Ash-Wednesday contrasts well with Four Quartets in the degree of feminine participation. The former has rich feminine presences while in the latter are heard only their faintly-heard voices. The richness of feminine involvement allows the reader a subtler look at the attributes and workings of feminine elements, the feminine archetypes here. Unlike most of Eliot’s poetical works where the motherly figures are dominant, Ash-Wednesday presents the anima actively functioning: the archetype shows its quality of variability, which the persona finds distasteful and struggles to escape from; it also displays its transformative and mediating nature through the Lady’s position of bridging the mundane and the transcendental; it reveals its dual nature as a helping partner and a destroyer alike by presenting itself as benign or hostile to the protagonist; it also shows its relation to the mother by presenting itself in collaboration with, or in opposition to, the other. The anima figures including invisible Vivienne of Poem I and the Lady, as a receptacle of these diverse and conflicting attributes of the anima, attract or repel the persona, depending on his different situations. She is a benign being at one time but she threatens his wellbeing at another time. Ultimately, however, the persona’s efforts to reach the world beyond seem to be limited by his propensity to gravitate toward the mother. He is consistently found regressively drawn to the mother in the poem and elsewhere.

• Byung-Hwa Joh(Koje College)