La importancia del etiquetado nutricional en los productos light

notes to The Waste Land, Eliot states that he used Frazer‘s study of

magic and religion, pointing specifically to the volumes Adonis, Attis,

It is no wonder that in a December 31, 1925, letter to Fitzgerald, Eliot declared that

The Great Gatsby was ―such a remarkable book . . . the first step American fiction

has taken since Henry James‖ (Fitzgerald qtd. in Crack Up 310).

Laura Riding, another writer who, we might say, danced around the prickly

pear during her unusual lifetime, published some twenty-two books and twenty-

eight stories, essays, and letters in various periodicals; her works still appear in at

least seven anthologies. The Fugitive published three of her poems in its March

1925 issue when she was twenty-four years old—―Summary for Alastor,‖ ―Virgin of

the Hills,‖ ―The Only Daughter‖—and the theme of alienation dominates each, a theme the Nashville poets particularly favored at that time: ―Though none of them

expressed the feeling as strikingly as T. S. Eliot had in ‗The Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock,‘ or Ezra Pound in ‗Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,‘ the sense of intellectual alienation was one they shared with the leading poets of the age‖ (Pratt xxv).

In a 1939 review of Riding‘s poems, William Carlos Williams states:

There are those who might say, with some justice, these are

monochromes painted by a lame person; they suggest colors and

movements—but nothing distinguished. That should not, in Laura

Riding‘s definition, limit them as poems. The ―reasons for poetry‖ are neither painting nor the dance. It is a dour theme—an

undifferentiated, aluminous femaleness of art—at its worst but ably

defended as a poetic wombdarkness, where only a few aimless kicks

By the time Williams penned this review of Riding‘s poetry, she had published

several more poems since her 1925 piece ―Summary for Alastor‖—―The Close Chaplet‖ (1926); ―Voltaire: A Biographical Fantasy‖ (1927); ―Love as Love, Death as Death‖ (1928); ―Though Gently,‖ ―Twenty Poems Less,‖ and ―Poems: A Joking Word‖ (1930); ―Laura and Francisca‖ (1931); ―Poet: A Lying Word,‖ ―The First Leaf,‖ and ―The Life of the Dead‖ (1933); ―Americans‖ (1934); ―Collected Poems‖ (1938)—so he had a considerable body of work from which to form his unimpressed

opinion. Deborah Baker writes, ―In the spring of 1938 Riding had turned her attention to novels, painting, music, and public morality because she had already

written the last of her published poems‖ (361). Baker tells of Riding‘s peculiar life during which she turned against poetry entirely, claiming that it was part of a

―dying romantic tradition—Literalism was the culminating ideology of a line of thought that would lead to Riding‘s renunciation of poetry‖ (362).

Although Riding‘s first patrons, the young Fugitives [Allen Tate, John

Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson], established no particular

program, they agreed on some basic points; therefore, despite Riding‘s lack of attendance among the group, apparently the several poems published in The

Fugitive satisfied their poetic and political credo during what William Pratt has

called the Fugitives‘ most formal phase (1922 to 1925) (xiii). John M. Bradbury lists some of John Crowe Ransom‘s criteria of the formalists: Ransom insists ―in

formalist fashion, that the poem is a ‗living integrity,‘ to be separated into its component elements only for the purpose of analysis, and he insists that ‗the character of the poem resides . . . in its way of exhibiting the residuary quality.‘‖

However, in an essay on Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ransom proposes ―as a ‗stale

consideration‘ that ‗the poetry on whatever level must make as consistent sense as prose.‘ Ransom wants a ‗professional‘ criticism, thoroughly organized and

‗scientific,‘ one that disregards the emotional component of poetry as nonobjective and undiscussible, and concentrates on properly aesthetic considerations‖

(Bradbury 133).

In contrast to the work of Stein, Eliot, and Pound, Riding‘s 1925 poem, ―Summary for Alastor,‖ seems very American. Its use of classical myth is

straightforward, clear allusion. The displacement to the classical realm, where one

can find a female ―judge‖ or adviser for a woman‘s plea in a case of adultery, is a necessity in Puritan patriarchal America, and so the device works. Here we have a

poem perfectly in accord with Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby, except from the female

point of view. The three women in The Great Gatsby—Daisy, Myrtle, and Jordan—

and the issues of innocence, seduction, adultery, and betrayal work themselves to a

more tragic end precisely BECAUSE the setting is materialistic, hypocritical

America—except in Fitzgerald‘s twist, a man is the innocent and is the one who

loses everything (and the most sexually direct woman perishes at the hands of Daisy

while Jordan Baker, named for two fancy automobiles, will keep cheating and

lying). In beginning Riding‘s ―Summary for Alastor‖—Alastor being the

mythological Greek personification of familial feuds—an adulteress speaks to her

lover. Perhaps Riding speaks to Allen Tate, because ―Tate‘s passionate interest in

‗Mrs. G.‘ had been returned in more than equal measure in the few months since his visit to her in Louisville‖ (Baker 59). The poem opens, ―Because my song was bold /

And you knew but my song, / You thought it must belong / To one brave to behold‖ (ll. 1-4). Recalling that appearances are often deceiving from Aesop‘s The Wolf in

Sheep’s Clothing, we realize that the adulteress purposely fools her lover in assuming the role of a Siren, and that beneath her façade lurks the fear that her

lover will find out that the boldness of her words is not matched by physical

freedom.

―Alastor‘s‖ second stanza juxtaposes the characteristics of the Siren with those of an Eve—not only an original distinction, but also fresh and spontaneous in

Riding‘s hands: ―But finding me a shy / And cool and quiet Eve, / You scarcely would believe / The fevered singer was I‖ (ll. 5-8). The mention of a ―fevered

singer‖ again connects to the bold singer or Siren in the first stanza and, of course, the Sirens of Greek mythology. The adulteress in ―Alastor‘s‖ third stanza now puts her reluctance to act on her words in terms of innocence: ―And you caressed the

child / That blushed beneath your eyes, / Hoping you might surprise / The hidden

heart and wild‖ (ll. 9-12). Not literally a child in years, the adulteress allows the lover to hope her pretense of innocence disguises a passionate nature. When he

learns that she has duped him, he reacts disappointingly. In a brief review of the

poem thus far, the reader recalls the female‘s aggressive behavior in the first stanza;

in the second, the female‘s passive manners; in this third stanza, the female‘s

virtuous conduct. Acting contradictorily in each stanza, the female masquerades as

a Siren, a child, and an Eve, yet all three stanzas reflect the poetic persona‘s feeling

of alienation from her own desire. The fourth stanza of ―Alastor‖ condemns the

finds colossally intriguing: ―And being only human, / A proud, impetuous fool / Whose guise alone was cool, / I let you see the woman‖ (ll. 13-16). She looks back now to the figure of Eve who was too proud and impetuous to follow God‘s

instructions in the Garden of Eden. When the Eve figure drops her charade as the

upstanding female, the lover discovers a passionate woman. Therefore, this stanza

continues the poet‘s contradictory personalities.

Baker writes, ―Riding was not, of course, the only intellectual of the time attempting to define and understand the worrisome topic of sex, but her conclusions

and proscriptions were often the most radical‖ (238). In effect, Riding‘s

―Summary for Alastor‖ possesses the underlying theme of adultery, for the poem speaks of a wife who entices an unsuspecting lover. The male never truly knows in

advance whether the female embodies a Siren, an innocent, an Eve, or a willing

sexual partner. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy dons the role of the Siren who continues

to entrance the Odyssean voyager. To Gatsby, however, Daisy is the Odyssean

goddess Calypso who genuinely cares for him and does not want to let him go.

Because the adulteress in ―Alastor‖ is unconcerned with the capture and release of

her lover, going so far as to inform Alastor that her innocence remains intact, she

may also be compared with the goddess Circe, who does not show any feelings for

Odysseus. Daisy is both Calypso, who sporadically cares about Gatsby, and Circe,

who displays no like or dislike for Gatsby, merely enchanting him. Gatsby has two

encounters with Daisy, one we see from Jordan Baker‘s point of view:

―One October day in nineteen-seventeen‖—(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-

garden at the Plaza Hotel)—―I was walking along from one place to

another, half on the sidewalks and half on the lawns. I was happier

on the lawns because I had on shoes from England with rubber nobs

on the soles that bit into the soft ground. I had on a new plaid skirt

also that blew a little in the wind, and whenever this happened the

red, white, and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out

stiff and said TUT-TUT-TUT-TUT, in a disapproving way. The

largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy

Fay‘s house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed

in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the

telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp

Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night.

"Anyways, for an hour!" When I came opposite her house that

morning her white roadster was beside the curb, and she was sitting

in it with a lieutenant I had never seen before. They were so engrossed

in each other that she didn't see me until I was five feet away.‖ (49)

Ironically, four years later, it is Jordan Baker who helps Nick Carraway arrange

the second awkward encounter between Gatsby and Daisy. This encounter is

witnessed by Nick:

For half a minute there wasn‘t a sound. Then from the living- room I heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh, followed

―I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.‖

A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall,