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“Our Little Systems Have Their Day”: Tennyson's Poetic

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“Our Little Systems Have Their Day”: Tennyson's Poetic “OUR LITTLE SYSTEMS HAVE THEIR DAY”: TENNYSON’S POETIC TREATMENT OF SCIENCE by Emily Carroll Shearer A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University 2014 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Rebecca King, Department of English, Chair Dr. Larry Gentry, Department of English Dr. Tammy Melton, Department of Chemistry © 2014 Emily Carroll Shearer ii For Mom and Dad – I’ve spent almost two years writing this “damn dissertation.” It’s around 38,000 words, so you’d think that a few extra for the dedication wouldn’t be that much more. It amazes me how words fail me when I want them the most. I don’t have the words to thank you for homeschooling me or for raising me to be a stubborn mule when it comes to achieving something (trust me, that’s an asset in graduate school) or for teaching me not to put up with crap from anyone. I don’t know how to say thank you for showing me how to listen or be kind to others, to take other people into heart as family, and to keep laughter as a constant companion. I don’t know how to say thank you for teaching me not to give up—and for not giving up on me when I felt like giving up on myself. Then again, maybe I do have the words. I love you so much. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Rebecca King for all her work in helping me prepare this dissertation. I would also like to thank Dr. Larry Gentry and Dr. Tammy Melton for their assistance and for serving on my committee. I would very much also like to thank Shiloh Carroll for being the very best of friends and my dissertation writing buddy during this whole arduous process. Most of all, I must thank my husband, Shane Stewart, for his unwavering support through my entire time at MTSU, especially during the writing of this dissertation. He is my bedrock, my strong foundation, and on that, this dissertation is built. iv ABSTRACT Cultural studies approaches identify all texts as arising from cultural contexts, and as such inform the methodology of this study of Tennyson’s poetry as mediating conflicting truth claims by aesthetic and spiritual spheres and materialist and empirical spheres of thought. John McGowan’s description of modernity suggests a way of reading Tennyson’s poetry as evidence of his involvement in an ongoing discussion involving competing claims to totality by these epistemologies. Tennyson was from early days interested in science, keeping abreast of current thought at Cambridge, and being elected to the Royal Society. While critics often see aspects of Tennyson’s work as the complaints of an increasingly pessimistic, personally disappointed old man, this study suggests that his poems instead display his engagement with major epistemological issues in which he and others express distrust of the totalizing claims of science and materialism. This dissertation analyses poems written during various points in his career that deal with these issues. Chapter 1 discusses historical and cultural contexts of Tennyson’s poems. Chapter 2 analyzes “The Palace of Art,” an early poem, as displaying his concerns with astronomy and its implications regarding creationist accounts of the cosmos in terms associated with the great chain of being metaphor and its principles of unity and perfection. It also reflects concerns with the second law of thermodynamics regarding its theories of entropy and death. Chapter 3 analyzes In Memoriam as it addresses natural evolution in terms of what Darwin would later term “survival of the v fittest” and in which Tennyson ultimately reaffirms the immortality of the soul in evolutionary terms. Chapter 4 examines “Locksley Hall” and “Locksley Hall Sixty Years Later,” written forty years apart, and their reflections of Tennyson’s adaptations of evolutionary theory to account for what the later poem marks as increasing cultural decay. Finally, Chapter 5 analyzes “The Higher Pantheism,” “Parnassus,” and “By an Evolutionist” as late poems that reveal persistent attempts to validate the aesthetic and spiritual as necessary contexts for understanding experience as illuminated by science. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………1 CHAPTER 2: “THE PALACE OF ART” AND THERMODYNAMIC CHAOS…28 CHAPTER 3: IN MEMORIAM AND THE IMPERMANENT NATURE OF HUMANITY……………………………………………………….......53 CHAPTER 4: “LOCKSLEY HALL” AND TENNYSON’S CONCERNS FOR SOCIETY…………………………………………………………………..85 CHAPTER 5: TENNYSON’S CONCLUSIONS………………………………….120 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………….………..138 vii 1 Chapter 1 Introduction Alfred, Lord Tennyson is generally seen as the quintessential Victorian poet for a number of reasons. Influential and beloved by the English populace, Tennyson lived through much of the nineteenth century and wrote through most of Queen Victoria’s reign, experiencing all of the turmoil and change that the Victorian era brought to England. His personal turmoils over genealogy and inheritance, love and loss, coincided with tumultuous cultural and historical events such as the extension of the franchise and the expansion of the British Empire. During his lifetime, the middle class rose as an entity with its own power and morality, and spiritual beliefs were increasingly questioned as science produced both new knowledge and new epistemologies. Tennyson is especially emblematic as a Victorian figure since he was at once a poet and an avid follower of scientific discoveries and ideas, a situation that positioned him to enter into the discourse over the so-called Victorian “crisis of faith.” The seemingly endless discoveries about the natural world made in the late eighteenth century through the Victorian era gave rise to similarly endless ideas about that natural world. Though the realm of science was already beginning to show signs of the specialization that persists today, the Victorian era was still a time when the gentleman or lady scientist could dabble in everything scientific within the larger philosophical tradition of the humanities. Indeed, many early British scientific discoveries arose through the work of Anglican clergymen, many of whom were members of the Royal Society before membership to the society began being restricted to those who more closely fit the role of 2 scientists. Thus, prose, poetry, novels, opinion columns, rebuttals, reviews, and scientific treatises were all part of the greater societal conversation that was taking place regarding these ideas and their epistemological implications. The interdisciplinary nature of Victorian science and knowledge in general thus authorized the participation of the gentleman and lady in scientific discourse, without ever having stepped into a laboratory. Since scientific knowledge was not yet as specialized as it is now and because access to this knowledge had not been removed to libraries and specialized journals with concepts too advanced for the non-practitioner, the Victorian intellectual could, with some effort, follow the latest scientific discoveries. Victorians could follow these discoveries and ideas through the works of several science writers, as Bernard Lightman describes in his 2010 work Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. The widespread effects of the popularization of science can also be seen as poets found new metaphors for their work in the discoveries reaching the general public, and as scientists used the vivid language of poets to describe the grandeur of the natural world. Cultural studies approaches to literary texts identify all texts as arising from their cultural contexts, and as such, inform the methodology of this study of Tennyson’s poetry. Gillian Beer notes that such “[i]nterdisciplinary work crosses over between fields: it transgresses. It thus brings into question the methods and materials of differing intellectual practices and may uncover problems disguised by the scope of established disciplines” (115). She also notes that “[i]nterdisciplinary studies do not bring closure.” Rather, interdisciplinarity generates more questions than it answers. Furthermore, 3 because cultural work during the Victorian era transgressed, crossed over, and flowed over boundaries of disciplines, to study works of the Victorian era, particularly literature, also requires an interdisciplinary approach. Jerome McGann offers a further caveat for the literary scholar: Because historical method [of literary analysis] is strictly a form of comparative studies, its goal is not the recovery of some lost originary cultural whole. The presumption must rather be that the object of study is volatile and dynamic—not merely that it . was an unstable and conflicted phenomenon, but that it continues to mutate as it is subjected to further study; indeed that its later changes are the effects of such studies. (82) What has involved in the past as simple approach to identifying the participants and the issues at stake within the so-called crisis between Victorian science and faith has more recently been problematized, reassessed, and reconsidered, and critical views of the Victorian era have thus changed over time as our understanding becomes ever deeper. Commenting on the scholarly benefits of cross-disciplinary analysis, Denis Bonnecase suggests: “If history, as a text, contains the threads of literature, the literary text gives us the glimpses of the many stitches, skeins and coils of the historical web” (102). This weaving has been demonstrated in the past several decades as literary scholarship has moved beyond traditional literary criticism, which focused on text and text alone, to cultural studies, which challenges “received divisions of academic thought” (Brantlinger 34), by using methodologies from a number of disciplines in order to 4 investigate how texts are constructed as artifacts of the culture in which they were produced. Cultural studies also allows investigation of how texts construct and represent their culture. In this study, cultural studies provides a lens through which to investigate how texts construct and represent the epistemological and axiological struggles taking place during the Victorian era.
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