Free Essays: Adams The Education :: Adams The Education Essays

The Education The typist who appears next in the passage is a proletarian named metonymically for the machine she tends, so merged with it, in fact, that she is called a typist even at home. In The Education, Henry Adams proclaims his astonishment at the denizens of the mod American cities new graphemes, -- or type-writers, -- telephone and telegraph-girls, shop-clerks, factory hands, running into millions on millions .... Eliots point here seems real close to Adamss. Eliots woman is also a type, identified with her type-writer so good she becomes it. She is a machine, acting as she does with automatic hand. The typist is horrifying both because she is reduced by the conditions of labor to a mere part and because she is infinitely multiple. In fact, her very status as a type is dependent on a prior reduction from whole to part. She can become one member of Adamss faceless crowd only by being first reduced to a hand. The typist is the very type of metonymy, of the social system that accumulates its members by mere aggregation. Yet this type is linked syntactically to Tiresias as well. In fact, the sentence surrenders its nominal subject, Tiresias, in favor of her. The evening hour strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, / The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights / Her stove, and lays come forth food in tins. The typist shifts in mid-line from object to subject, from passive to active. Does the evening hour clear her breakfast, or should the reader search even farther back for an take into account subject, to Tiresias himself. Though this would hardly clarify the syntax, Tiresias could function logically as both subject and object, seen and seer, because, as the notes tell us, he is the typist All the women are one woman, and the cardinal sexes meet in Tiresias. The confused syntax represents this process of appellation, erasing ordinary boundaries between active and passive, subject and object. On what basis can the typi st merge with all opposite men and women to become part of Tiresias? In other words, what is the figurative relationship between the whole he represents and the part acted by the typist? The process of figurative identification seems similar to that in Prufrock, where women are also represented as mere arms and where all women are also one woman.