In "Portrait D'une Femme", Ezra Pound contrasts the female inclination towards fragmentation, inertia and submission with the corresponding masculine characteristics of spontaneity, thoroughness, and dominance in an attempt to highlight the threat posed by women seeking to drag the "man's world" into the depths of a cultural Sargasso Sea. However, Pound also recognizes that women are ultimately individual entities and uses the changing female figure to reveal the emptiness of chaos that characterizes the "new" metropolitan world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Unlike Eliot, who sees both sexes as “empty,” Pound sees women as binary opposites of men. The sexes are the "different light and depth" (27), the "nothing" and the "everything" (28), the "darkened goods" and the "brighter stuff" (5, 26). Unlike the spontaneous and emotionally fulfilled man, Pound's woman is a stationary, empty being, incapable of progressing because there is no point of trajectory within her empty frame. She is Galatea to Pygmalion, a "wonderful ancient work" (22), an "idol" preserved with ambergris (23), unable to move, breathe, or think independently of the influence of man. Its place is in an exotic collection of "finds" and "trophies" (4, 16); a static, lifeless work of art from a moldy museum that "never...shows use" (20), "that could prove useful and yet never shows it" (19), whose state internal is guided by its external goods. Pound's woman is the opposite of his man: she is surrounded by culture, random material things, and "strange branches of knowledge" (5). Men, on the contrary, are spontaneous: they search, move, sail around the world on "light ships" (3) while women are trapped in sterile ponds, cemented in ports like toll booths richly paid for in taxes, gathering the knowledge of men in a sedentary "marine treasure" (25). The woman may see the swift currents of an evolving society "swept around her," but may or may not participate (2). She is made up of the detritus of men, an apathetic Athena born from the head of Zeus, a goddess who is wearily immortal. This lady of Shalott, while working on her "loom of days," is trapped in a tower with a mirror that reflects the physical artifacts of her valor, weaving a tapestry that displays the exploits of men (21). Pound argues that this passivity, this denial of agency, is what women "prefer... to the same old thing" (8). The woman takes the man's relics with her because they fill a sterility within her that she is not willing to face. Accumulate fragments of other lives, striving to create a unified unity from the parts. Totally organized by her environment, she creates temporary identities out of the intellect of anyone who stops, so that, in the end, "nothing is really [hers]" (29). Because he is an immortal figure with a transitory soul, he is in a race against time to take away some of man's permanent integrity. Pound describes this relationship in wooden terms: the woody, rooted woman hoards the man's growing "deciduous things" and, having taken her due, returns the "strange half-soaked woods" (25-6 ). She fills her mind with shiny, superficial “new brighter things” and “ideas, old gossip” to distract her from looking into her ambiguous inner self (26, 4). The lady dashes all hopes of a cohesive identity because she is dissatisfied with singularity, but too impatient to discover what makes her singular; rejects "a boring man" because he needs exciting stories and things to remain a "one's person."certain interest" in order to encourage the next "great minds [to] seek it." In doing so, it can again weaken their enduring spirit and "take away strange gains" (9, 14, 6, 15). It is a trap of the time that promotes her mistaken association between knowledge and personal meaning. She sits "patiently...[for] hours, where something might have floated" (11-2), a spider in her web; Sphinx offering menacing yet compelling enigmas. Pound's Woman is so fleeting yet so all-consuming that it's fitting that she is able to take on so many faces from so many stories and so many cultures. She's not stable enough to fit an archetype, like he can be a man, and he can't work his way into acceptance, because he "never fits into a corner" (20), being an incomplete being, always "half-soaked" (26), of only "some interest" (14), filled with a vague "something else" (18), submits to men only to have a foundation to stand on. basing one's identity on an "other" by choice. Despite “her riches, her great store” (24), she is internally impoverished, inevitably there but “get[ing] nowhere” (17), seeking a tangible, material man to fill the void. Pound uses the rhetoric of absence, togetherness, possession, and fulfillment to illustrate a woman's path to "satisfaction." Men want her when "someone else is missing" (6); she is a last priority addition, a rib of Adam who cannot become a complete being without first completing someone else. Once attached, the story suddenly becomes a "tale of two", in which the lady has a companion to whom she can be "always second" (7), and "pay richly" for her love with "your mind and you" (13, 1). In a way, it's a cold, symbiotic business transaction: it's a modern-day Colossus of Rhodes, allowing men into its personal cityscape by letting them under its skirts, taking compensation in the form of random ideas. Interestingly, her realization from these relationships is a pregnancy with screaming mandrakes, her only voice in her silent, stationary hibernation amidst her cultural junk. For Pound, women are secondary, stagnant, and emotionally disconnected. They need to be pushed, forced, and filled by men, but once they are expected to "prove themselves useful" (19) they are distracted by meaningless trifles which in turn distract men. Pound uses the binary opposition between the sexes as a conflict between man's flexibility in making lasting and resolute decisions, and woman's weakness of will and action. These two forces are unable to balance each other because the woman's negative energy clouds and dulls the man's brightness and, as a result, upsets the balance that maintains order in Pound's rapidly expanding world. Despite being a mixture of other people's characteristics, Pound admits that his femme is a complete and separate entity: "this is you" (30). However, because he created this particular woman just as artists shape sculptures, he continues to see his subject as a passive receptacle who accepts whatever identity he gives her: equally the London sprawl, the Sargasso Sea, or a possessive witch. Here, it becomes the site for Pound's discussion of the “new world” of the 20th century, and its flaws mirror those of the chaotic global metropolis. Pound sees the end of the First World War as the starting line for a new era in which culture and the social landscape begins to transform at increasing speed. The world is always moving across uneven terrain, bordering on chaos, and must be controlled and stabilized before it implodes into the "slow rolling" apocalypse that"it doesn't lead anywhere"; in other words, Eliot's "Wasteland." Pound depicts this shifting, impetuous reality as “London overwhelms you” (2), where humanity, innovation, and connections swirl in an accelerating vortex that surrounds the dazed, immobile individual. Pound makes his femme an artistic ornament, partly to express the feeling of lifeless stillness in the calm of a vortex, watching in amazement as it all resumes and leaves her behind still fixed to her pedestal, her private problems so petty in compared to catastrophic changes in society. Like a painting, it embodies Pound's poetic goal of complex feelings and thoughts condensed into a single passing frame; think for slides and "strange spars" (5). In the contradiction of modernity, as life shifts to different things, we are stuck trying to "find [our] hour on the frame of days" (21), wondering if we are simply a blink on the timeline between bright newness and antiquity recently "tarnished" (22). We become industrious, in arrears, we are "patient...hours", as if we hoped the world would stop for us, to allow us a moment to catch up (11-2). To stay at our relatively slow pace, we would have to choose from the slideshow of small, fast-moving snapshots of life. Pound fears that his woman, not wanting to lose anything, will try to keep up and end up neglecting what is significant in her existence. The new world is empty and banal, partly because fast communication turns meeting new people into a mere hobby. The value of interaction diminishes when people compete to pack so many new personalities into their consciousness that they hollow out their characters. Like Pound's lady, modern people become shells housing a collection of social and intellectual curiosities and little else. By putting together many "trophies... idols... riches" (16, 23-4), their initial brightness is attenuated, and they become "darkened goods of price... gaudy" (5, 22), masking a inner emptiness tarred by the residues of a material world. The femme shows that seeking respite from emotional mediocrity through beautiful things rather than worthy thoughts takes a heavy toll, leading all roads to Rome and true spiritual fulfillment to be blocked by the barriers of commerce and profit. Once again, in the ongoing effort to "make it new" Pound comes to the question of identity and individuality. In a world that operates outside of time, poetry is scarce, and Pound's blank verse is free from the tradition of rhyme, free to be a series of discontinuous impressions and images without a binding narrative. The femme's fluctuating and fragmented sense of self reflects the individual's struggle to break the overwhelming dominance of modern crowds and the pressure to constantly reinvent oneself to remain separate and unique. Pound accepts the crowded, cosmopolitan, universal world: his femme is the essence of a global citizen; his name is in French but he lives in London. He fraternizes with "great minds" and possesses exotic rarities, but is not impervious to the abyss of identity crisis. Refusing to settle for "a boring man" to gain the approval of others, she ironically becomes the most overwhelmed and abandoned of them all. He often falls short, making "curious suggestions...that lead nowhere" (16-7), trying to "prove useful and yet never prove himself" (19). Like other new world "bastards" who crave scraps to complete themselves, he finds nothing in the entire expanding Western civilization that he can completely call his own. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now..