T. S. Eliot as a “moralist” or “critic of life” shows deep concern for the moral question, ‘how to live.’ Because Eliot experienced the tragic vision of life, he apprehended clearly the differences between failed “unlived life,” and genuine “buried life” or “fullness of life” as expressed in the characters of Henry James and in Matthew Arnold’s poem. “Portrait of a Lady” is a prime example of the “unlived life.” Like a spectator of life, the young male speaker in “Portrait of a Lady” leads a spiritually and morally dead “unlived life.” He shrinks away from his real life and a human relationship with the older lady, who wants friendship or sympathy from him. His passivity and selfishness toward life result in frustration, self-destructiveness and nothingness. So he as a force of evil obstructs the spiritual growth of the other people like a lady, and cannot change his fake life into a new meaningful life in a society. Eliot understands well the negative aspect of life, and by describing it vividly in “Portrait of a Lady,” he warns us not to waste life vainly but try to “live fully” finding a kind of deep, vital, satisfying, emotional “buried life” as a whole human being.

This paper purports to read “Portrait of a Lady” in terms of Henry James’ influence. Unlike the influence of French Symbolist poets, H. James’s influence has not drawn many critical attentions. Eliot is greatly indebted to H. James in many ways. First of all, it is James from whom Eliot had learned that poetry ought to be as well written as prose. Also, as Eliot himself said, he was stimulated by the method to make a place real not descriptively but by something happening there and to let a situation, a relation, and an atmosphere give only what the writer wants in James’s stories. Under the inspiration of James, Eliot can cultivate his gift for dramatic verse. So, we can say the dramatic quality of Eliot’s poetry which is no less than in James’s stories, is not irrelevant to the Jamesian method. Considering such influence of James, this paper aims at comparing Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” and James’s The Portrait of a Lady and “The Beast in the Jungle”, in the light of the character’s failure and frustration. Especially, Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” and James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” portray a man who fails in having relations with a woman in common. In both of works, each man is distinctively selfish. We can investigate more concretely in what ways “the egotism of a man” is expressed and presented as a hindrance in human relations in both works.

How does T. S. Eliot represent women in his poetry? One of the recent arguments puts forward stresses Eliot’s way of describing negative aspects of women in his poetry, while ignoring any good qualities that they may have had. However, a careful study of Eliot’s early poetry shows women torn by the pain of abandonment, betrayal, fear, isolation and loneliness. Furthermore, it is not easy to find the poet’s sympathetic attitude toward women throughout his early poetry. This study aims at investigating the sources of the frustration, failure and unhappiness through the polyphonic voices of man and woman heard in “Portrait of a Lady,” while considering the real sense of Eliot’s attitude toward women. The poem ends in unresolved pain and uncertainty, suffered by men and women alike, which implicitly shows the agony and isolation that people must encounter in human relationships. It is usually apparent when they recognize their own destiny and their confused feelings and longings. In the final analysis, it basically derives from the existential recognition of human beings.