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Article Excerpt
Tennyson committed decades of his life to recrafting medieval Arthurian romance into his eventual Victorian epic, Idylls of the King, but his earliest publication from the venture shows that he approached the project with concern for its relevance to modern society. "The Epic," his frame poem for the 1842 "Morte d'Arthur," concludes with a dream of Arthur returning, but an Arthur who appears "like a modern gentleman / Of stateliest port." (1) The heroic Arthur of the battlefield has already passed away, and this decorous modern replacement arrives. Tennyson's shift to the modern seems to anticipate Elizabeth Barrett Browning's assertion that epic poets should look to their own age for inspiration, and his next published foray into the project enacts, in a way, her conviction that what goes on "Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms" (2) is worthy of epic treatment. Tennyson's 1859 edition of the Idylls reinforced the impression that the battlefield scene of "Morte d'Arthur" was not going to be the dominant setting or preoccupation of his larger Arthurian narrative. The volume, entitled The True and the False: Four Idylls of the King, contained four idylls, each named for a female character, which take as their subjects the romantic, sexual, and domestic negotiations carried out by their principal subjects. Tennyson's centering of women in his Idylls reflects a Victorian society in which women really were central to ideas of order, morality, and national stability; where an ideal king might say "I seem as nothing in the mighty world, / And cannot will my will, nor work my work" without an ideal queen (The Coming of Arthur, ll. 86-87). The ultimate goal of the Round Table is the creation and maintenance of order in a chaotic world; and, in this Victorian version of the material, establishing order comes to mean building solid domestic arrangements.
The Geraint and Enid episodes from Idylls of the King, among the first in order of composition as in the eventual epic, exemplify Tennyson's attempt to be the laureate for his age-the laureate whose hero and heroine may go questing like medieval knight and lady but ultimately face their greatest challenges in learning how to fulfill the roles of husband and wife in a particularly Victorian domestic arrangement. "Brave Geraint" and Enid, with all of her "bashful delicacy" (The Marriage of Geraint, ll. 1, 66), do face the strange dangers posed by Edyrn and Earl Doorm, but their greater challenges arise as they negotiate the complex gender constructions and exacting demands of domestic ideology.
While domestic ideology is frequently associated with the roles and responsibilities of women, men had to find their own ways within the cultural construct that became so central to nineteenth-century life. Linda Hughes argues that, in fact, the 1859 Idylls functions expressly as a "primer for modern gentlemen," (3) and concludes that "the newness of Tennyson's Arthurian materials in this respect was his argument that only in relation to women, and by sharing part of their nature, could men hope to be real and true men" (p. 61). In many ways, this relation and sharing was modern, as Hughes puts it, precisely because it reflected contemporary domestic values. Herbert F. Tucker sees Geraint as a hero who is negotiating his role in a text that represents a kind of "generic miscegenation," and the Geraint and Enid idylls as "a trial of epic itself, in contest with the most vigorous claimant of the Victorian era to the honor of bearing the tale of the tribe: namely, the novel." (4) While the novel is not an explicitly domestic form, the generic experimentation of the Idylls is not unrelated to the concerns of its characters, and--as Tucker points out--Geraint's tale quickly becomes one not of a champion but rather of an outsider who stumbles into a domestic "mantrap," and finally resolves into "more a domestic than a dynastic blessing" (pp. 445, 447). The Idylls generally, and Geraint's idylls particularly, are remarkable for their shaping of the heroic stuff of epic and romance into the homely confines of novel, of drawing room, and of conventional domesticity.
When Tennyson divided the Enid idyll in 1872, he identified the first part as being about Geraint's, not Enid's marriage, while the second part carries both characters' names. Geraint's plot in The Marriage of Geraint and Geraint and Enid explores that character's need to find a way to be both a loving and involved husband and a respected, productive public figure. This is the central question confronted by men as they negotiated their experience in domestic ideology. As John Tosh points out, attaining manhood for Victorians entailed projects that sometimes seemed to be at cross purposes. "Becoming a man," Tosh claims, "involved detaching oneself from the home and its feminine comforts" and achieving "a level of material success in the wider world" including "the recognition of manhood by one's peers." (5) At the same time, however, "only marriage could yield the full privileges of masculinity." According to Tosh, "To form a household, to exercise authority over dependants, and to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining and protecting them--these things set the seal on a man's gender identity" (p. 108). Those household responsibilities--protecting, providing--are traditional and reinforce homosocial recognition and economic success. Increasingly, though, a married man was expected to have a more profound involvement in his own homelife, and to look to his marriage and family as his sanctuary from an inhospitable world, and to his wife specifically for moral guidance (Tosh, pp. 54-55, 67-68). This contradiction between the demands of traditional masculinity and domestic involvement is illustrated in Geraint's story, and his inability to resolve this contradiction effectively results in several of the major complications in the plot. In order to succeed in this text, in this web of cultural values, Geraint must make a move from knight errant to effective public leader and domestic husband.
Enid, too, must work her way out of the role of damsel in distress to become a capable wife. Although the primary responsibility for Camelot's stability fell upon Arthur, and through him upon Geraint and the rest of the knights, domestic ideology presented women as significant actors in accomplishing or frustrating Arthur's purpose. Tennyson's title for the 1859 volume--The True and the False--sets up a dichotomy between types of female characters: those who adequately fulfill these complex roles through their performances of normative gender and sexuality and those who do not. Mark Girouard makes the distinction succinctly when he asserts that the title of the volume refers to "false as against true womanhood." (6) Girouard's interpretation is, I think, a defensible reading of Tennyson's treatment of his female characters in this text. Women's behavior that defies the boundaries of ideal Victorian chastity and domesticity is not only undesirable in the logic of the Idylls, it is impossible, inconceivable, "false." As Judith Butler argues, however, the performativity of gender makes such an assessment necessarily suspect. "The distinction between expression and performativeness...
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