Back to the Future: Poetic Justice

TERRY EAGLETON has suggested that “the mid-nineteenth century bourgeois state had problems in resolving its Oedipus complex” (76). Eagleton's semi-serious remark certainly holds true for nineteenth-century British culture, which, while supposedly patriarchal in its political structures, features a great number of significant literary narratives in which the paternal parent is either missing, dead, or never mentioned. The poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are no exception. Gerhard Joseph, Christopher Ricks, and Linda Shires, among others, turn to Freudian psychoanalysis, the Oedipal complex, and Freud's seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia” for insight into why so many father figures are absent from Tennyson's work. Yet neither the Oedipus complex nor “melancholia” accounts for how these father figures, while literally absent, are nevertheless present and influential. Another model is needed to describe the relationship between Tennyson, the missing paternal figures of his narratives, and the age that he has come to represent.

Such a model can be found in the work of the clinical psychologists Karl Abraham and Maria Torok. Working with Freud's initial hypotheses about mourning, Abraham and Torok write in The Shell and the Kernel that, although the mourning process is healthy, natural, and necessary, mourning that is inexpressible

In a healthy subject, the loss is introjected–mourned and grieved for, accepted as a part of reality, and worked through. Inexpressible mourning gets locked away from the subject, held in a kind of tomb, what Abraham and Torok call a “crypt.”

Such a tomb, a crypt, is created by Tennyson's characters and poems. In a literary work, because of the textual nature of the poetic (or prose) subject, a crypt can be either a character's literal burial place or an expression, denoting inexpressible loss, of a character's psychic crypt. A literary work itself may also function as a crypt for this author, a way of holding onto someone or something precious yet problematic. In yet another sense, a literary work can become a cryptic embodiment of traumatic losses for a readership torn by inexpressible anxieties. The significant factor in each case is that the crypt, while by its inherent nature forbidding the expression of mourning, nonetheless evokes a state of mourning whose effects are visible. Such crypts are repeatedly created by Tennyson's characters as well as by his poems themselves.

Furthermore, Tennyson's poetry is distinctly representative of a nineteenth-century problem in paternal representation that resulted from a gradual national shift in social structures from paternalistic hierarchies to committees and professional brotherhoods.¹

Tennyson's own family was part of the squirearchy that had ruled England for centuries, and the changes in paternal and paternalistic power that he witnessed, as well as the failures of those same structures in his own relationships, became part of the narrative of his poems. His ambivalence about domineering fathers resonates with the shifting sense of the paternal in British culture, from the domineering paternal father to a brotherhood stricken with the same difficulties in owning and using power for the good of their dependents. Queen Victoria's attraction to the grief Tennyson wrote out in his poems underscores the importance of this connection, while simultaneously proffering Prince Albert as an allegorical Arthur, who united the British kingdom only to pass away before he could see the fruits of his efforts. By linking a very British literary tradition to a culture that was negotiating new social and political power structures, poems such as “Mariana,” “The Lady of Shalott,” and the twelve-book epic Idylls of the King embody an ambivalent loss of the father that is mourned by the son as he undertakes his “life's unfinished business” (Abraham and Torok 153).

Tennyson's Mourning: Fixations of the Father

VICTORIA ONCE told her Poet Laureate, “Next to the Bible In Memoriam is my comfort” (Stott 1). This link between the Queen and Tennyson's ongoing expression of the loss of his best friend Arthur Hallam calls attention to the two elements at work in each of their lives: painful and debilitating personal loss resulting from the death of one dearly loved, and the national question of patriarchal presence. The Queen's mourning for Prince Albert, as Adrienne Munich has shown, produced crypts ranging from his actual burial place, to his bedroom, to numerous stone effigies where his memory is “buried,” to Victoria's potentially gender-transgressive assumption of his duties in his name (79–103).

Tennyson's In Memoriam at first seems to function as a similar kind of memorial for Arthur Hallam, whereby the poet works through his grief by building the text of the poem. Instead of being dispelled, however, Tennyson's melancholy seems to have remained with him in a way that, given his family's well-known struggle with mental illness, was potentially dangerous. As Ann C. Colley reminds us, Tennyson's concern for his own mental health is well documented; she argues, however, that “it is necessary to think of Tennyson as an observer of that madness and not, as some might claim, its victim” (3). Hallam's death nearly sent Tennyson into a spiral of depression that he was unable to escape. Through writing his nearly book-length epitaph for his friend, Tennyson was able to keep Hallam as a real audience for the poem–to keep him alive, so to speak, inside himself–and thus stave off a spiral of depression that threatened to be inescapable. Even long before Hallam's death, however, Tennyson had begun, as a matter of practice, to encrypt losses in his poems, mourning ambivalent paternal figures through the actions and activities of the sons. This practice is most evident in “The Kraken” and “The Hesperides.”

“The Kraken” might appear to be most easily read in psychoanalytic terms as a vague figure of repression and the Oedipal complex. Matthew Rowlinson, in a fine if difficult and complex Lacanian reading, refers to the Kraken's “battening on huge seaworms” without evidence of eyes or mouth as mourning for a stage of human infancy before the subject is initiated into the Oedipal complex. “[T]he difference between what is seen and what is eaten,” writes Rowlinson, “must have a peculiar force for the small child in marking the difference between what is inside and what is outside its body” (59). Yet, as Rowlinson suggests, Tennyson's poetry is highly allegorical, and “within psychoanalytic theory, no less than within Tennyson's poetry, the materiality of language–more generally, of the signifier– is constituted by allegory” (3). While Tennyson delights in the classical and historic figures upon which his poems center, these figures usually hold additional significance. Rowlinson's reading situates the Kraken's allegorical representation nicely into the Lacanian Law of the Father, that which initiates the Oedipal complex.

The pre-Oedipal stage in which the Kraken is lolling about, which evokes a child's pre-knowledge of competition with and fear of the father, could certainly be read as a desire to elide the paternal presence altogether. This Kraken, however, is both eyeless and “I”-less; it does not see or experience itself slumbering. The Kraken's narrative thus requires that another I/eye sit in as the subject speaking. It is this subject, too, that fears the primacy of the Son and the loss of the Father that would allow the Kraken to slumber unmolested by the vagaries and needs of the new time. Since, according to the timeline of the poem, that loss has yet to come, the poem covers the anxiety of the real loss that is being encrypted within it: the loss of the primacy of the paternal over the fraternal.

The Kraken, who will not be disturbed until the “latter fire” awakes him, is figured within this poem in an as-yet-unawakened state. The rise of the creature thus equates to the freeing of the subject from a repression that cannot survive once it is seen. Rowlinson's psychoanalytic discussion overlooks the context in which the Kraken will arise: “Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;/Then once by man and angels to be seen,/In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die” (13–15).²

The Kraken will arise on the occasion of the apocalypse: the final settling of accounts between God and man in the figure of the Son. When that occurs, the Kraken will account not to the eternal Father, per se, but to the Son.

The slumbering Kraken thus represents an awakening, as yet buried, to the light of the new age, an anxiety of pre-symbolic representation that will someday be called up from the depths to account for its existence. This reading points to multiple sources of anxiety at the heart of the Christian allegory of spiritual awakening: the wrath of the displaced father, the ambivalent maintenance of paternal authority through a fraternal representative (Christ, the Son of Man), and the actual viability of New Testament authority over the Old Testament.

The Kraken will rise to the Son either because the Son's authority has primacy over the Father's or because the Son (Sun?) stands in for the father under his authority. Utilizing a figure from Norse mythology, the poem could easily be read as the loss of an age of mythic and fairy-tale innocence before the world was pressed into the Christian order with its avenging God.

“The Kraken” introduces a pattern we will see in a number of Tennyson's earlier poems, among them “Mariana,” and seems to prefigure his later fascination with the mythical fraternity of Camelot. Here, as in these other poems, a missing paternal presence determines the condition under which the events narrated in the poem occur. As in “The Kraken,” the elided paternal parent is frequently replaced with a fraternal surrogate, one that Tennyson's narrative events cast as unable to resolve the problems he creates. Hence it seems as if the elided paternal figure is actually buried or “encrypted” within these poems as a presence figured through absence, painfully problematic and replaced by a fraternity that frequently fares no better.

The nature of Abraham and Torok's “crypt” is that the loss within can never be acknowledged as such. In fact, anything and everything that can be done to cover the loss, will be. In Tennyson's poems, the loss is so traumatic and so painful to the characters, the author, and even the reader, that to show it would cause the end of the symbolic order from which it is absent. Hence its absence is another unspoken presence: it must be there to support what is not there, to enact the narrative of the missing father. Without focusing on the father's absence, the poem nevertheless invokes an anxiety about his missing presence.

“The Hesperides” performs another mythic encryption. The reference Tennyson borrows is, of course, from Milton's Comus. Like the fruit in Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market” (or, more appropriately, vice versa), the fruit of the tree that the Hesperides watch is, for both Milton and Tennyson, linked to the Fall of Man. For this tree is an ever-green, ever-living, life-giving Edenic tree:

According to Aidan Day, the Hesperidian maidens and the redcombed dragon fuse connotations of youth with extreme old age (14). This combination hints further at the extreme age (or agelessness) of God the Father, the Old Testament God, and God the Son, the “innocent,” the lamb. Thus this Edenic tree and its fruit are guarded “[l]est one from the East come and take it away” (42). This passage is commonly read in Miltonic terms, with reference to the Fall of Man; Day adds mention of “a traditional Christian interpretation of the figure of Hercules as a type of Christ (Milton himself makes such a comparison in Paradise Regained, IV. 563–71)” (17). Yet, like “The Kraken,” this poem takes place before the Fall of Man, and the tree here is maintained in stasis by the poem. The crypt that results in “The Hesperides,” however, is quite different from that of “The Kraken.”

Here, Tennyson's inexpressible mourning is not for the Fall of Man, the secret of the original sin that we all supposedly share, and the Other whose redemption we seek. Tennyson's crypt in “The Hesperides” is for the age before the Fall itself. This is the age that Tennyson violently mourns and takes into himself, writing the poem as an elaborate crypt for the pre-Christian ideal of untroubled mythic beginnings. The stasis of the poem marks a time that does not pass, a time of innocence and rich, pagan beauty, a time of the idealized Romantic pre-historical unspoiled garden of Tennyson's Romantic proclivities.

“The Hesperides” harkens back to the kind of timelessness represented in “The Kraken.” Both poems await the coming of the Son at the same time that they denote a Father who would threaten their survival. The Kraken is not a Christian beast, nor the Hesperides Christian maidens; all exist before the time of the Father with his vengeance or the Son with his obliterating forgiveness. Yet in both poems Tennyson alludes only to the Son's destructive presence: in each case, the power of the heavenly Father will be visited upon the world by his Son. The transference of authority from father to son suggests a pattern here that calls into question Tennyson's ambivalence about the paternal being replaced by the fraternal. In each, the coming of the Son is not a peaceable and inclusive coming, but a destructive and deadening force, yet one that is assumed to be necessary. In both “The Kraken” and “The Hesperides,” the coming of the Son will simultaneously bring about the destruction of one age and the complications of another, “better” age. Tennyson's poems act as a crypt for these anxieties, eliding the father completely while nonetheless invoking the inarticulable and troublesome relationship to the paternal figure through a concurrent assumption of his power by his sons.

Love and Madness: Tennyson's Women

TENNYSON DOES NOT RELY only upon mythological creatures for his expression of this encrypted loss. He draws too from later sources that evoke not an exchange of pre-Christian mythology for the power of Christ the Son, but an exchange that calls into question the very problematic paternalistic authority within Christian British culture. One such source is Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, from which Tennyson takes his character of Mariana.

Embowered in her moated grange and surrounded by thatch, mosses, and poplars, the title character of “Mariana” exhibits all the symptoms of the love-mad woman:

In the same psychoanalytic vein as Rowlinson, David Goslee characterizes Mariana's “alienation” and her melancholy as the typical kind, wherein she is experiencing the world in the eyes of the Other. This Other's refusal to come to her and behold her in his line of vision is something she then holds as her own failure (Goslee 30–31). This interpretation brings us to the main question raised by the poem: if Mariana is so unhappy in the grange without her lover, why does she not leave or make any attempt physically to alter the landscape that, in its decay, echoes and exacerbates her alienation from the desired Other?

Although Mariana does speak, she is essentially in the poem as a part of the landscape, and the landscape reflects her emotional state. The poplar tree in her garden, the only upright figure in the entire landscape, casts a shadow “[u]pon her bed, across her brow” (56), thereby marking, in its phallic significance, the lack she is mourning. The externalization of herself in her surroundings becomes an important element of the crypt in this poem. As in “The Kraken” and “The Hesperides,” “Mariana” relies on an external narrator, who relates her lengthy tale of woe, depicts her in her “moated grange,” and conveys her moans of spiritual weariness. In his catalogue of her sadness, the narrator allows the poem to lay heavy blame on the lover who abandoned her.

This narrator critiques the socioeconomic power that has created Mariana's misery. That her lover, Angelo, left her upon being deprived of the property that would ensure their marriage exemplifies the barter of women on the marriage market for other property. Sold in body and affections to her lover, Tennyson's Mariana is forever enmeshed in paternal power structures that dismiss the sorrow of women in favor of the rights and privileges of men. While Shakespeare's play corrects the error, a Victorian audience would know that Angelo was fully within his rights to withdraw his pledge. Mariana has lost not only a lover but any control over her own social position and emotional fulfillment. By concentrating on the period of Mariana's abandonment, rather than the moment in which she is reunited with Angelo, Tennyson's narrator lays the emphasis of the poem on a critique of the structures that have driven Mariana to her abject misery. The time captured in this poem is not the reunion but the days, weeks, months, and perhaps years that elapse after the broken betrothal.

In fact, excepting the story of Geraint and Enid in the Idylls of the King, such a reunion seems alien to Tennyson's major themes. In privileging this period in Mariana's story, Tennyson not only explores her melancholy but can also use that affect to castigate the men who left her to wallow in it. According to Ann Jennalie Cook, a man in Shakespeare's time could legally revoke his offer of marriage when the agreed-upon property was not forthcoming (213). Tennyson communicates to his readership what we would call today the “human cost” of that practice. Tennyson never mentions her family, Angelo, the patriarchal exchange of woman and property, or any other criticism of marital practices. Yet in concentrating on Mariana's pain in that context, while not ever mentioning it, he sets up an effective critique about the powers that leave this kind of destruction in their wake. In this case, the iteration of Mariana's tale of woe becomes an encryption of this story, in which the narrator is also implicated for his or her inaction.

The difference between simple melancholia–where loss turns to anger at the loved one in oneself and punishes the self as if it were the object of affection–and the crypt is that the crypt is never known to the subject. The crypt is caused by a “guilty secret,” which the subject cannot reveal and would rather die than give up. I would suggest that Tennyson is working on such a crypt here in which he hides his most ambivalent of loves: the love of the problematic patriarch. Tennyson's poems do not seem merely melancholic in their expression of loss, nor merely Oedipal in the wish for the overthrow of the father by the sons and fraternal order with whom he replaces father figures. Tennyson's narratives encrypt paternal power in fraternal orders with an ambivalence that concurrently mourns and castigates paternal privilege enacted within fraternal spaces.

Mariana's cries, “I am aweary, aweary” reflect Tennyson's own cries. His own family history doubtless influenced his ambivalence about paternal power structures and figures. Christopher Ricks attributes Tennyson's description of himself as “[a]n infant crying in the night/…And with no language but a cry,” to Tennyson's experiences with his father and his father's family (1). The talented and artistic Dr. George Tennyson, Alfred's father, was passed over for his primogeniture in favor of his younger brother, Charles (Ricks 2). Tennyson's poetic father, denied the family inheritance, took orders and eventually “collapsed into drink and rage,” fits of despondency and broken health (Ricks 4). By 1822, Tennyson's father had “sadly clamped together his physical and mental illness” with drink and never regained his health (Ricks 6). Instead, he suffered fits of madness, despair, and an unfettered bitterness toward the “Old Man” (Tennyson's grandfather) and Alfred's uncle, Charles Tennyson, who was given his brother's birthright (Ricks 6–8). Although schooled by his father for years, Alfred Tennyson left for Cambridge at a young age and had little to do with his father thereafter, but the experience left its mark on him, and his father, in absence, was a tremendous presence.

That the patriarchal presence in Tennyson's poetry is repeatedly constructed by absence is one of the surest signs of an encrypted figure. It is not there, but it is always there. Even if the father figure is deconstructed through absence, he is reconstructed by a simulacrum, a rewriting of that role onto another who has internalized the best of that role, and, many times inadvertently, the worst. Hence, in the story of Mariana that Shakespeare tells, Mariana has fathers, brothers, and Dukes who compel the missing lover to be true to his lady. Tennyson's poem contains no such figures: they have been cut out, but the damage they have done and not yet repaired is held up for the reader as, simultaneously, a distraction from the loss for which the narrator and author are covering up and also a castigation of their inadequacy.

Another of Tennyson's Ophelian maids, the Lady of Shalott, performs a similar kind of encryption as her “sister” Mariana. The Lady's weaving is tremendously important to her entire subjectivity, an exhalation of her consciousness as represented in the mirror. This exhalation, a making in the exterior world of the interior consciousness, is what Hegel might have called an Aufhebung, the turning of thought into empirical reality. The weaving then becomes a kind of text (a word that comes from the Latin texere, “to weave”). This artist, as Tennyson writes her, is placed irreparably outside of the world she desires. Her work becomes a fetishistic crypt for her desire for the world that has deserted her in her tower.

Not only has she mirrored the world in her art, but that art is conversely reflected in her mirror. Her shameful secret of the desire for which she mourns is triggered by the mirrored effect of Lancelot's desertion after his “song.” In the Tennysonian pantheon, Lancelot functions as a metaphor for desire itself, as evidenced by his effect on Guinevere and his fatal impression on the Lady of Shalott, translated into Lady Elaine in the Idylls. Up in her tower, weaving and singing, the Lady, upon seeing Lancelot's reflection in her mirror, is immediately struck with a desire that kills her. Her desire for desire, as figured by the metonym of Lancelot, splits the subjectivity of this poem. On the one hand, the Lady is the subject of the poem. On the other, she has, like Mariana, made herself the object of a desired subject. In enacting her desire as such, the Lady moves from one text, her weaving, to another text.

Like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, who orders her own coffin, engraves the epitaph, and then climbs in, turning her self and her name into text, the Lady has been turning her self into text throughout her whole existence. Only in her last hours does she recognize the nature of this text and, in applying her name to her Charon-like craft, associate that text with the crypt she inhabits. Inscribing her name on her death barge, she floats down the river, singing and dying, becoming in a kind of cruel irony a floating signifier in the most literal sense for the fatality of a woman's desire in a patriarchal culture.

That Lancelot encounters the watercraft in Camelot is no mistake; nor is his acknowledgment of the Lady's beauty and her name. He states, “She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace,/The Lady of Shalott” (169–71). The text inscribed on the craft is meant for him and forces him to encounter the dead Lady in ways he could not encounter the living artist. By making this possible, she asks him to mourn her as she mourns the loss of him, answering the needs of the encrypted mourning, without having to acknowledge the dirty secret of her desire. This is one of the more potent ways in which this inscription becomes an encryption, a crypt to hide the secret that has destroyed her. Lancelot has no consciousness of her, except perhaps as the myth she inhabits in the local parts and in Camelot. Yet she forces him and the rest of the locals to notice her outside of the “text” she creates, both literally and mythically.

Tennyson is so fond of this narrative problem that he will repeat it in the Idylls when the lady, now identified as Elaine, dies after embroidering the cover for Lancelot's shield and similarly being spurned by him. That these events occur several times in Tennyson's work is significant: they return like a repressed trauma that Tennyson is working through. Many critics suggest that the Lady is a metaphor for the writer and the artist, mirroring the author's own thoughts on the production of art and getting “half sick of shadows,” but the end result of Tennyson's experience must not be ignored. His father may have recognized the potential of his art, but the Old Man, his grandfather, did not. Upon giving the young Tennyson some money upon the authorship of a poem, the family patriarch is reported to have said that it would be the last Alfred would earn through his poetry. The titled grandfather who passed over his eldest son, Tennyson's father, in favor of Tennyson's uncle, Charles, for the inheritance of the family fortune represents an older kind of paternal order that Arthur and his round table were meant to stave off: ever-powerful, whimsically malicious, and absolutely devastating. Tennyson's father never recovered from his emasculation at his own father's hands, settling into rage and alcoholism and eventually going mad. He had to take direction from another brother, and a younger one at that, and was not up to the feat. The song of Tennyson the artist thus even more closely parallels the song of the neglected Lady, overlooked by the paterfamilias and the brothers (Alfred's father and his Uncle Charles) who try to replace him and driven to despair by their carelessness.

If we are to interpret the Lady's weaving as text, we can also interpret the text–Tennyson's poem–as a similar weaving of a narrative of her story. This leads to the third layer of this textual crypt: Tennyson's encryption of his character and her needs and desires. Since her desire is for an acknowledgment by her world, his desire must be seen as similar, a desire for recognition by a public that would not ignore his craft. As she is encrypting herself in her weaving, her original text, and her writing on her boat, he is encrypting himself in writing the narrative of her secret desire. Not only is the Lady's crypt for desire also Tennyson's crypt, but the poem is a fetishistic word for that crypt. Tennyson works this particular text and his own weaving of his own crypt as a covering of one of his own losses, one that again is never mentioned in context of this poem, but lies behind it as a desperate and secret need.

For a subject who harbors a crypt, the prospect of its being opened brings on a fear of death, usually figurative rather than literal. For both Mariana and the Lady of Shalott, however, the two kinds of death are intertwined. If the secret Other buried inside the subject is let out, this subjectivity could destroy the self that the crypt was built to protect. Tennyson's understanding of this long before Abraham and Torok sorted it out suggests he knew something inarticulable to him at the time. Yet, allegorically, he illustrated the horror of this figurative death in a way that allows him to deflect the reader from Tennyson's own crypt. Again, there is no mention of the callousness of the Paterfamilias who neglected the Lady in her castle or ignored her desire (or Tennyson's) to be acknowledged, but in the absence of comment lies the crypt that “Mariana” and “The Lady of Shalott” were written to hide.

When read together, these poems plead for and encrypt a loss of acknowledgment by a patriarchal authority who can resolve the loss but will not and a brotherhood of Camelot knights who cannot. Given Lancelot's role as one of the original knights of the round table, his unknowing participation in the Lady's death points to his inability to resolve the cost of a patriarchy that denies her desire as it denies Mariana's. He and the other knights, also sons and brothers, will develop avuncular relationships with some of the younger knights, concurrently inhabiting both fraternal and paternal subject positions. Thus, Lancelot sits in as a signifier for paternal relationships and simultaneously for a problematic fraternal order in Tennyson's poems, reverberating with Tennyson's dead “brother,” Hallam, who could not survive to help him negotiate his changing personal and national landscape.

Mad or Maud

TENNYSON ENGAGES in the same kind of mourning in his longer poem, Maud. On the surface, Maud appears to be about an unstable young man, rocked by misfortune, who becomes obsessed with a neighbor girl and goes slowly mad from his troubles. But on a more complex level, Maud also acts as a multi-layered crypt and cryptic inscription of Tennyson's own concerns about madness and his troubled love for a neighbor. The poem begins with the death of the hero's father indirectly at the hands of Maud's father, two old friends turned business partners, and then (with the narrator's father's failure) bitter enemies. Soon after, the father's broken body is found in a gully, and the son asks himself, “Did he fling himself down? who knows? for a vast speculation had failed,/And ever he muttered and maddened, and ever wanned with despair” (I: 9–10). And thus begins the narrator's tale of sorrow over a father's death and anger at the man who ruined him, as he falls more and more in love with Maud until his anger and madness hit a heightened pitch.

In the narrator's obsessive passion, he stews over every detail. A glance in a church becomes a thing of import: “And once, but once, she lifted her eyes,/And suddenly, sweetly, strangely blushed/To find they were met by my own” (I: 305–07). Maud has also waved at our hero while “[r]apidly riding far away” (I: 320), and that gesture of affection sustains him until the next meeting. Several other incidents later, which our hero meets with the same extreme emotion, he is led to further obsession with her as a love object. And she seems to return his affection, despite the differences in their status. The lamentation of the narrator's objective correlative, the white rose, that “[s]he is late” (I: 913) to an appointment to meet him after a ball at her house, to which he is purposely not invited, underscores their separation. But, alone and alienated in a place in which he grew up a wealthy young man, he needs some kind of assurance that he still has a place in his world:

Though he is originally mourning the death of his father, the metonymic slide from his father's death, to anger at the neighboring lord, to his attraction to Maud actually displaces his original mourning. That he is melancholic is clear. Whom he mourns is not literally his father, as his odes are all lavished upon Maud as the object of desire. He is rather mourning his own loss of social and financial status upon the death of his ruined father. This father's loss translates to the loss of property and position, as well as to the father's madness and possible death from suicide, thus compounding the pain and shame of the father's legacy. So the son must mourn, but the mourning is impossible because the father has ruined and disgraced the family. Nonetheless, the loss of the father is the loss of everything in this young man's life.

Given Tennyson's anguish at his own father's destruction through loss of wealth and madness, the similarities are too great to ignore. Ralph Wilson Rader has traced the genesis of the poem to Tennyson's own early thwarted love affair with Rosa Baring and other circumstances in the poem to Tennyson's early relationships with her and some of the other young women of her social circle: “For Maud–the object of love in the poem–is, I believe, an image in which were blended Tennyson's memories of all three of the women who he had successively loved–Rosa Baring, Sophy Rawnsley (to an extent), and Emily Sellwood” (91). Given Tennyson's struggles with mental health and his attraction to the lovely noblewoman Rosa Baring in particular, one could easily say that this poem is actually an exorcism of Tennyson's erotic demons. Or, as Joseph Bristow writes, “Maud–as the eponymous subject whose name literally means war or battle–has, in the main, two purposes in mind: first, to demonstrate how woman can salve the emotional suffering of men; and second, how a ‘monodrama’ (as the poem is subtitled), dedicated in a woman's warring name, can, paradoxically, prove that poetry, as a genre, is ideally suited to men” (129). I would suggest, however, that there is more to it than that, especially since the anonymous hero redeems himself by flinging himself into the battles of the Crimean War. While Tennyson himself did no such thing, he had already written “Locksley Hall,” and later, “Locksley Hall 60 Years Later,” both poems Rader suggests have great similarities to Maud. These similarities bespeak another recurring concern of Tennyson's, which is elided in this poem as part of his own encryption into this text. I would argue that Maud represents to Tennyson's narrator, and thus in some ways to the author himself, the signifier for a masculinity-defining wealth and social acceptance.

The way Tennyson achieves this in Maud is to name the poem after the woman who sits in as the signifier for what would repair the narrator's loss. In this loss of the father, which is never again discussed, the narrator has encrypted his father as part of his psyche, a loss that he is not even aware is problematic to him, as he begins to take on the attributes of his father and, incidentally, his madness. As a landed gentleman, however, there is only one way to recover the family fortune, and that is to marry for it. All the family's funds are now tied up in the neighboring lord's estate, and the only daughter, the only one who could possibly accomplish this for the protagonist, is Maud. The love of a good woman, especially a propertied and moneyed one, could well heal our narrator of his afflictions, and Maud is the loveliest thing he has seen. She must be: she is his salvation, and not merely in the financial sense. They were children and played together, but his change of fortunes has taken him out of her social sphere. This part of his paternal crypt, the loss of the one who would have probably been his wife in other circumstances, is part of his illness.

After the misery of his family's destruction and the gloating of Maud's family over their fall, the hero seeks the love of his childhood playmate as a way of both retaining the subject position he once held and of getting back at her family. He cannot possibly have had enough contact with Maud after his father's death for him to truly know and love her. Marilyn Kurata notes that he seems in love with her almost as a simultaneous act of self-negation (he is defined by her esteem) and revenge upon her family (373–74). He loves her with precisely the same obsession with which he hates her brother and her father. The shameful secret of the narrator's past is one that they share, and the virtual cannibalism of his father by hers subverts a mourning that should be impossible, and in fact calls into question the obsession as hatred or love. As Kurata contends, “the ambivalence the young man betrays toward Maud, especially in the first half of Part I and in Part II, clearly indicates that passion and violence are intermingled” (370). Some of this aggression is obviously directed toward Maud's brother, who is a target for the narrator's threatened passion. The deaths of Maud and her brother, the one following hard upon the other, strengthen that relationship. The narrator loves Maud as he hates her brother: desperately, passionately, violently, and in opposition to accepted social codes. Had she indeed loved him despite his poverty, this would have buttressed his worth in the eyes of the otherwise unapproachable Other, as well as angering her father and brother to have her desire one they ruined.

The narrator's attraction to Maud and his desire for her love is a way of covering the hole the death of his father has left. His desire has attached itself to her as a way to hide from himself how bereft he really is without the man who ruined his family. The ambivalence the narrator feels toward his father cannot be spoken of, however, because his mourning for his father goes deeper than the physical loss of his father: it goes to the failure of the position the father occupied and becomes encrypted in the hero's psyche.

An important part of all crypts is the enactment of the role of the lost ego ideal. In “The Kraken” and “The Hesperides,” the Son acts as God instead of the Father. In “Mariana” and “The Lady of Shalott,” the woman desires the gaze and acknowledgement of the beloved Other and acts in her mourning of his loss as she wishes he would mourn her. In Maud, the son attempts to reestablish the family fortune lost by the father. With this attempt, however, comes an encryption of the father's own madness onto the son. Many of our hero's lines spoken in his madness suggest that he may be vaguely aware that he is enacting his father's last days. In Part II, Book V, Section XI, the maddened hero has a delusion of being buried. As odd as that may be, it is not the reason for his complaint, which is that he has not been buried deep enough:

The irony is that this is supposedly our hero at his maddest. Strangely, his awareness of his encryption of his father is enacted as a violent love for Maud. Upon her death, he begins to go mad, culminating in this delusion of burial–another intertwined the loss of figurative and literal life. Here, Tennyson inscribes a version of his own crypt in the poem, attempting to bury his own terror of mental instability by portraying a man driven mad by conditions similar to those the poet encountered in young adulthood. The violently impassioned young man has not been “buried” deep enough in Tennyson's poem and stands in as something Tennyson cannot otherwise name.

Another anxiety buried in the execution of this poem has to do with Tennyson's concern over the Victorian tendency to emasculate male poets, even those of his own stature. Men in the Victorian era were supposed to be monied or actively earning money, though those actively earning were considered less socially worthy of respect than those fortunate enough to inherit. Tennyson, cut off from a familial inheritance through his grandfather's passing over of his father to his uncle, was also bereft of an income. Tennyson's grandfather, who did not consider poetry enough of a serious calling to establish a fortune, belittled his grandson's very promising gifts. Tennyson uses those same gifts to cover the elision of the paternal parent who himself went mad, broke his health as Tennyson's narrator's father broke his body, and died. Tennyson's poetry will also reestablish the family name jeopardized by the father. Maud is Tennyson's own crypt, an encryption of his unspeakable losses both of the love of Rosa Baring and of his position in a dying paternalistic order of landed gentry, one that had no place for him, but toward which he nonetheless felt an unnamable loss.

Alfred and Arthur: The Idylls

TENNYSON'S ANXIETIES, encrypted in his poetry, about what he saw as a flawed patriarchal system come to a zenith in the fraternal assumption of power in the Idylls of the King. Tennyson's gender work here is set in those most mythic of fraternities: Camelot and King Arthur's Round Table. In this rewriting of the myth of Arthur and Merlin, patriarchy is present through a marked absence. Arthurian patriarchs do not survive but are replaced by fraternal figures, avuncular figures, sons of emasculated fathers, femmes fatales, and an occasional monster or two. Yet again, what is never discussed but always lies underneath these poems is an anxiety about paternal roles that plays itself out at every turn, sometimes literally “burying” the question at hand.

For Tennyson, Arthur and his court are determined by how they end–with several unanswered questions as to the viability of the fraternal project and what went wrong in the transmission of the knightly ideal of brotherhood and chivalry into the rest of the world. Tennyson's writing process also showcases what Linda Shires calls “Tennyson's unusually strong interest in liminal times and terminal situations” (167). It is important to note that Tennyson wrote this work backward, beginning with “The Passing of Arthur” (Ricks 513). Not only is this consistent with Tennyson's practice (Maud began from “Oh, that 'twere possible,” which was eventually placed near the beginning of book II), it suggests that how things end, for Tennyson, are just as important as how they begin. Endings are crucial to the meaning of the whole.

In the first book, The Coming of Arthur, we face already an initial question that could only be answered by a missing father: that of Arthur's paternal lineage. The dead Uther Pendragon cannot speak to Arthur's legitimacy; this crucial piece of information is lost with him. Hence Arthur must internalize that legacy as a kind of crypt for his own legitimacy despite Uther's “dirty secret”: the seduction of the Lady Igraine and Arthur's own illegitimacy. He must become a leader of men even though he lacks legitimate markers of his parentage. Merlin claims, and it is assumed that he speaks the truth, that the child he has raised is Uther's son. Already, then, the paternal authority has been shifted to an avuncular figure. Merlin has raised the “Once and Future King,” taking over the role of a paternal parent and perpetrating the knowledge of Arthur's legitimacy. He has also had to step in to speak for the child's legitimacy as an heir of Uther's. The eventual combination of corroborated local tales and Arthur's greatness as a knight and leader convinces Leodogran that Arthur is the real thing: heir to Uther's throne, no “petty” king, and therefore an appropriate suitor for Guinevere.

Still, Arthur must finish his father's unfinished business and unite the kingdom. His virtue as a knight is not enough, however, to convince Leodogran to allow Arthur to come to court and marry his daughter. In a strange reversal of the Oedipal narrative, the death of the father here almost prevents access to the woman. If Arthur's lineage cannot be proven, he will not be allowed access to ladies of good birth. Again, his legitimacy is not given by Uther, but by proxy through Merlin and Leodogran. The poem thus depends upon a dead father who, initially, sets up an anxiety of origins by his absence. Buried with him, in his physical crypt as constructed by the poem, is the knowledge an entire kingdom will look to for the legitimacy of a king who must continue his father's unfinished business and complete the unification of the nation.

Merlin is also an interesting paternal puzzle. A wifeless wizard, he nonetheless rears the young Arthur, prepares him to be king, then announces his coming and his legitimacy all at once. As the surrogate paternal parent of Arthur, and thus of a whole kingdom, Merlin is shortly thereafter entrapped by Vivien who uses his own spell to render him a continuing absent presence within the kingdom. Merlin becomes literally encrypted within the tree that holds him. Arthur must also bear with him Merlin's wisdom, though Merlin is not there to enact it. With neither Uther nor Merlin upon whom to depend for either direction or dissemination, the knights of Camelot are left to their brotherhood and to the wisdom and direction of their collective ideals. As with Arthur, they must carry on the work of their “fathers” in resolving the dirty secrets of the kingdom. Yet it seems that the ideas required to tame a wilderness and literally and metaphorically chase out the “beasts” (both the literal monsters and the beastly in men) are not the same as those required to keep it healthy and well-ordered. The brotherhood of Camelot, however, will not be able to rise to the requirement that at least some of them shift their roles from fraternal to paternal presences, and the violent sexuality of the poem seems to be part and parcel of the fraternity that, in its inability to evolve, must collapse.

As in Maud, a great deal of Camelot's collective sexuality is sublimated to aggression. Both sex and aggression, as Tennyson writes them in the Idylls, are dangerous to the fraternal order. The only way to subvert the dangers is to commit one's aggression to a larger cause. As Gerhard Joseph writes, only

The passion in these poems that erupts into personal violence–like that of the narrator against Maud's brother for his continuous interference with the narrator's affair with Maud, the violence Uther commits for access to Igraine, and the violence invoked by Lancelot against his younger knights–is destructive because of its use for personal means. When directed to a common purpose, the destruction of the order shifts to protection of the greater good. This channeling of violence from pursuits of a personal and sexual nature to those necessary for national self-identification and security marks an important recognition of British masculinity and nationalism during Victoria's especially colonial reign.

Another difficulty that persists in the Idylls is the determination of a national masculinity threatened by unfulfilled Oedipal relationships. Where the paternal authority is elided due to emasculated patriarchs (the dead or removed paternal figure), the fraternity will have its day, but the results are mixed, at best. U. C. Knoepflmacher, who suggests that Arthur's court have actually been unable to complete the Oedipal process, notes that each key knight possesses a particular perversion (343–62). Even though Lancelot will serve as an avuncular figure to Gareth in his quest, his dalliance with Guinevere strips him of the moral authority required to muster and hold the respect of the younger knights, Pellas, Tristram, and Balin. Geraint cannot assume his own patriarchal position with his wife Enid. To prove her loyalty, she must accompany him on a quest that nearly kills him. Balin slays and is slain by his brother, Balan. Percival is led off into the unsuccessful quest for the grail that fractures and destroys the strength of the Round Table knights. Pelleas is unable to assume his own confident and rightful place in the order after Ettarre has used and cast him away in favor of Gawain. Lancelot, the “strongest” of the knights, has an illicit affair with his Queen, Guinevere. The resulting scandal, along with the grail quest, destroys the kingdom. The elision of patriarchal hierarchy and decentralization of its authority fails to cohere, and this brotherhood cannot resolve the subsequent challenges.

Tennyson's Idylls of the King writes out an anxiety about what Margaret Linley calls “the absence of absolute father figures” (371) in the poem. In Merlin's famous declaration, “And none can read the text, not even I;/And none can read the comment but myself;/And in the comment did I find the charm” (VII: 679–81) lies what seems to be part of the problem. None can read the text except for Merlin, and poor Merlin gives it to Elaine, who locks him in a tree with it. For Merlin, the only actual living paternal presence in this poem, to be so emasculated by his own tool suggests that the paternal structure does not survive and can only be supplanted with a fraternal one. The crypt that Arthur and his knights hold for their dead fathers in enacting their lives' unfinished business is ineffective in protecting them against the demands of the new nationhood. Even Arthur, as the head of these knights, older than many of them, son of Uther, and sitting in a position of responsibility, is not spared. His fraternal organization fails and he cannot offer a substantially paternal force to hold it together. The round table is scattered, the land wasted, his Queen lost, his advisor imprisoned by a witch, and he is mortally wounded, distanced from the “grail” which would reunite his kingdom. These poems are also littered with the bodies of dead fathers who fell in battle. Tennyson herein suggests that the war-like hyper-masculinity Victorians became so fond of has its price: fathers and sons. Without the fathers, the sons cannot hold the kingdom together; they can neither rise above the problems created by the previous generation nor assume a place in the now-defunct patriarchy. Not one member of Arthur's court has any children himself to speak of, or graduates from the brotherhood to parenthood. Uther cannot pass legitimacy to his son; Merlin is forever confined in his curse. Arthur and Guinevere have no children, nor do any of the other knights. Even the nestling Lancelot brings to Guinevere,“[b]eing smitten in mid heaven with mortal cold/Past from her” (II: 26–28). This martial landscape, one supposedly fought to make the land safe, cannot consummate its splendor in the production of a next generation to which the spoils can be left.

All of this encryption hides Tennyson's deep anxiety about the new committees and brotherhoods of professional men that have supplanted the lordly fathers about whose leadership the poet had developed such serious doubts. Tennyson wrote the “Morte d'Arthur” in 1833, years before Queen Victoria took either the throne or a husband. He wrote the rest of the Idylls over the next fifty years, however, throughout Victoria's reign and through the life and death of Albert as Prince Consort. Charles Algernon Swinburne mockingly referred to Tennyson's Idylls as the “Morte d'Albert or Idylls of the Prince Consort” (Gilbert 166). The comment was meant to point out the self-indulgent nature of the poems and the yea-saying of the poet's friends, who had ceased to be critical. Swinburne's ambivalent relationship to the “father” of Victorian poetry does not, however, rob his castigation of its kernel of truth. Swinburne saw the connection between the struggles of the egalitarian, committee-laden round table and those of the Prince Consort, which Tennyson mirrors in his poetry.

We are, of course, speaking of a Poet Laureate who had deeply seated anxieties about the death of his own father, and who wrote during an era of the public loss of such distinctly paternalistic figures as the Duke of Wellington and Lord Melbourne. These poems link a very British literary tradition to a culture that negotiated, in turn, the new kind of committee-driven and brotherly masculinity embodied in the Prince Consort; the troublesome masculinity of his authority, which he derived from the traditional and well-entrenched authority of his royal wife; and the nation's eventual loss of him as a public figure. Tennyson's dedication of the Idylls to Queen Victoria underscores the importance of these sociocultural elements in play while simultaneously suggesting that, after the death of the Duke of Wellington and the proper mourning of his loss, the loss of the less popular Prince Consort occasioned in some ways a double mourning. The mourning for the lost Prince almost becomes a mourning for the kind of masculine power and authority embodied in the Duke of Wellington, which Albert did not and could not wield. Even Tennyson cannot read the “text” of his nation's shifting masculinity, but only the “comment” present in his own evocation of the Arthurian tales upon which British nationality, virtue, and manhood are so traditionally based. Therein he finds the charm by which he himself, and his anxieties of paternal power, are encrypted.