Deviating from the Angelic Norm

Chen 1 Table of Contents Introduction . 2 Chapter One Tennyson’s Gender Politics . 8 Chapter Two Deviating from the Angelic Norm . 17 Victorian Attitudes about Suicide and Elaine as Woman Artist . .22 Elaine’s Gaze: The Transgression of Feminine Sight . .32 Leaving the Private Sphere . .42 Conclusion . 48 Bibliography . .53 Chen 2 Introduction Ever since its publication in 1859, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King has garnered a myriad of responses, ranging from adoration to aversion. While dearly beloved to the Victorians, Idylls of the King has lost much of its popularity over the course of the 20th century. Today, Idylls of the King is oftentimes labeled as pedantically adhering to the rigid social mores of the Victorian middle class, while simultaneously reestablishing patriarchal ideals and vilifying women’s sexuality. However, through this thesis, I would like to argue that although frequently accused of inflexibility, Idylls of the King still possesses space for challenging traditional patriarchal ideology. Moments of negotiation and subversion are most apparent through a close reading of Tennyson’s “Lancelot and Elaine.” Like modern day popular culture texts, Idylls of the King presents potentially contradictory ideologies in order to appeal to a diverse audience. As John Fiske states in Understanding Popular Culture, “A text that is to be made into popular culture must, then, contain both the forces of domination and the opportunities to speak against them . .” (25) According to Stuart Hall’s essay Encoding/Decoding, “forces of domination” are the established hegemonic ideals of the contemporary time period. Without these, the work would lack the cultural significance and approval to even see the light of day. Nevertheless, to truly win popular appeal, the cultural text must also allow space for negotiation and subversion, for those who oppose the dominant ideologies. On a similar note, Antonia Losano states that Victorian texts, especially due to the popularity of realism, operated as a means of social policing, an “effort at containment and ideological domination”. On the other hand, texts similarly have the power to employ moments of transgression to simultaneously critique the “social and ideological pressures that limited Chen 3 Victorian women’s lives” (240). Under the guise of convention, radical statements could be made. Mary Poovey likewise states in Uneven Developments: representations of gender constituted one of the sites on which ideological systems were simultaneously constructed and contested; as such, the representations of gender I discuss were themselves contested images, the sites at which struggles for authority occurred, as well as the locus of assumptions used to underwrite the very authority that authorized these struggles. (2) Poovey very eloquently describes the tug and pull of ideological systems within texts, specifically when they deal with the topic of sexual difference. In other words, a single text can have qualities that both reinforce traditional values while simultaneously presenting opportunities for contradicting those ideals. Idylls of the King is such a text. In chapter 1, I examine how critics have interpreted Tennyson’s gender politics in the past. Tennyson’s reputation as a man with traditional Victorian ideals has been gradually questioned since the late 1980s with the work of Marion Shaw. To follow up, critics in the 1990s and 2000s, such as Stephen Ahren and Arthur Simpson, also reinterpret Tennyson having a more nuanced position on women’s roles in society. Like my predecessors, I agree that Tennyson has painted a picture of how women struggle and negotiate a position within a male-dominated society. At the same time, it is difficult to disregard the problematic areas of Tennyson’s writing, which can be observed by examining Charlotte Bunch’s article “Not By Degrees: Feminist Theory and Education.” While Tennyson, a 19th century Victorian man, cannot be expected to uphold all the guidelines for good feminist theory, Bunch’s article provides a basic guideline for evaluating Idylls of the King as a potential commentary on Victorian gender roles. For instance, Chen 4 Tennyson’s detailed descriptions provide numerous moments for his readers to sympathize for the plight of his transgressive heroines. However, Tennyson apparently cannot envision a bright future for the imperfect women, as both Elaine and Guinevere are killed off by the series’ conclusion. As a result, the progressiveness of Idylls becomes more questionable when these two female characters can only find adequate resolution in death. In spite of these issues, the character of Elaine still challenges Victorian middle-class ideals of womanhood. To begin, the standard of the ideal woman being passive, selflessly devoted to her loved ones, and pure was greatly popularized by the widely read narrative poem The Angel in the House by Coventry Patmore (1854). Through the influence of the poem, the term ‘angel in the house’ emerged as a term for describing the female archetype that began proliferating social discussion regarding women as well as the literary world. In many ways, the Angel of the House understanding of women was definitive of the Victorian era. Before, in the 18th century, women were on the whole perceived as sinful creatures that brought about the fall of man. As Mary Poovey articulates in “The Ideological Work of Gender,” women were perceived to be like Eve of the Bible, the ‘Mother of our Miseries.’ Poovey elaborates on this perception of women by stating: As late as the 1740s, woman was consistently represented as the site of willful sexuality and bodily appetite: whether figured as that part of man responsible for the Fall, as was characteristic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, or represented as man’s foil, as in eighteenth-century texts like Swift’s and Pope’s poems, women were associated with flesh, desire, and unsocialized, hence susceptible, impulses and passions. (9-10) Chen 5 Gradually, over time, this conception of women gradually shifted to make way for the new, Victorian cultural view that upheld the Angel of the House ideal. Instead, men were the ones perceived to be in need of a nurturing woman, who acted as a “moral hope and spiritual guide” (10). As a result, two very different perceptions of women emerged within a century. Women went from being seen as aggressive and carnal to selfless mothers who were “‘naturally’ self- sacrificing,” sexless angels that “radiated morality.” (Poovey 8, 11) This ideal also emerged primarily in response to middle-class anxieties about crime, immorality, and close contact with the lower classes. Because of these apprehensions, the divide between the private and public sphere became heavily emphasized within the Victorian period. In her book Good Girls Make Good Wives, Judith Rowbotham articulates how the concept of the separate spheres emerged as the mode of production moved outside the home, creating a physical divide between work and home life. Next, the nouveau riche likewise upheld the divide because having an employed wife was a sign of being lower class. These factors fueled the middle class ideals in having a wife sheltered from the public sphere, which distinguished them from the working classes. Enlightenment ideas, which encouraged binary thinking with regards to gender, also contributed to the development of the Angel in the House ideal of femininity. Men were considered rational as opposed to their more emotional and sensitive wives. Consequently, many middle class Victorians did not find the Angel in the House paradigm of womanly excellence problematic. With these thoughts in mind, the premise of my thesis is to present a negotiated reading of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and reveal how the text both challenges and supports Victorian middle-class understandings of women. In many ways, Elaine’s sexual purity as the “lily maid” and devotion to Lancelot reflects desirable traits found in ideal Victorian women, she also Chen 6 displays many other behaviors that directly contradict qualities of the Angel in the House. For instance, one of Elaine’s most definitive qualities, being a woman artist, would have been considered potentially controversial within some Victorian circles. At best, the Angel of the House could operate as a muse to stimulate the inspiration of her artist husband. Many voices within the Victorian community voiced their fears that artistic women would inevitably neglect their households and their ‘natural-born’ duties as wives and mothers. Because of women’s supposed greater emotionality, an overactive imagination was also considered dangerous within women. Just as women’s creative potential was frowned upon, the authority of the gaze was also seen as transgressive for Victorian women, who were supposed to be submissive, passionless, and innocent. The burgeoning women’s rights movement potentially influenced many Victorian painters and poets to remove the gaze from their female subjects, therefore, returning the power of the gaze back in male hands. The image of the Greek hero Perseus beheading Medusa also saw a resurgence of popularity during the Victorian era for similar reasons. Respected male artists such as Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Lord Frederic Leighton, and Albert Moore employed these themes throughout many of their paintings. Other poets, such as Dante Rossetti and Robert Browning also depict women stripped of the gaze due to sleep or death. Tennyson, on the other hand, depicts Elaine as both a voyeur and a subject of the gaze, setting him apart from many of his contemporaries. The last issue I discuss is Elaine’s mobility outside the domestic sphere and her expression of her private emotions. According to Sarah Stickney Ellis, a famous writer of Victorian conduct books, a woman’s artistry should remain at home for the viewing of her family. By selling art to a public audience, many Victorians perceived women artists as Chen 7 trespassing the natural bounds between the separate spheres. Elaine, on the other hand, is very eager to command the attention of the whole court of Camelot and share her own tragic story with the world.

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