Stage Spaces and T. S. Eliot’s Exits from Secular Modernity

Any discussion of Eliot and literary spatiality must begin with Murder in the Cathedral (1935), particularly its first production run within the walls of Canterbury Cathedral. This assertion might sound arbitrary since Eliot went on to write four more plays that were drawing-room dramas and used staging and set design intentionally in them to perform what I call “exit scenes,” spiritual awakenings rendered in dramatic vocabulary. However, the scenes and exits from the drawing-room dramas are prefigured by his first full-length foray into dramaturgy, and Murder in the Cathedral remains his wildest and in some senses most successful triangulation of religious philosophy, stage space, and contemporary politics. Throughout this chapter, what interests me is Eliot’s emphasis in prose and poetry on Englishness and English politics, which for him always includes the British Empire. Even though he resists overly critical commentary about imperial politics, colonized spaces—India, and to a lesser extent North Africa and Central America—are in the plays the locus of spiritual exits, where characters go to escape stifling London spaces. Despite limitations in his imagination about such non-English places, all the drawing-room plays insist that spiritually sensitive people have to leave their degraded modern life in London society apartments or upper-class English manors. Eliot also repeatedly contends that true Christianity is at odds with contemporary politics, including extractive twentieth-century colonial rule. This separation of an individual from their national identity, for instance where an upper-middle-class British woman has a spiritual awakening and goes to colonized east Asia while rejecting her class and citizenship, recalls Forster’s early phase in Alexandria. Like the older author, Eliot imagines that people might be able to remove the yoke of nationality in remote places and live outside the ambit of global politics. One Eliot play, The Cocktail Party (1949), acknowledges how impossible it is to really set aside the trappings of privilege, and Forster certainly realized almost immediately after landing as a uniformed Red Cross officer in Alexandria that the burdens and privileges of nationality and race are difficult to eschew. Eliot, in contrast, retains an almost simple loyalty to the idea that a religious calling extricates the individual from other kinds of affiliations of class, race, and social standing. Thomas à Becket’s historical example, wherein the priest chooses to sacrifice himself rather than accede to the demands of the king, remains for him the preeminent model for ethical citizenship in twentieth-century modernity.