A Modern Eve: The Typist in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Exploring the universal, mythic aspects of the typist of
Part III of the poem, the book looks at her relationship to the Hellenic
poet Sappho and the Hebraic myth of Eve. For millennia that myth
has labelled women as inferior and untrustworthy, so requiring
male supervision. Eliot states that ‘all the women are one woman’
in the poem. By the time this woman reaches modernity, she is
isolated, alienated, and mute with exhaustion. Eliot visits the
cultures of the north and south Mediterranean, exploring imagery such as Sappho’s evening
star Hesperus as Aphrodite, who opens the poem in ‘April’.
Adopted by the Greeks from the Phoenicians of the southern shores,
she is accompanied by Mnemosyne of ‘Memory’, the mother of the
Boeotian muses.