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Offstage Purgatories

Spatial settings in T. S. Eliot’s plays are mostly determined by those plays’ main situations. We may think of the dismal London flat of Sweeney Agonistes, of Canterbury Cathedral in Murder in the Cathedral, or Wishwood manor in The Family Reunion. Occasionally, Eliot introduces imaginary locations of a dramatic relevance: examples are San Marco in The Elder Statesman, or Kinkanja in The Cocktail Party.

Frederick Culverwell was an Oxford friend of Lord Claverton’s. After serving a jail sentence in England for forgery, he settles in San Marco. This is a fictional republic in Central America where Culverwell becomes a respectable citizen as Federico Gomez. However, as he points out to Lord Claverton, “out there they respect you for rather different reasons” – the republic’s name seems evocative of Venetian moral decadence. According to Gomez, San Marco is “a good place / to make money in, though not to keep it in,” and the people there “have Indian thoughts”. Lord Claverton dismisses his former friend’s activity as “systematic corruption,” but his sense of moral superiority will soon waver. Gomez has returned from his own purgatorial San Marco to teach Claverton a lesson in humility.

Kinkanja is an island in the East to which Celia Copplestone travels as a missionary, and where she undergoes her via purgativa. Alex MacColgie Gibbs, returning from “a tour of inspection of local conditions,” characterises the conflict in Kinkanja: the heathen population venerates monkeys, Christian converts eat monkeys, and the heathen eat Christians in revenge. Alex also brings news of Celia’s death in this context: she has been crucified by heathen insurgents (her final via unitiva). The population of Kinkanja is portrayed, from a prejudiced orientalist perspective, as cruel and irrational (“The native is not, I fear, very rational”), but their land, present through Alex’s narration, is important as the setting where Celia fulfils her destiny of sacrifice and sainthood.

San Marco and Kinkanja contribute to characterisation, plot evolution and thematic definition. Neither is staged, but both represent foils to the plays’ actual or alternative settings: San Marco is a contrast to Lord Claverton’s England, where law, order and morality seem to prevail; Kinkanja is diametrically opposed to the glamour of Hollywood, of which Celia may have dreamt as an aspiring actress. Crucially, they are comparable as offstage, symbolic purgatories.

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