modernism

Throughout antiquity, thinking has been the province of a select, radical few. Others were merely to believe their teachers and respond accordingly, not to come up with new ideas on their own. Gradually, individual thinking became encouraged and eventually the norm. As our societies expanded, so did our knowledge of the world itself and new theories disproved old theories which required a complete re-construction of the ways we learned. Instead of re-vamping old theories, more and more students were experimenting with them and learning that many old theories just don't hold up to scientific inquiries. The learned of this time period had to re-invent themselves and their classification to include new ways of thinking, not just learning. And thwarted at every turn by the Church in their Justifications to leave the masses ignorant, they had quite a fight before education even resembled what we know today.

Education, historically, has been for males, especially after industrialization allowed men to go out into the world to work and learn. Women were once again shunted to the rear in order to care for the basic daily chores to sustain living while their men were out reconfiguring the landscape of the educational universe and reinventing more complicated, mechanized ways of doing traditional chores. Even still, women found a way to reinvent the landscape themselves: they began reading their husbands' and fathers' books and theses and began to think for themselves much the same as men were expanding their knowledge base. (The song that's playing in my head while I write this is Eurythmic's "Sister's are Doin' it For Themselves").

Modernist works include women more so than many other time periods in history, as well as a delve into the individual psyche. A new, personal accountability arose in this time that every little nuance of self was not in some way beholden to some specific deity (i.e. the furies, if one was angry or maddeningly off-kilter with everyone else, the anger or radical behavior could be blamed on the furies of myths) so much as to one's own character; this shift upset the natural order of things, but the old ways were on their way out anyway. If one could not blame the furies or other external influence, then where did these feelings come from? Freud posed the theory of the unconscious to explain where indeed we get our emotions that we cannot always control. And if these things come from within, then we are accountable for our own actions. Always.
So Prufrock, in olden times, could perhaps have blamed the fates for not weaving his life together with a woman he desired but in the modernist times in which he lived, he had only himself to blame.