(Download) "Tennyson and the Ladies (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay)" by Victorian Poetry ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Tennyson and the Ladies (Alfred Tennyson) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 218 KB
Description
In his 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and 1832 Poems, Tennyson published more than a dozen lyrics now designated "lady poems"--taking his titles from the heroines of Shakespeare and Spenser, modern and classical authors, and letting them evolve, as he put it, "like the camel, from my own consciousness." (1) For much of his career and the century after, critics tended to dismiss these poems, from his friend Edward FitzGerald who thought them a "tiresome Gallery" to the late A. Dwight Culler who quipped that the poems "began, very suddenly, with the onset of puberty and stopped, very suddenly, with the access of judgment." (2) We can understand Culler's impatience with "airy, fairy Lilian," the "ever varying Madeline," or the "faintly smiling Adeline" as exhibitions of an adolescent's erotic fantasies. Yet recent scholars have countered Culler's critique, pointing out that Tennyson continued to place "Claribel" at the head of his collections, including Poems, in Two Volumes (1842) and the Moxon Tennyson (1857), and arguing that the lady poems embed his enduring concerns: the "freedoms and constrictions" of the human condition (James Hood), the feminization of lyric and literary culture (Richard Cronin, Carol Christ, Catherine Maxwell, Herbert Tucker), and an anxiety over the status of the artist in modern England (Linda Hughes, Gerhard Joseph, Joseph Chadwick, et al.). (3) Even Culler acknowledged this last concern as it pertained to Tennyson's development: "Tennyson stopped painting them and allowed them to speak.... In so doing he transformed them from an art object into a symbol of the artist" (p. 40). While acknowledging the developmental function of the lady poems in Tennyson's oeuvre, I want to explore instead their participation in a contemporary debate over the "characteristics of women"--a phrase I take from Anna Jameson's Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832). Published in the same year as Poems, this text was not directly influential on Tennyson's work; rather, Jameson's study, like Tennyson's poems, represents an engagement with public debates about woman's "character" and her newly emerging cultural role by means of analyzing the female "characters" of Shakespeare. Jameson's alternate title, Shakespeare's Heroines, (4) makes this link dear, as do articles about Shakespeare's heroines in periodicals of the 1820s and reviews of Fanny Kemble's acting in the period 1829-1832. Tennyson's lady poems reflect the poet's interest in the "characteristics of women," including his recognition of what a masculine perspective might offer to questions about women's nature, roles, influence, and mission. The poems are not just adolescent fantasies, then, soon to disappear with "the access of judgment," nor are they primarily vehicles for expressing artistic anxiety in a post-Romantic climate (though they may be both). Rather, as I read them, they are explorations of a pressing Victorian concern with the social roles and contributions of women--a concern that emerged prominently in the era of the first Reform Bill and that Tennyson would engage throughout his career. As I shall suggest, Tennyson began his analysis of women's "characteristics" by meditating on Shakespeare's heroines, but by 1832, most likely under Arthur Hallam's influence, he expanded his range to include female characters from classical lyric and epic texts-an expansion that also deepened his thinking about women's roles in the public sphere.