The Game of Chess

The Game of Chess is an excerpt from Eliot's "The Wasteland" that describes two different scenes of women, one being a high society woman and her evening in a lavish room while the other references a group of women sitting at a bar. Eliot's piece was particularly well known for the footnotes he decided to attach to the piece and we were asked to examine whether or not any of these contributed to a deeper understanding of the reading. Through examining other pieces in class, it's evident that I've found value in other footnote like pieces, particularly in Coleridge's journal entry concerning the baked beans he ate as a child. Unlike Wimsatt & Beardsley's perception of what is most useful in close reading, I found that his personal relationship to what beans meant to him growing up was interesting and contributed to his work as a writer. In "The Game of Chess," however, I felt like the story was and contrast between high society and lower class interactions was clear enough without most of them. The only footnote that really contributes to the story is the one that clarifies "the game of chess" as denoting a seduction in the piece Middleton's "Women beware women." It seems the woman is speaking to an unknown lover or suffering from a hallucination about a lover in the lines just before. This entirely adds validity to his reference of chess in line 137. However, my skepticism of the other footnotes is merely in the words that he uses to launch into description, for example "laquearia" reference in the Aeneid. As a reader, I understood the lavishness of the room she was in without knowing exactly where that reference came from, whereas the seduction denotation really solidified the piece for me.