what one might call anachronistic allusions to modern life.

The method that has appealed to me has been rather to take merely the situation of a Greek play as a starting point, with wholly modern characters, and develop it according to the workings of my own mind. The chief aim of this piece is to observe precisely how these workings of Eliot's mind in fact developed with each one of his themes in his plays including The Family Reunion and to show that how he used Greek plays as a starting-point.

In The Family Reunion, we have an elaboration of the plot of Aeschylus' Choephoroe. A full analysis scene by scene will not be necessary for this comparison: it will be sufficient to compare the outline of the two plots. The reader will recall that in the Choephoroe Clytemnestra has had a bad dream and therefore is sending offerings to appease the ghost of Agamemnon, the husband she had murdered with the aid of her lover Aegisthus.

Whilst Electra, her daughter prays that Agamemnon may be avenged, Orestes and Pylades are waiting to introduce themselves. Electra and Orestes recognize one another, and brother and sister at once concert a plan to avenge their father. Orestes then calls on Clytemnestra, pretending to be a stranger from Daulis sent by Strophius to Argos on the errand of reporting Orestes' death in a chariot race.

When she sends out Aegisthus for further details, Orestes slays him. He then slays his mother too, urged on by Pylades his friend. However, once his mother is slain, the young prince beholds the Eumenides, who constrain him to depart, though remaining invisible to the chorus. This chorus is composed of women of Argos, while the remaining characters are Orestes' old nurse, who is sent to tell Aegisthus the supposed news, and the servant who first admits the supposed Daulian messenger to the palace and then runs to tell Clytemnestra that Orestes has slain Aegisthus.

How does Eliot use this plot as his starting-point for The Family Reunion? Believing that the Furies have caused the hero to murder his mother as much as they enforce his departure, Eliot determines to treat each aspect separately in his Orestes, Harry, Earl Monchensey. He is returning after years abroad for the birthday of his mother, Amy, Dowager Countess Monchensey.

The false accident of Aeschylus' tale becomes two real motor accidents which prevent Harry's brothers Arthur and John from reaching Wishwood for the occasion. Harry himself had murdered his wife by pushing her overboard in mid Atlantic, and is thus pursued by Furies visible only to him and his faithful chauffeur Downing. Unlike Clytemnestra, Amy wishes her son to come home, and his departure at the urging of the Furies occasions her fatal seizure.

Again, Eliot divides the fixations of Electra on her dead father and her absent brother between two characters. The latter duty is given Harry's cousin Mary, his childhood playmate, who now lives with Amy as a companion poor relation. The former function is discharged by Agatha, Amy's younger sister, a retired headmistress who was Monchensey's beloved before Amy's mental cruelty finally caused his death when Harry was still a small boy.

Aegisthus is replaced by the more innocuous figure of Amy's medical adviser and confidant, Dr. Warburton, whom she asks to dinner in the hope that he can prescribe for Harry's unsettled nerves.

The role of the Aeschylean chorus is shared by Harry's two uncles Gerald and Charles Piper and his aunts Violet and Ivy. Denman the parlor maid replaces Clytemnestra's manservant, while the old policeman whom Harry knew as a boy, Sergeant Winchell, has the function of the old nurse of Orestes.

Finally the chauffeur Downing, who takes Harry away in the last act, replaces some of the functions of the faithful friend Pylades in Aeschylus. So it is that in The Family Reunion the model for the plot is obscured from immediate view by the combined effect of the doubling of several roles and incidents, the division of the choral duties between four characters, and exchange of sex between two of the minor parts. Again, the motive for such modification is the desire to work out implications in the original tale which are of no concern to Aeschylus.

The general method of Eliot's dramatic adaptations from the Greek is to begin by asking some questions implicit in the play and then revise and develop the plot in modern terms in order to raise these issues. In consequence, some roles are rendered two or threefold to survey their different implications, while others which become less important in the new structure are combined or merged.

For the same reason there is a tendency to double the events or situations of the original play. Further, as gods, kings, and heroes walk the Greek tragic stage, Eliot takes care that his main characters are similarly well-bred and well-connected in their modern contexts. Finally, though in The Family Reunion the Greek unities of time and place are carefully observed, the later plays allow more latitude.

Lastly, Greek drama frequently embodied comment on current affairs. Though this function is most evident in Comedy, its presence in Tragedy cannot wholly be ignored. Therefore it is probable that Eliot would also have wished to redevelop this aspect of his Greek models; and his plays seem susceptible of such interpretation.

The speeches of the Knights in 1935 are also the speeches of the Age of Appeasement, of that 'National' Government which abetted Franco's Fascists and countenanced the invasion of Abyssinia under the HoareLaval pact. Murder in the Cathedral criticizes such things by implication, and finds them displeasing to God.

Again, The Family Reunion does not merely express the workings of the family curse of Wishwood: it is the guilt of the depression, of the abdication crisis, and, above all, of Munich which haunts the conscience of Harry's generation. In 1949 The Cocktail Party offers the choices of the days of post-war austerity. Does a man run away or does he face the call of duty, whether it bring routine tasks or martyrdom? The Confidential Clerk is the play of Coronation Year, full of hope and of a reconciliation brightened by richer understanding of life and experience.

Finally, The Elder Statesman is the post-Suez play, belonging to a day when Britain, like Claverton, has retired from active leadership and can only escape the unhappy legacies of the past by a similar total honesty. The play ends with a mood of peaceful acceptance and a serenity which the poet perhaps desired both for himself and his adopted country.

Perhaps Eliot has put his own view of the significance of the models he chose, in more telling language than any literary scholar can presume to coin, in the fifth canto of East Coker:

And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate-but there is no competition-

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

Equivalents between Aeschylus' Greek Play Choephoroe and Eliot's The Family Reunion:

1. Orestes : Harry, Earl Monchensey (and Arthur and John)

2. Chorus of Captive Women: Ivy and Violet+ Gerald and Charles

3. Electra : Agatha and Mary

4. Nurse : Sergeant Winchell

5. Clytemnestra : Amy, Dowager Countess Monchensey

6. Aegisthus: Dr. Warburton

7. Serving man: Denman, a parlour maid

8. Pylades : Downing, the chauffeur

(Acknowledgements: THE DRAMAS OF T. S. ELIOT AND THEIR GREEK MODELS : R. G. TANNER)

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Design in T. S. Eliot's 'The Family Reunion'

The work of art is by its very name a single construct. However intricate or complicated in detail, it is essentially one thing. A valid criticism of a work is to say that its form is obscure or contradictory. It is fair to demand of the writer, "Explain this form. What did you mean by it?"And the only acceptable answer from the writer (or the critic who ventures to speak in his stead) is that he had to use a particular form, however complex and subtle, to put over the whole complex and subtle experience which was his meaning.I would like to re-examine

T.S. Eliot's play The Family Reunion in light of this statement-a play which was written exactly fifty years ago and yet speaks in the most contemporary modulation. Present-day readers of the play-it is rarely performed-are likely to come away from the text with one of two convictions: that this work, like Ulysses, is perfectly justified in its form, and as closely organized as a Bach fugue or it contains too many riddles and perplexities recalcitrant to any sensible design, and that it is therefore a failure as a work of art.

For example, one may ask, are the various levels of the plot really unified, or do they in the end stand resistant to reconciliation? Are the Eumenides any more than a melodramatic device that the author himself later repudiated? Doesn't the Greek framework finally limit Eliot's vision? Aren't both the language and structure of play gratuitously poetic in a manner more tedious than telling? For the reader who asks such questions, I shall undertake in this paper to trace and reveal the design - "the significant form"-which gives the play its impact.

The main dramatic action deals with the gradual and progressive liberation of Harry Monchensey from his sense of guilt and defilement in a private, curse-haunted universe.

This liberation is brought about by the presence of certain mysterious forces represented by the Eumenides. They appear to Harry on three separate occasions; each time Harry perceives them with increasing clarity, and as he does, he is led coincidentally to a deepened discovery of himself and of the knowledge he needs to recover his identity. In other words, the appearances of the Eumenides coincide with the successive steps in Harry's liberation, marking out as it were the stages of his progress.

This has never been noticed in Eliot criticism, nor has it been recognized precisely how significant the Eumenides are in the design of the action and the designation of character. They are not-and here I am forced into the embarrassing position of defending the author against himself-merely theatrical freaks or inopportune invocations of the classical spirit.

In one sense, they are leading figures in the play, the pivots in the pattern, the turning points of Eliot's Byzantine mosaic-not merely adjuncts to the action like the ghosts in Murder in the Cathedral. Some explication of the text is necessary if I am to clarify my contention.

Harry sees the Eumenides as concrete entities for the first time when he returns to Wishwood. Whatever hope he had of finding release from his sense of guilt is reduced to despair under the gaze of his pursuers. In their presence, Harry realizes that one does not escape the burning wheel by flight or by violence; the former is merely a change of position on the wheel, the latter a momentary reversal of its direction.

This realization puts Harry in a state of isolation which makes the entire universe seem corrupt and corrupting. This deranging isolation breaks his contact with reality and projects him into a private world without direction, purpose, or principle of conduct.

Haunted by hallucinations, Harry has no one to cheer him up. His family expects him to take up routine as head of the household as though nothing had happened. Annoyed by their pretense, Harry accuses his family of insensibility and tries to awaken them to his suffering, without success. Thus, his first encounter with the Eumenides finds Harry holding the hope that he can forget at Wishwood, and leaves him with the despairing realization that he cannot.

During the next stage of his liberation, Harry gropes his way up from despair towards freedom and illumination. He starts by fastening upon a question he had asked himself earlier: why should the Eumenides wait until his return to Wishwood to show. themselves? His aunt Agatha, who does not believe his condition of mind can be explained by his professed crime, encourages him to explore the past as the path to freedom (nearly all of Eliot's heroes are prophets of the past).

From this point on, Harry becomes the hunter as well as hunted -like Oedipus, hunting himself down, pursuer and pursued. Where his cousin Mary removes the illusion that he had once been happy at Wishwood, she confirms his stirring suspicion that his present misery is somehow linked to the house. The possibility of a romantic relationship glimmers for a moment in his mind as a means of escape from his guilt and loneliness. At this moment, the Eumenides appear to him again, this time to warn him away from his contemplated evasion.

When Mary pretends? that there is nothing to see, Harry withdraws his confidence. But now he is convinced that Wishwood holds part of the secret he seeks, and he decides to stay. This decision to face the Furies and not to run from them is the second stage of his liberation, part of the progressive ascent towards the experience of truth Eliot feels.

The third and final stage begins during his conversation with Warburton and ends during his final duet with Agatha. Warburton provides fragments of the puzzle, and Agatha fills in the missing links. She recalls her affair with his father and his plans to murder the wife he hated. Harry asks, "In what way did he wish to murder her'?" This is apparently the overwhelming question. Up to this point, whether or not Harry actually pushed his wife overboard is left vague; in light of Harry's condition, Uncle Charles has viewed the confession with skepticism, perhaps even suspecting that Harry cannot disassociate the pollution of his wife's existence from that of her death.

Now when Agatha forces Harry to focus upon the event, to strip himself of his compulsive habit of self-immolation, he begins to understand that he has imagined the murder: somehow he has objectified a fantasy, and then accepted the objectification as true.

Here is the situation we can piece together from Eliot's unpublished letters to Martin Browne and from hints scattered throughout the play: Harry is standing on the deck of the liner, a few feet from his wife, who is leaning against the rail. She has sometimes talked of suicide, and at this juncture, is drunkenly taunting him with this threat.

She overdoes it and accidentally falls overboard. Because the whole scene of shoving her overboard has passed through his mind before, Harry believes he has pushed her. He does not call for help, or attempt to rescue her in any way. His recollection of this extraordinary behavior-the event itself he has buried deeply in his unconsciousness-convinces him that he is guilty. The wish has become the overwhelming reality.

Agatha helps him to understand this through her patience and love, and the load of guilt drops from Harry. He perceives that his remark to Warburton, "The things that are going to happen/Have already happened" is "true in another sense." His father's desire to kill his wife has repeated itself in him as a kind of mysterious family curse. The inheritance for which he has returned turns out to be the knowledge of the past, and the knowledge that the past may be redeemable. The truth frees him from his guilt.

Harry's perspective is re-ordered by his release, and he is attracted to the agent of his release, half as a son, half as a lover. Agatha, who has also known "that circular desert", responds with the opposite but complementary love and they join in spiritual meeting, the only true reunion in the play.

As Agatha responds, Harry is carried away by his mounting excitement, expressed in images of encounter. But the encounter is brief. Agatha's answer is enigmatic certainly, but seems to say this: one does not pass twice through the same door (to the desert) or return to the door through which one never passed (fulfillment in love). A bond such as theirs, instead of being a refuge from responsibility, must be a release for a new beginning, a key to other doors that remain to be opened, for new experiences beyond life itself.

Harry does not comprehend her meaning until the Eumenides appear for the third time. Now Harry does not deny them. His rose-garden experience raises him to a state of spirit which is described more explicitly in Part II of Burnt Norton. Surrounded by a sense of grace, Harry intuits ("His Lordship is rather psychic"-Downing) the higher function of the Eumenides by connecting their appearance with what Agatha has been trying to tell him: "relief from what happened" comes not through evasion, but through quest; not through rejection, but through the "awful daring of a moment's surrender."

Illumined by this insight, Harry is released for action and suffering on a higher plane; he accepts without fully understanding Agatha's paradox, "To rest in our own suffering/Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more." When Harry announces his decision to depart from Wishwood on the trail of the Eumenides, his mother concludes that Agatha has persuaded him to become a missionary and asks him to change his mind.

Harry refuses the request, and departs with Downing in pursuit of the "hint half guessed, the gift half understood" (Dry Salvages, V). Soon after his departure, his mother collapses, and the play ends as Agatha and Mary, in circular procession around the cake intended for her, gradually extinguish the candles in a tenement service for both of the departed.

They reverse their circular movement to indicate that the wheel has also changed direction. As Harry is freed to follow the promptings of his spirit, we see how intricately the sin-salvation symbol has been woven into the horizontal structure of the play.

Just as deftly the symbol is spread over the vertical structure. The characters are grouped in stations along a hierarchical scale of values. In this scheme their position is determined by the nature of their spiritual perception (or, in somewhat different terms, by the level of consciousness or awareness the character is capable of attaining), and by the nature of the actions arising from the perceptions of the character. Seen from this perspective, the Eumenides become the point of reference in the manipulation of various, shifting planes of perception, or a kind of index to spirituality or what we might call "awareness quotient."

The presence of these silent agents every member of the family feels as a strange force working behind the scenes, assembling the group almost against its will, exerting peculiar powers on Wishwood, appearing at strategic moments. But only the characters with capacity for belief have the vision to recognize the higher function of these spirits.

These members of the family actually see what they sense, so strongly do they sense it "If this strains your credulity, entertain the suggestions that a sudden intuition, in certain minds, may tend to express itself at once in a picture" Those who deny the spirit, in this scheme, cannot see. Yet nor can they escape it: in almost animal fashion, these characters can only feel.

They respond only to the tangible: and they feel the supernatural only as something which troubles sleep. If they are without vision, then they are beyond change: and beyond change themselves, they behave as though nothing else changes. Living and partly living, they try to avoid the reality that lies behind appearance in Eliot's haunted universe.

Of this group, only Uncle Charles tries to comprehend the design that may exist beyond the world of external events, of strictly practical purposes. He is dimly aware of forces outside his grasp, and at the end, says with a selfeffacing humor, "I fear that my mind is not what it was-or was it-and yet I think that I might understand." But Charles has measured out his life with sherry glasses, and when his moment of salvation flickered he was afraid.

Gerald is a foil to his brother Charles, a beautifully cryptic creation whose manner manages to suggest why young men in England are angry. Like his accident-prone nephew, Arthur, who is apparently stamped in his image, Gerald is on vacation from consciousness. He sees nothing and knows nothing, a voice straight out of "The Game of Chess." The two aunts, whose personalities reverse the qualities implied by their names, also lack perception. Behind their trivial concerns, they have hidden and continue to hide from spiritual disturbance.

This foursome of aunts and uncles-the chorus- feels and fears the strange events at Wishwood, but fears to examine what they feel and fear. During ordinary moments, each seeks comfort behind such reassurances as "Of course we know what really happened, we read it in the papers" ("I seen that in the papers"-Sweeney).

But when they are overwhelmed by what the sub consciousness will not overlook, a procession of forebodings, superstitions, and terrors march through the lower centers of their minds and into simultaneous articulation. As they sink back into this primitive state, their common recitation becomes clogged with surrealistic images, with slumbering memories from the past and disturbing moments from the present "all twined and tangled together."

But this kind of animal awareness, without belief, is merely animal. Until they have learned a change of heart, these people can neither escape nor exercise the nameless forces lurking within and about them. Whether in Argos or in England, one must have the courage to look into the heart of light, Eliot seems to imply, in order to transform devils into angels.

While Harry is saying, "Now I see," the chorus declares dolefully, "We have lost our way in the dark." They pass each other, Harry and these spiritually decadent gentlefolk, going in opposite directions.

Part of this secular group, Amy is the most forceful person in it, living on the plane of will alone. But will without spirit is like sensation without spirit, and Amy's attempt to will a design to which all must consent is wrecked by her inability to see beyond her own schemes. Unmoved by physical disasters, she is crumpled completely by Harry's departure, which she regards as the greatest disaster. When her clock stops, she too is still in the dark, and her party, more dismal than Dusty's (Sweeney), becomes her funeral.

After her collapse, we are left with the inescapable inference that these representatives of English aristocracy have lost every advantage their age could confer. Deprived of even simple belief by their sophisticated secularism, and shaken from their sophistication by their simple fear, they are the hollow men and women.

Occupying "the territory between two worlds" are Agatha, Mary, and Downing. All three see the Eumenides. But like the protagonist of "A Song for Simeon", they have not been elected to pursue the Vision, and to his words give reluctant assent: "Not from me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,/Not for me the ultimate vision." However, because they know that revelation is possible, they can help Harry towards his election.

After he is beyond their assistance, they will go each in his own direction to find what peace may be granted to those who "shall not know the one veritable transitory power." As part of the almost geometric using and re-using of patterns, there is a parallel between Mary's starting life as a reacher and Agatha's debut in that profession: disappointed in sexual love, Mary will devote herself to the enlightenment of others, while learning the attitudes of resignation that her aunt has already attained.

If their future seems drab, yet both have been fortified for it by their encounter with the powers that emerge now and then. At the outset only "watchersand waiters" like the women of Canterbury, they emerge from their spiritual experience as wanderers with wisdom, surprisingly unsoured by prospects that might seem sterile to their secular kinfolk. As his name suggests, the valet-chauffeur Downing is the common-folk counterpart of the two women, a demonstration that spiritual flexibility is not a matter of intellect or class.

Presumably because his vision is unhampered by involvement in the tangle of loves and hatreds, Downing becomes awed of the Eumenides earlier than any of the others. Downing is to accompany his master on the first leg of his journey; at some point along the way, perhaps he will say in the words of Simeon, "Let thy servant depart,/Having seen thy salvation."

To his valet, Harry is a hero. Having been most low, he becomes most high by accepting the election of the Eumenides to explore the meaning of the rose-garden experience. When first confronted by these powers, he sees them as evil eyes, but during the moment of illumination, he perceives them as the "final eye," judicial and benevolent (the shift from the plural to the singular is significant and parallels the play's ascent from pagan to Christian meaning).

Having tracked himself down, Harry leaves his homeland with his will made ready for the thousand natural shocks that an heir is heir to. As he heads rejuvenated for his awaiting chariot, we may safely infer that the author, too, is repudiating the desperate declaration of Sweeney: "I've been born and once is enough."

The Eumenides are also used to lock the various levels of the plot together, to relate each plane of action to the other. The reader will recall that the theme of the Quartets is the interrelationship of time past, time present, and time future. Written while Eliot was in the midst of composing the Quartets, the play appears to be an attempt to make this highly abstract idea dramatically concrete, to re-state it in another voice. The Eumenides may be regarded as the objective correlative of the central meaning in each statement, and the symbol under which all these meanings are infolded.

Let us consider the play in this light. Eliot's interest in present time is reflected in the play's examination of the nature of psychological guilt, its effect upon people in general and an individual in particular living in the modern world. The concrete embodiments of the guilt-sense, the Eumenides, reveal themselves for the first time at Wishwood because it is the locus of the guilt. "The origin of wretchedness" lies in the unhappy bondage of Harry's parents.

Guilt about his homicidal wish drives Harry's father into exile, while her feelings of guilt separate Agatha from the family. Harry is left to the care of a mother who clutches and dominates him. Out of his position as the possessed, he develops a strange morality-being good is pleasing mother, being bad is hurting her.

He feels guilt for resisting her and out of his guilt, feels a desire to be punished; therefore, he misbehaves in order to be chastised and therefore purged of his guilt. The chastisement in turn intensifies his hostility, which culminates in an act of open defiance: he marries a "non-U" instead of the woman whom his mother intends for him. The mother feels strong homicidal impulses towards the intruder ("I believed that Cousin Amy had killed her by willing" - Mary).

To punish herself for these impluses, the mother devotes her life to the "purposes of Wishwood" and eventually becomes, like the manor-house, a shell of stone. Harry is affected by these tragedies. Never having known love, he expresses the opposite impulse towards his wife, who has become a surrogate for his hostility towards all women. Dependent himself, when he finds her to be the same, his hostility deepens into a desire to be rid of her.

He quite readily holds himself guilty in the accident, for he has come to regard himself as an outcast predestined to crime. This fantasy so absorbs him that he loses contact with reality. In these terms, the Aeschylean curse may be interpreted as a streak of family neuroticism which Harry inherits: the desire of both parents to kill somehow descends upon the son with such intensity that need becomes indistinct from deed.

Harry's attachment to Agatha resembles what the psychiatrist calls "transfer." Acting as analyst, she helps Harry to free himself of loathing. During this process, he tries to release positive feelings, first with Mary, then with Agatha. In the former instance, he is incapable of developing the emotion: he has never had the chance to identify with a father figure, and therefore finds heterosexual relationships difficult to enter; and second, he has been symbolically castrated by his traumatic experience (the fact that his most enduring association is with his male servant may be relevant here).

Later, he reaches a high pitch of tenderness with Agatha, but at this time his super-ego in the form of the Eumenides, remind him that this is not the way to divine union. However, this exploration of the past cures Harry of his near schizophrenia.

The reader who is inclined to may disregard the extra-physical aspects of the Eumenides by thinking of the play as a dramatization of modern psychological problems, with the Eumenides as the dramatically-tangible counterparts of our obsessions, the idea of guilt and alienation. In this light, the play is as modern as Macbeth. This modern theme Eliot fuses with the myth of the ancient house of Atreus.

The present is interwoven with the past in a manner that enriches the fabric of the action and brings into collocation the wisdom of the two ages. Through this dramatic overlaying, Eliot gives us his version of the permanent but often unacknowledged psychical attitudes and forces operational in the life of mankind. Some critics have argued that there are more departures than affinities to the Oresteia, but this is true only in the most literal sense.

Just as we regard Joyce's departures from Homer not as departures but as symbolic equivalents that add meaning to the original, so may we regard Eliot's departures from Aeschylus. Thus, the characters need not do things merely because their Greek prototypes did: they may have their own identity and meaning as modern people, but within a familiar but flexible shaping medium.

Maud Bodkin has already shown how Eliot gives the Greek plot a fresh interpretation, and we need to add to her discussion only a few remarks. The central affair is replaced by one perhaps more representative of our age, the affair between husband and mistress. Amy, we know, is the Clytemnestra who "destroys" the lovers, but who is Agatha? In the interest of thrift, she combines the roles of Athena and Cassandra: a prophetess put out of the way by the wife, Agatha returns as the protector of the hero (she is, really, the first of Eliot's "Guardians").

Mary, it will be seen, is the counterpart of Electra. Resentful of the matriarch, who looks upon "her as a servant-daughter, Mary can only watch and wait for a rescuer. In contrast to O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Eliot retains the prominent role for the son-rescuer. Harry returns from exile, "stabs" his mother, and sets free Mary, who has become a sister to him. This is a subtle reversal of O'Neill, who turns Orin and Lavina-naturally!-into lovers.

Among the minor characters, Downing is an enlargement upon the rescuer's retainer, Pylades, and Winchell is Eliot's version of the indispensable Greek messenger. On this level, the play expands upon a cryptic remark Eliot once made: "Aeschylus may have made a statement which is true everywhere and for all time." But Eliot uses the Aeschylean myth only as a handy vehicle for the expression of his own ideas, and his interpretation of it throws considerable illumination upon interfamilial relationships of today.

Eliot is slave to neither his source nor his psychology. He develops the dimension of the play by infusing it with the truth of his religion. Without recourse to specific Christian terminology, he brings to fruition his aim of supplementing the cathedral play with the kind of drama which deals with situations of modern life in an implicitly Christian way.

The focus of interest is not, as one might assume about the work of a poet reared in New England and converted to Anglo-Catholicism, upon the question of "sexual laxity", but upon the discovery and recognition of conscience. In Eliot's eyes, consc:ience is the extra-physical factor in man that refutes the materialistic view of human personality and that justifies man's hope of the future. Io Eliot sets out to examine how far towards an acceptable solution of moral problems we can come without invoking Christian terms.

Hence, the action acquires a third dimension which may satisfy what the author has called "the essentially religious craving ... latent in all serious lovers of the drama."

Harry learns that his sense of guilt and isolation are part of a condition that goes deeper than either- the condition of sin. In this figure, the subjective and psychological complex becomes a supernatural, objective fact, an eternal and external reality both terrifying and reassuring to the faithful.

The author has expressed himself directly on this subject: "People often talk as if the sense of sin were something invented by a group of gloomy fanatics ... it is absolutely essential to Christianity." Sin, to Eliot, is the universal sickness responsible for man's nature ("We're all of us ill in one way or another"- Warburton). Of course, sin may grow out of thought as well as deed-as Christ's own words testify.

Therefore, if Harry's criminal desire is innate and the moral equivalent to the act, then the curse transcends the confines of family and society, and represents the unfolding of man's primeval impulse to violate the Law-the impulse which Adam passed on to Cain. Apparently, then, the ultimate origin of wretchedness lies in the theological fact of man's sinful nature. There is nothing new about this concept: Eliot subjects it to the scrutiny of modern and ancient wisdom and tries to show it as consistent with both.

The Eumenides play their part in this construct. Associated with primitive blood-curse and modern guilt, in another aspect entirely continuous with the first two they stand for sin-consciousness. Harry becomes aware of the root of his unhappiness after their final visit. He senses that the business of his life must become ascetic purgaton. Guilt vanishes but sin remains.

By following the Eumenides as immediately and as unintelligibly as the Disciples dropping their nets, Harry leaves for a triple salvation: to lift the doom on himself, on the house, and on the world. This conviction of sin and expiation is, in Eliot's definition, the "certain inflexible law unalterable whether in Argos or England."

Hence, what began as a primitive flight from fear is changed into a Christian pilgrimage of penance, with pagan furies at the entrance and bright angels at the exit. As a dramatically perceptible parallel to the interior transvaluation, there is the exaltation of Agatha's pagan exorcisms into Christian rituals of hope. While the stage at the end is symbollically darkened, Harry descends into the Night of the Soul.

Divested of impure love of created beings, he can act in the future with a purified, impersonal, and self-sacrificing submission to God, in alien places under stranger skies. Even the time of the action, about Holy Week, suggests that the hour of re-birth is to be celebrated. Just as Thomas Becket emerges as a symbol of faith, and Celia Coplestone as a symbol of charity, so does Harry stand as a symbol of hope (each play is concerned with the Christian virtues in order).

For the faithful, the Aeschylean concept is elevated to one of nobler meaning: as Agatha says, perhaps for the author, "What we have written is not a story of detection,/Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation."

The play is thus an exercise in the manipulation of modes of consciousness on various planes of insight and mystical awareness, its modern and Christian quests fused and dominated by a symbol drawn from ancient myth, the action ordered but not confined by the structure of the Aeschylean ritual drama.

In addition to the idea of ritual action, Eliot borrowed from classical drama the idea of ritual utterance. Remote enough from the modern drama to seem like a fresh form, the ritual utterance in choral and individual incantation becomes in Eliot's hand a secondary means of shaping his material as well as an interesting innovation in dramaturgy.

However, Eliot makes use of the chorus inside the play, instead of outside of it as in the classical drama. Members of the chorus can, while retaining individuality, pick up together a thread of the protagonist's thought and can develop it in terms of their own kind of perception. The running contradiction between the conscious utterances to each other and their subconscious feeling subtly affirms Harry's insistence that appearances lie.

The chorus also foreshadows the events to come, so that they do not break too suddenly upon us; and they also create the background of mystery and terror against which the action of the hero seems more heroic. When the pure chorus is broken up, and the actors speak their lines singly, in pairs, or in unison as they move about quite naturally, examining a book or pouring a drink, instead of "freezing" in the manner of Strange Interlude, the naturalistic surface of the play remains undisturbed by the ritualistic effect of their recitation.

The runic passages of Agatha arise from the shorter strophes of the chorus. In both form and content something similar to the trance-like incantations of Cassandra, they are mystical chants of curious coinage, inspired by the ancestral curse.

These ritualistic utterances of Agatha are fitted into the design of the play to coincide, like the appearances of the Eumenides (which touch them off), with the stages of Harry's liberation. The first is said just after Harry arrives; the second, spoken shortly after the second appearance of the Eumenides, is an exorcism of evil.

Immediately following their third appearance, Agatha steps into the place they had occupied and descants a final rune to indicate that the curse shall be ended. As the "crossed bones" are straightened and the "cloud of unknowing" is lifted, these passages of pagan incantation acquire an increasingly Christian tone.

This pattern of development is recapitulated in the concluding ritual between Mary and Agatha, wherein the primitive birthday observance and curse-cure, with its "follow, follow" procession, becomes a Christian communion and prayer. Thus, the main religious theme of transvaluation of curse into blessing is worked out like in the pattern of the runic passages.

Underlying these interlocking ideas is yet another design -what we might call the musical design of the play. Working from a hint that Eliot buried in an essay of this period, one need not be a musicologist in order to detect a pattern from the opera.

The extended recitations of Agatha, Mary, and Harry, with their embroidering of motifs, correspond to the aria; the lyrical exchanges between Mary and Harry, and Agatha and Harry, ·are developed in the form of duets; and the choral passages immediately bring to mind the corresponding recital in the opera. As in the well constructed opera, there is almost a classical balance of parts. The first scenes of each Part have balancing choruses of 27 and 28 lines each.

The chorus of Part II, scene iii, is balanced by one in Part I, scene iii, each of them rounded off with a runic utterance, while the rune of Part I, scene i, is balanced by a rune in Part II, scene i. Furthermore, the duet between Mary and Harry in Part I has its counterpart in the duet between Agatha and Harry in Part II, just as the exchange between Mary and Agatha in Part I may be paired with the one in Part II.

The arrival and departure of Harry, important moments dramatically, are heightened by long recitations. The only recitals of Downing are similarly balanced in the first and last scenes of the play, and the tenor coloration of Harry's arias, recounterpoised by the deep alto passages of Amy.

This experimentation with musical pattern within a dramatic context illustrates Eliot's definition of what he calls "underdesign": "a design of human action and words, such as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and musical order." Scholars tell us that a certain form of music and movement now lost to us, was characteristic of the Greek drama. Whether so novel and unorthodox a technique has any place in the modern theater is a debatable question, but the additional qualities of architecture it gives the action results in a play with a unity of feeling and a design seldom achieved in the drama.

Through this kind of unity, Eliot approached the intensity of form which he felt was seriously lacking in modern drama. In the pursuit of greater and greater naturalism, it had lost not only this intensity, he believed, but it had also departed from the intensity of language so vital to the poetic projection of the permanent human struggles and conflicts. As a result, the modern drama had characters so extremely lifelike that they did "not even talk prose, but merely made human noises."

Therefore, it was imperative to take the opposite direction, by not letting the listener forget he was hearing verse. But the customary medium of dramatic poetry-blank verse-when it did not sound like bad prose, was likely to sound like bad Shakespeare. Seeking a form that would sound like neither, Eliot ranged from the music-hall to the cathedral after a medium that would permit dramatic characters to "express the purest poetry without highfalutin and convey the most commonplace message without absurdity."

The restrictions under which he wrote were too confining, in one way or another, to allow any real progress. While he was successful in avoiding the worn forms of his predecessors, he arrived at no idiom that promised to solve the problem so neatly wrapped up in one of his own queries: "How would people today speak if they could speak in poetry?" For The Family Reunion, Eliot attuned his ear to modern cultivated speech and developed out of it a verse form that was to become the groundwork for subsequent experiments.

Like the mature Yeats, casting out energetic rhythms as of a man running, he created a fluid poetry out of everyday speech. With only slightest heightening, he shaped a loose and flowing structure different from prose mainly in its subtle rhythms and its stress patterns. The dialogue line has four main stresses, with no definite syllable count.

The rhythm is generally trochaic, varied by dactyls at the head of the line and by occasional anapests. Though there is no rhyme, the end of the line frequently gains significance by end-stops and key words. It is almost as though the cadences of Sweeney were lightened to meet the conditions of natural conversation. In this mode, people can chatter about wine-cellars or auto accidents without sounding tedious or rhetorical.

However, says Eliot, "conversational style may and does itself become rhetoric, in becoming a fixed convention applied to any matter, not invariably issuing out of the matter treated but imposed upon it." Therefore, as the mood shifts from the conversational to one of more intense consciousness, the verse stirs and adjusts itself to the requirements of the situation. Just as imperceptibly, the verse may shift back to the relatively prosaic.

This kind of transition between passages of greater and lesser intensity the author has called the "rhythm of fluctuating emotion." By suiting the word and rhythm to the plane of perception, Eliot re-enforces the unity of the play. The use of this technique to explore various levels of consciousness is nowhere better illustrated than in the choral passages. When the members discuss the trivial and ordinary, the verse is flattened and subdued, with a grey, edgy tone. As they plumb the subterranean depths of the psyche, the rhythm becomes more pronounced, the lines lengthen and acquire additional stress.

When the chorus expresses common subconscious fear, or when it expresses thoughts censored by decorum, the long flowing lines contract into three-stress measures and the rhythm becomes tense and staccato. To indicate that the chorus is returning to the surface, the rhythm relaxes and goes forward to meet conversational cadences. Like Agatha's runic recitations, the duets descend from the three-stress choral passages rather than from the dialogue, as juxtaposition of the two will show.

This verse is not merely an example of Eliot's lyric virtuosity; it is a truly dramatic vehicle adaptable to the requirements of characterization as well as of mood. For example, the "dactylic flutter" of Ivy and the "massed cohort of strong stresses" of Violet (these phrases are Martin Browne's) reveal something of their contrasting natures, just as the facile flow of Charles' speech and the clipped, caesura-laden lines of Gerald bring out their particular personalities.

The speech of Downing is monosyllabic and swift, suggesting the efficient if uneducated attendant, while the pronounced cadences of Amy reflect her forceful nature. In following the lines of Agatha, Mary, and Harry, we feel that they are living at once on the plane we know and on some other plane of reality from which we are shut out. Although critics have remarked that the poetry frequently sinks out of sight altogether, the only prose of the play is contained in the newspaper clippings which are read aloud.

By what I have said in the foregoing pages I do not mean to imply that the play is without the imperfections of stagecraft and characterization which have been pointed out with only too great enthusiasm by Eliot's detractors. Despite its faults, Eliot has provided a memorable experience in the drama. If art is the expression of meanings, Eliot has expressed the whole complex experience that was his meaning in a form exactly suited to it. "

Credits: THE FIGURES IN THE WINDOW: DESIGN IN T.S. ELIOT'S THE FAMILY REUNION- Leo Hamalian

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Romance and Ritual in T. S. Eliot's 'The Family Reunion'

In The Family Reunion, T.S. Eliot's second complete play, he set himself the task of creating Christian comedy out of the materials of pagan tragedy. He faced an audience whose lives and whose literature, he thought, were "corrupted" by "Secularism" and who neither understood nor wished to understand "the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life."'

He also wished to reinstitute poetry as a dramatic medium. In 1942, he stressed the importance of "a verse medium for the theatre, a medium in which we shall be able to hear the speech of contemporary human beings, in which dramatic characters can express the purest poetry without high-falutin and in which they can convey the most commonplace message without absurdity."

Given this concern for the response of his audience, it is little wonder that he emphasized "the music of poetry" (hence its emotional, extra-rational appeal) and that he fancied the poet as "something of a popular entertainer" who could "think his own thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask." He was a poet turned playwright who sought to show a stratified and unpredictable audience the principles of theological and aesthetic truth.

The Family Reunion is Eliot's attempt to use the comic and tragic masks for purposes of conversion. It is therefore a rigidly organized play, a conversion ritual in itself, that begins with the stuff of romance-a repressed and lonely man whose life prior to the action of the play has been little more than a frustrated search for love.

The Family Reunion has at its center Aeschylus's version of the myth of Orestes. Eliot uses three of Aeschylus's dramatic figures-the chorus, the Eumenides, and Orestes-to suggest the timelessness of the situation enacted at Wishwood, the Monchensey estate in the North of England.

He uses several themes worked out in the Oresteia for a similar purpose, carefully setting up the "curse" on the house of Monchensey and Harry as both the victim and the exorcist of that curse. Just as, in the Choephori, the returning Orestes prays to the dead Agamemnon for aid in his revenge,"Father, . . . I ask / the gift of lordship at your hands, to rule your house,"

Harry identifies himself with "the old house / With the noxious smell and the sorrow before morning" (234), referring directly to the curse under which he lives and attesting to his despair of ever escaping it. Harry, as does Orestes, struggles to understand his past and, consequently, his fate. But Eliot soon makes a crucial distinction between Harry and his prototype: It is not for Harry to rule the house, as must Orestes; Harry must abandon Wishwood, leave the house in order to save both it and himself.

Eliot wants Harry's decision to appear heroic in a Christian rather than a classical sense; so he tries in The Family Reunion to remove the material connotations from the Greek concept of oikos, to transform the house into a purely spiritual notion.

He makes Wishwood "noxious" and the possession of it undesirable, and he forces us to applaud Harry's decision to divest himself of his status in the world of mortals. And with this transformation of oikos comes a reappraisal of moira, or fate, particularly that of the play's hero.

If it is Harry's task to awaken the spiritual side of life at Wishwood, Eliot must show us a cast of characters in dire need of redemption; he must also give us a protagonist, a hero, callous enough to ignore the wishes of those characters, yet perceptive enough to function consciously as a spiritual agent for them.

Northrop Frye suggests that there exists an intimate connection between the genres of tragedy and romance, and I think it is a connection that Eliot realizes in the character of Harry Lord Monchensey. Because tragedy recounts man's struggle against his own death, Frye says, it contains a "counter-movement of being that we call the heroic, a capacity for action or passion, for doing or suffering, which is above ordinary human experience.

This heroic energy, glorified by itself as something invincible which bursts the boundaries of normal experience, is the basis of romance."7 Harry hardly shows the "heroic energy" of an Othello or even an Orestes, but he certainly has more of this quality than anyone else at Wishwood.

He tells his assembled family:

You are all people
To whom nothing has happened, at most a continual impact
Of external events. You have gone through life in sleep,
Never woken to the nightmare. I tell you life would be unendurable
If you were wide awake. (234)

Harry speaks here most directly to the play's chorus, four of his aunts and uncles who exist in the world of Eliot's Hollow Men. Also in this speech, Harry identifies himself with "the old house"; in his next, he refers to the "slow stain" of the curse and, abruptly, confesses to the murder of his wife:

It was only reversing the senseless direction
For a momentary rest on the burning wheel
That cloudless night in the mid-Atlantic
When I pushed her over. (235)

Harry, like Orestes, is caught on the wheel of fate, entangled in the net of moira. The speakers of the chorus, in order to protect themselves from Harry's charge regarding their spiritual insensitivity, ignore Harry's remarks on destiny and instead "isolate the single event" for comment: Charles speaks for them when he says, "You mustn't indulge such dangerous
fancies" (235-36).

Harry is initially defined, then, as both a tragic and a romantic figure-as a man more perceptive and intelligent than those around him, as one whose experience sets him apart from his contemporaries. Moreover, by adding yet another layer of literary allusion to Harry's characterization, Eliot makes his protagonist aware of himself as a player in a drama. He recreates in Harry the dilemma of Hamlet:

So you must believe
That I suffer from delusions. It is not my conscience,
Not my mind, that is diseased, but the world I have to live in
………........................
I am afraid of sleep:
A condition in which one can be caught for the last time.
And also waking. She is nearer than ever.
The contamination has reached the marrow
And they are always near. (236)

We have in the character of Harry an Orestes pursued by a Shakespearean ghost through "death's dream kingdom." Harry has in the above speech the same awareness of his own theatricality that Eliot discerned in Othello; he, as does Othello, "sees himself in a dramatic light."8 He is a thoroughly literary creation by any standards.

Obviously, Eliot's next task was to make Harry human, to turn the audience's attention away from Harry's rather contrived characterization and toward his experience as it unfolds in the action of the play.

Eliot accomplishes this by removing Harry from the stage as quickly as possible and shifting the audience's attention to the family, each member of which responds to Harry according to the degree of his or her spiritual sensitivity. Amy is a director of other people's lives, and she ignores Harry's consternation. Ivy, Violet, Gerald, and Charles are "afraid of all that has happened" and express four different ways to cope with that fear: Ivy "struggles" against it; Gerald fails to understand it; Violet is unnerved by attempts to explain it; Charles wants to "manage the situation" that it creates (256-57). Only Agatha and Mary try to understand the spiritual implications of Harry's speeches. They, as Agatha says, "are only watchers and waiters" (246).

Like Eliot's auditors, then, the family members fall into distinct strata of spiritual awareness. By placing directly onstage such a variety of personalities and such a range of reactions to Harry's words, Eliot actually dramatizes his audience's response to his poetic material even as the action unfolds.

Such a technique allows Eliot to direct audience response by degrees: we begin perhaps as baffled as Gerald, with some of Charles' desire to discover the facts of Harry's case, but we agree to watch and to wait with Agatha and Mary. And this reaction seems to be exactly what Eliot desired from theatre-goers and what he praised in Shakespeare:

For the simplest auditors there is the plot, for the more thoughtful the character and the conflict of character, or the more literary his words and phrasing, for the more musically sensitive the rhythm, and for the auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding a meaning which reveals itself gradually. The sensitiveness of every auditor is acted upon by all these elements at once, though in different degrees of consciousness. At none of these levels is the auditor bothered by the presence of that which he does not understand, or by the presence of that in which he is not interested.

This last comment seems disingenuous on Eliot's part, for in The Family Reunion it is precisely the presence of something which we do not understand- the nature of Harry's character and experience-which keeps us interested in the action of the play. Eliot's brief introduction and subsequent removal of his hero allow his auditors to meet the man and then to reflect upon his situation as they weigh the various responses given to Harry onstage.

Theoretically, the device is a simple one: what could be easier for a playwright than to juxtapose a superior individual and a dull crowd in order to create sympathy for the hero? Yet, admitting the variation in potential audience response that Eliot faced, how could this playwright bring each member of that audience to the point of understanding "a meaning which reveals itself gradually"?

To raise the spiritual awareness of his audience was Eliot's definition of the goal of the dramatist, of the successful "popular entertainer."

He knew in which direction he wanted to pull his auditors. Martin Browne, who directed the first production of The Family Reunion and reviewed several drafts of the play, indicates that Eliot conceived the pattern of the play before he developed the specific personalities that inhabit Wishwood, that he thought first of "family relationships and the irruption into them of the force represented by the Furies."'l Browne's reproduction of Eliot's scenario does show that this "irruption" was to form the central action of the play; but the scenario also includes Eliot's central thematic concern-the notion of "purgation."

Eliot avoids even the mention of the word, however, until halfway through both the scenario and the play; he withholds the announcement of his "meaning" until after he has traced his hero's situation for the audience. Aeschylus and Shakespeare did much the same thing. We know the precise nature of the curse of the Atrides long before we meet Orestes." We discover Hamlet's disgust with Gertrude, what Eliot saw as Hamlet's "problem," in Act III, scene iv of Shakespeare's play-long after the ghost has set Hamlet on a course of revenge.

As were his predecessors, Eliot was obviously concerned with the order in which his audience dis-covers the events that shaped Harry's life. We hear first his confession to the murder of his wife. Then Mary and Agatha tell us that he avoided an arranged marriage with Mary and eventually eloped with a "weak" woman who "was frightened of the family" (245). Near the end of Part I, we discover that his childhood was "not happy"; his mother destroyed even the hollow tree which was his "only memory of freedom" (247-48).

These conversations reveal in reverse chronological order the events that shaped Harry's character. We first see how he behaves toward his family, and then we begin to understand the pattern of a life that produced this behavior. Actors and auditors alike move toward the very origin of Harry's troubled existence.

The Family Reunion, then, is a conversion play organized on the principle of revelation, on an explanation of the present through a return to the past. Beginning with Harry's attempts to explain himself, moving to his discovery of some portion of spiritual truth, and finally returning to life at Wishwood, Parts I and II both end with Agatha chanting a rune.

By following the revelation of Harry's character with these runes, Eliot deliberately moves the action of the play toward a ritual meant to contain the significance of the events that precede it. This is what rituals are for, after all to explain and to commemorate stages of human life. And human beings understand both the need for order that demands rituals, and the actual, if temporary, order that they provide.

Paradoxically, then, Harry becomes a more comprehensible and sympathetic character because he becomes the object of a ritual; moreover, the ritualization of his personal experience allows Eliot to unify the play's rather disparate aesthetic elements.

We can observe this twofold resolution in Harry's private conversations with Mary and Agatha, the two characters who act as his spiritual guides. In order to distinguish Mary and Agatha as superior to the cruel Lady Monchensey and the straw-headed chorus, Eliot treats the two women much as he does Harry: he introduces a conflict between each of them and the rest of the family (Mary is Amy's self-conscious "companion," Agatha the one who finds meaning where others cannot) and then ushers them both offstage.

He then establishes a connection between the women; we discover during their conversation in Part I that Agatha is Mary's former teacher. Agatha's status as a teacher or adviser is crucial to the action of the play. She understands Mary's dilemma, but she also knows that Mary still has a part to play in Harry's development:

I would like to help you: but you must not run away.
Any time before now, it would have shown courage
And would have been right. Now the courage is only the moment
And the moment is only fear and pride. I see more than this,
More than I can tell you, more than there are words for. (246)

The conversation with Agatha encourages Mary to speak honestly with Harry. Agatha, in other words, prepares Mary to help Harry recognize the nature of his spiritual burden. Eliot thus constructs a pedagogical chain in The Family Reunion, a sequence of spiritual stages through which Harry is guided, directly or indirectly, by Agatha. Harry's first glimpse of the truth of his situation occurs during his conversation with Mary, a talk which begins with a rather commonplace exchange about Wishwood and turns immediately into a fulfillment of Agatha's prophecy that "The man who returns will have to meet / The boy who left" (229):

It's very unnatural,
This arresting of the normal change of things:
But it's very like her [Amy]. What I might have expected.
It only makes the changing of people
All the more manifest. (247)

Mary understands part of Harry's comment but fails to recognize that he speaks primarily of himself. However, she can make the imaginative connection between her own "commonplace troubles," her "ordinary hopelessness," and the "unexpected crash of the iron cataract" of Harry's despair (248-49).

The sympathy that arises between the two characters develops into the spontaneous articulation of their innermost thoughts and feelings, a lyrical duet that leads Harry to listen to Mary's charge that his emotional state is self-inflicted and therefore deceptive. Her subsequent speeches evoke the imagery of The Waste Land ("The cold spring is now the time /
For the ache in the moving root") but turn these images into symbols of rebirth and regeneration:

I believe the moment of birth
Is when we have the knowledge of death
And what of the terrified spirit
Compelled to be reborn
To rise toward the violent sun
Wet wings to the rain cloud
Harefoot over the moon? (251-52)

She sees the end in the beginning, the beginning in the end, as does the speaker of East Coker. The wheel of fate, of time, does not bur her as it does Harry; realizing its regenerative power frees her from the fear of its turning. Her sympathy brings Harry "news / Of a door that opens at the end of a corridor, / Sunlight and singing" (252). And this admission of possible relief rouses Harry's fear of "another world," represented onstage by the Eumenides.

The appearance of the Eumenides is clearly the most important of the revelations occurring in Part I. We have been prepared to see ghosts, and Harry leads us to expect Clytemnestra's Furies, sharp-clawed and hungry for human flesh. What we actually see, however, are "one man and two women, in evening dress." They must look as though they expect to be invited to Amy's birthday party.

The discrepancy between Harry's imaginative vision of these ghosts and the ghosts we all see onstage lets us (and Mary) know that Harry does indeed suffer from self-deception. His horror of the Eumenides is, at this point in the play, called into question. He cannot see them for what they are-Eumenides, "kindly ones," rather than Furies.

His problem, as Mary has suggested, is one of perception; yet her solution, "depend on me" (253), cannot correct Harry's faulty vision. In order for Harry to see what Eliot wants him to see, he must move through "the love of creacted beings" to an understanding of those very beings, of the forces that join him with as well as divide him from his family. Agatha's first rune indicates that the "three together"-she, Mary, and Harry in this act, and she, Harry, and Harry's father in the second-must be "separated," explained, in order for Harry to comprehend and to escapethe curse of Wishwood.

By the end of Part I, we understand that Eliot's chorus represents the confused masses both in need and in terror of spiritual rebirth; we have a view of disorder, of individuals at cross purposes, of moral values in flux. We realize that Harry, in facing this terror, is superior to the chorus. Yet he seems, at best, a rather skittish and directionless hero whose brooding speeches verge too closely on whining self-pity.

One doesn't understand why Harry should wish to remain at Wishwood even through dinner; we have at the end of the first act only Agatha's rune as a promise that "the crooked" (perhaps a reference to the play's plot) will be "made straight" (257).

Eliot had at this point to step up the pace of the play, to increase the action in order to keep his audience's attention while he worked out Harry's spiritual dilemma.14 Part II of The Family Reunion therefore contains most of what Aristotle would have described as the play's plot, character, and thought-the action of the persons onstage that, by defining them morally, reveals to the auditor the poet's moral point.

Eliot accelerates the play's movement by re-introducing the curse on Wishwood and its classical prototype. "Whatever happens began in the past," the chorus declares, and The agony in the curtained bedroom, whether of birth or of dying, Gathers into itself all the voices of the past, and projects them into the future.

There is no avoiding these things
And we know nothing of exorcism
And whether in Argos or in England
There are certain inflexible laws
Unalterable, in the nature of music. (270-71)

It is tempting to take the chorus' word on the "unalterable" nature of the family curse, but it seems clear that Eliot ascribes belief in "inflexible laws" to lost souls rather than to his hero. Harry must not succumb to his house, as has the chorus.

He must actively seek to understand it, as he does in Part II of The Family Reunion: he inquires about his father; he characterizes his absent brothers, takes charge of Amy, and admonishes the chorus. Most importantly, he initiates the play's central scene-the conversation with Agatha which produces the vision of the rose garden, an image that Eliot used throughout his canon as a symbol of a state of spiritual purity.

The most perceptive of the "watchers and waiters," Agatha can see that Harry's attention must be refocused. "What we have written," she says, "is not a story of detection, / Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation" (275). This statement follows Agatha's revelation to Harry of his father's wish to murder Amy.

Having thus explained the origin of the "curse" upon the house of Monchensey, Agatha cautions Harry to avoid the chorus' mistake of isolating "the single event" and to look instead at the significance of that event. Agatha directs Harry's (and our) attention from the mortal to the spiritual realm; it is she whom

Eliot meant to introduce the notion of "purgation" that lies at the moral center of the play. Helen Gardner voices what is probably the most common criticism of Eliot's treatment of Agatha when she notes that Agatha has very little "reality" of her own, that her character remains so mysterious throughout the play that she is ultimately inaccessible to us.

But to argue, as Gardner does, that Agatha is "featureless" because Eliot presents her, as he does Harry and Mary, in almost exclusively psychological or spiritual terms is to miss entirely Eliot's point in writing The Family Reunion. He wanted to show the soul in the process of liberating itself from the flesh that holds it. He needed to show us souls in motion in order to convince us that an escape could be effected from the mire of life at Wishwood. He needed, in short, just such a character as Agatha, one who had freed herself from the family curse.

It is also important to note that Eliot first saw his hero as a man "psychologically partially desexed" with a "horror of women as of unclean creatures."6 The fact that Agatha is a woman allows Eliot to point out Harry's psychological and sexual limitations. She, after all, has known human love:

There are hours when there seems to be no past or future,
Only a present moment of pointed light
When you want to burn. When you stretch out your hand
To the flames. They only come once,
Thank God, that kind. (274)

Agatha understands sexual passion. She understands what passion brings, too-the desire to be consumed by that passion, the fear bred by that desire. She knows the passion of material desire as well; for it was she who saved the unborn Harry, "a thing called life'- / Something that should have been mine."

Finally, Agatha understands the possibility of spiritual passion or martyrdom. She tells Harry that there is "another kind" of love, of flames "across a whole Tibet of broken stones / That lie, fang up, a lifetime's march." She sees what Eliot wants Harry to see. She has divested herself of the love of created beings; and although she is no martyr, she can instruct
Harry in both human and divine love, thus directing his spiritual path:

It is possible that sin may strain and struggle
In its dark instinctive birth, to come to consciousness
And so find expurgation. It is possible
You are the consciousness of your unhappy family,
Its bird sent flying through the purgatorial flame.
Indeed it is possible. You may learn hereafter,
Moving along through flames of ice, chosen
To resolve the enchantment under which we suffer. (275)

Far from "featureless," Agatha has the single feature possessed by no one else at Wishwood: she bears the marks of love. Consequently, she understands the death of love as a sin, and she makes an intriguing comparison between the birth of sin and the birth of a child. We can read the speech that begins. "

A curse comes into being / As a child is formed" as though she thinks of Harry as a curse. It seems more correct, both thematically and syntactically, to read the speech as an extended metaphor for purgation: a child is formed unconsciously, as is a curse (one thinks of the generational repetitions of the curse of the Atrides); both child and curse are acted upon
unconsciously, "formed to grow to maturity" (278-79).

A mature child is as obviously an adult as a mature curse is one that has run its course, and a sin expiated is no longer a sin. Agatha's comparison of the unloved child to a sin and to a curse indicates that love can end the child's plight, dissolve the curse, expiate the sin. Harry, then, must simply learn how to love.

After receiving Agatha's instruction, Harry moves quickly from the love of mortals to the spiritual love symbolized by his meeting Agatha in the rose garden. "Family affection," he says, "was a kind of formal obligation" at Wishwood; and he knows that human love is not possible in the Monchensey house. Yet the knowledge that some kind of love has existed in his past frees Harry from "that awful privacy / Of the insane mind" (276) and, consequently, leads to his escape from the "circular desert" of self-deception into the rose garden where he meets his spiritual mother, Agatha. Her revelation of Harry's spiritual origins gives him what she earlier called "a present," the crucial link between his past and his future.

This accomplished, the second appearance of the Eumenides comes as no surprise to Harry or to his auditors. His vision, as he says, has changed. The ghosts merely validate the correctness of his new perception. They are dressed for travel, and once Harry agrees to accept them as his guides the action of the play begins to decelerate.

Even Agatha's quarrel with Amy reveals few unexpected sources of tension or information. For the remainder of the play, the poetry becomes again conversational, the language almost commonplace; and Eliot allows our attention to shift out of the world represented by the rose garden and back to the pattern of life at Wishwood.

Harry soon escapes this pattern, leaving his home, "a world of insanity," to take up life "somewhere on the other side of despair" (281). He knows, as does Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, that action and suffering are identical. This knowledge creates in both men a despair of human life, but it also gives each a curious kind of painful freedom characteristic of the tragic hero.

Yet neither play can properly be called a tragedy, for each clearly arises from Eliot's desire to show that a man need not succumb to what Harry's aunts and uncles call "certain inexorable laws." Eliot believed in Law, of course, but in the Law of a Christian universe in which "everything tends toward reconciliation" rather than toward the eternal repetition of a form of pagan curse. By setting certain elements of the Oresteia in contemporary England, Eliot dramatized the Christian concept of reformation, of seeing with new eyes what Agatha calls the "deeper organisation" of human life.

That Harry forms a new life by following the "bright angels," that he is able to follow them because he discovers both mortal and spiritual love-these indicate Eliot's belief that the old patterns, the ancient forms of both art and theology, must be reinvigorated by just such an infusion of Christian principles.

If '"Tradition and the Individual Talent" tells us that works of art all enrich one another, then The Family Reunion tells us that theological forms are connected in much the same fashion. And, as The Waste Land might lead us to expect, Eliot's preoccupation with ritual (the formalization of conduct) and the destruction of ritual is central to the organization of his second play.

The ritualistic final scene of The Family Reunion, which has been criticized as "an unintentional parody of liturgy rather than a reinvigoration from it," represents Eliot's successful integration of the play's aesthetic elements. From a purely dramatic point of view, the spectacle of blowing out Amy's birthday candles while announcing the end of the Monchensey curse is visually powerful: the mortal world ends in darkness before our eyes, and we are left with Agatha's promise that this ritual foreshadows the success of the "pilgrimage of expiation" (293).

The play ends with a blessing, a promise of redemption, not with a view of life at Wishwood. Eliot, in other words, moves our attention once again into the realm of the spiritual because he intends for us to see, as does Harry, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life. Furthermore, Agatha's rune gives the play its structural symmetry; both acts close this way, and the last chant fulfills the hope expressed in the first.

Finally, these runes are a simplification of what has come before them: the mystery of Harry's origins, both physical and emotional, has been explained, and the knots of plot and personality untied by the end of the second act. And, interestingly enough, the first director of The Family Reunion had no qualms about the appropriateness of Agatha's runes and in fact requested very strongly that Eliot keep the one that ends Part I and adjust only the degree to which Harry's fantasy of murdering his wife parallels his father's feelings about Amy.

Eliot was obviously concerned with the formal qualities, the structural principles, of the play. He organized his play in such a way as to increase his audience's knowledge of Harry's situation at very nearly the same rate that Harry's self-knowledge increases. The dramatic pacing, a result of Eliot's concern for the connection between the play's structure and its meaning, accounts for the almost complete lack of irony (even dramatic irony) in the work.

For Eliot to direct any irony at his Orestes would have been to create a hero in some way inferior to his auditors, thus reducing the chances of converting them by Harry's example. Although he was impatient with his audience's secularism, then, Eliot took care at least not to increase its love of created beings by staging before it an inferior religious play.

If Eliot voiced some impatience at hearing a bit too much of "a bang and a whimper," he also might have been expected to despair of hearing about the relationships between his theory of literature and his practice of the art-particularly in those instances in which he was generally thought to have failed aesthetically.

Eliot's plays in particular have been called "failures" in light of his own ideas about how plays should be written. Then, too, Eliot judged them adversely. There are, of course, large gaps between the dramatic effects of Eliot's plays and the explanations that he offered, usually after the plays were staged, of their contents and themes.

The Family Reunion, however, has a theory behind it that Eliot took great care not to obscure. In fact, his revisions of the play show that he was almost reluctant to reveal too much of his plot for fear of distracting an audience from the presentation of his meaning. That meaning originated in the author's desire to show his auditors that human sight must give way to spiritual vision. The waste land, with its litter of broken images and rituals emptied of meaning, can evolve into the rose garden, but only if, as these lines from Ash Wednesday indicate,

The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme.

Eliot once said that poetic drama could "give us some perception of an order in life,"21 and the task of writing plays gave him an opportunity to reunite two genres that had been forcibly separated by the prevalence of prose drama.

By moving Harry's experience through the forms of tragedy and romance and subsuming it into Agatha's runes, Eliot made a ritual with an ancient verse. Each of Harry's discoveries is a revelation for the audience as well, and the revelations culminate in Agatha's ritualistic promise of hope for the soul as it undertakes its purgatorial journey. The play succeeds precisely because it provides its audience with a ritual that has meaning in its dramatic context and because the playwright makes his auditors participate
in each stage of that ritual.

credits; THERESA M. TOWNER . University of Virginia
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T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion: Overview

The Family Reunion

The Family Reunion is a play by T. S. Eliot written mostly in blank verse. It incorporates elements from Greek drama and mid-twentieth century detective plays to portray the hero's journey from guilt to redemption.

The play was unsuccessful when first presented in 1939, and was later regarded as unsatisfactory by its author, but has been successfully revived since the 1940s. Some critics have thought aspects of the tormented hero reflect T.S. Eliot's own difficulties with his estrangement from his first wife.

Plot

The play is in two acts set in Wishwood, a stately home in the north of England. At the beginning, the family of Lady Monchensey is assembling for her birthday party. She is, as her doctor later explains, clinging on to life by sheer willpower:

I keep Wishwood alive/ To keep the family alive,
to keep them together, To keep me alive, and I keep them.

Lady Monchensey's two brothers and three sisters are present, and a younger relation, Mary, but none of Lady Monchensey's three sons. Among other things they discuss the sudden, and not to them wholly unwelcome, death at sea of the wife of the eldest son Harry, the present Lord Monchensey.

Neither of the younger sons ever appears, both being slightly injured in motoring accidents, but Harry soon arrives, his first appearance at Wishwood for eight years. He is haunted by the belief that he pushed his wife off the ship.

In fact Harry has an alibi for the time, but whether he killed her or not he wished her dead and his feelings of guilt are the driving force in the rest of the play. Lady Monchensey decides that Harry's state warrants the discreet observation of the family doctor, who is invited to join the party, ostensibly as a dinner guest. Mary, who has been earmarked by Amy as a future wife for Harry, wishes to escape from life at Wishwood, but her aunt Agatha tells her that she must wait:

You and I, Mary/ Are only watchers and waiters, not the easiest role.

Agatha reveals to Harry that his father attempted to kill Amy while Harry was in her womb, and that Agatha prevented him. Far from being grateful, Amy resented and still resents Agatha's depriving her of her husband. Harry, with Agatha's encouragement, announces his intention to go away from Wishwood, leaving his steady younger brother John to take over. Amy, despairing at Harry's renunciation of Wishwood, dies (offstage), "An old woman alone in a damned house", and Harry and his faithful servant, Downing, leave.

Structure

The play is partly in blank verse and partly in prose. Eliot had already experimented with verse drama in Murder in the Cathedral, and continued to use the form in his post-war stage works.[12] Though the work has superficial resemblances to a conventional 1930s drawing room drama, Eliot uses two devices from ancient Greek drama:

1. Harry's uncles and aunts occasionally detach themselves from the action and chant a commentary on the plot, in the manner of a Greek chorus
2. Harry is pursued by the Eumenides – the avenging Furies who pursue Orestes in the Oresteia; they are seen not only by Harry but by his servant and the most perceptive member of his family, Agatha

Despite these Greek themes, Stephen Spender commented that the whole play was "about the hero's discovery of his religious vocation as a result of his sense of guilt

The play is divided in two parts, each divided in three scenes. The first part takes place in the drawing room, after tea, an afternoon in late March. The first scene is used as an introduction of the persons Amy, Ivy, Violet, Agatha, Gerald, Charles, Mary and Denman. They are talking about tonight, when a dinner is being held with the entire family. They are also talking about Harry, whom they haven't seen for eight years.

Before those years, something terrible had happened to Harry's wife and he thinks he is to blame. His wife was swept off the deck of a boat. Because harry thinks he has thrown her overboard, his family thinks he is not sane. But know, eight years later, Harry is the only one who acts sane about it, his aunts Ivy, Violet and Agatha are the ones who are making a fuss out of it. And that upsets Harry.

When the others notice Harry sees 'persons' that they don't see, they really begin to think Harry's gone crazy. It appears that these ghosts are from his deceased wife, and he is haunted by them, at least he thinks he is. Scene two describes a conversation between Harry and Mary, they talk about their youth and Harry sees the ghosts again.

Mary doesn't see them and she feels sorry for him. Scene three tells that everyone is preparing for dinner and that the guests are worried about John and Arthur, who haven't arrived yet. Part two takes place in the library, after dinner.

In scene I, Dr. Warburton has a conversation with Harry, at advice of Harry's uncles and aunts. It's about Harry's mother, Warburton explains that Harry's mother gets her strength to live from her determination of keeping the family together, and that she is very feeble at the moment. Then Sergeant Winchell appears with the message that John has had an accident, but that it is nothing serious, just a concussion. Later on, it appears that Arthur has also had an accident.

In scene II, Harry asks Agatha for the truth behind his parents and she is strong enough to tell him. She tells Harry that his father was going to kill his mother while she was pregnant of him. Agatha stopped Harry's father just in time. When she is finished telling she sighs with relief and says that Harry is now the one who has to carry the burden.

Scene III describes an argument between Amy and Agatha, Amy is very angry with Agatha for taking away her son, saying she first took her husband and now her son. Agatha explains that it was inevitable and that they have to start their lives over again and leave the past behind them.

Harry realises he has to follow the ghosts and that they will lead him. I'm not sure, but I think Amy dies at the end because she can take no more. That is when Ivy says: "I shall have to stay till after the funeral: will my ticket to London still be valid?" The play ends with Agatha, saying that the knot is unknotted, the cross is uncrossed and the crooked is made straight as a conclusion of what she said before:


"The eye is on this house
The eye covers it
There are three together
May the three be separated
May the knot that was tied
Become unknotted
May the crossed bones
In the filled-up well
Be at last straightened
May the weasel and the otter
Be about their proper business
The eye of the day time
And the eye of the night time
Be diverted from this house
Till the knot is unknotted
The cross is uncrossed
And the crooked is made straight."

T.S. Elliott's "The Family Reunion" is a play about the return to home, and the looking back at ghosts of the past. The play starts with Harry returning to his boyhood home for his mother's birthday. The plot centers around Harry's return, the mystery surrounding his wife's death, and his family's desire to have Harry take over the role as head of the household. It's an anticipated return, one that they all have been waiting for.

There are concurrent plots threading through the work, such as the mystery involving his own father's death and disappearance, Harry's schizophrenia and Mary's return to the family as well as her inability to leave.

In Scene II of "The Family Reunion", Mary and Harry meet in the drawing room, waiting for the family dinner (reunion) to begin. Mary & Harry are second cousins, both growing up in Wishwood. Harry has returned after an absence of eight years, and mysterious death of his wife at sea.

There's a recurring thread of "waiting" that runs through the play: waiting for Harry's return, waiting for dinner to begin, waiting for Harry's brothers to appear, waiting for the other guests. In waiting for Harry's return to Wishwood, everything in the house has been kept the way it was when he left. "I had only just noticed that this room is quite unchanged: The same hangings...the same pictures...even the table, the chairs, the sofa...all in the same positions. I was looking to see if anything was changed, but if it is so, I can't find it."

The unchanged room symbolizes the Harry of his youth, and the person that Harry is hoping to find when he returns. It also symbolizes his family's inability to accept the fact that Harry has moved on. Their longing to keep life the same. In this scene Mary and Agatha have been waiting for Harry to appear for dinner. Agatha exits and Mary alone says, "Waiting, waiting, always waiting, I think this house means to keep us waiting."

Harry, returning from Wishwood after eight years discusses his longing to return back to his childhood home. (The home theme this semester.) His return to Wishwood is actually his need to make peace with his past, his loss of his father and the confines of his childhood.

By returning to Wishwood he also is looking to escape his recent past, and his inability to live in the present. "But I thought I might escape from one life to another, and it may be all one life, with no escape." He speaks about returning home for the school holidays as a young man and escaping the family gatherings to go down to the river, their only place of freedom. "I made my escape as soon as I could, and slipped down to the river to find the old hiding place."

T.S.Elliott has a poetic and descriptive voice. He uses the metaphors of nature and the senses to describe Harry & Mary's constricted and contrived upbringing at Wishwood. They describe the hollow tree in the wilderness as their place of escape. "It's absurd that one's only memory of freedom should be a hollow tree in a wood by the river."

In a speech between Mary and Harry, he describes his lost hope "Where the dead stone is seen to batrachian, the aphyllous branch of ophidian." Mary tells Harry that "You bring your own landscape, no more real than the other. And in a way you contradict yourself." "You deceive yourself like the man who believes that he is blind while he still sees the sunlight."

Harry rebukes her by saying "You have staid in England, yet you seem like someone who comes from a very long distance, or the distant waterfall in the forest, inaccessible, half-heard. And I hear your voice as in silence between two storms, one hears the moderate usual noises in the grass and leaves, of life persisting, which ordinary pass unnoticed. Perhaps you are right, though I do not know how you should know it. Is the cold spring is the spring not an evil time, that excites us with lyric voices? "That apprehension deeper than all sense, deeper than the sense of smell, but like a smell in that it is indescribably, a sweet and bitter smell from another world."

Harry' Character

A contemporary review described Harry as "an unresolved amalgam of Orestes and Hamlet" and Eliot himself had vetoed the casting of John Gielgud because he thought him "not religious enough to understand the character's motivation." Some modern critics see in Harry a parallel with Eliot's own emotional difficulties of the time, with his estrangement from his first wife.

When Eliot was asked , "What happens to Harry after he leaves?" Eliot responded with an additional fifty lines to Harry's scene with Amy and Agatha (Part II, scene 2) in which his destination is said to be "somewhere on the other side of despair". READ MORE!