Does modernist aesthetic theory amount to more than a set of masks that criticism must tear away? Certainly it isn't hard to see how the doctrine of impersonality bolsters claims for aesthetic disinterestedness – claims that have been thoroughly demystified to reveal the self-interest and special pleading that lie underneath. The modernist ideal of art's autonomy has been regarded skeptically for several decades now, following the suspicion that it rationalizes various forms of dissimulation. The critic's job is to discover what, in any given case, this aesthetic ideology is being employed to disguise. Since T. S. Eliot had so much to hide – a disastrous marriage, his near-phobic hatred of women, the faint but unmistakable hint of sexual deviancy, along with the expatriate's standard insecurities about fitting in, not to mention his anti-Semitism and racialist bigotries – recent critics have found plenty to expose.