1+ TENNYSON’S MAUD: A REEXAMINATION OF ITS BIOGRAPHICAL GENESIS AND AESTHETIC MERITS James N. O'Neill A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1975 Graduate School Representative r / URÏ ï<\ © 1975 JAMES NORMAN O'NEILL ALL RIGHTS RESERVED il ABSTRACT This dissertation reexamines Maud * s experiential ele­ ments and reconsiders whether Tennyson*s poem is seriously marred hy its personal matrix. It appraises a number of conclusions about the nature of Maud's aesthetic merits arrived at in Ralph Rader’s important biographical account of the composition of Tennyson’s poem. In his work Rader contends that Maud is flawed by a "hidden emotional dimen­ sion" which results from Tennyson’s inability to distance himself sufficiently from the emotional experiences about which he was writing. Rader believes that "the emotion which flows from the frenetic hero is distorted and dis­ proportionate to its objects as they appear in the poem." This study confirms that Maud is, indeed, a mosaic­ like rendering of Tennyson’s first forty-five years. In Maud Tennyson does seem to have made use of the complex of psychological wounds he had sustained during his rural childhood years and post-Somersby relocating and recasting years. However, this study disputes the claim that Tennyson was unable to distance himself sufficiently from the emo­ tional experiences about which he was writing. The poet’s frame of mind at Chapel House and Farringford between 1851 and 1855 was sufficiently serene for him to embark upon the composition of Maud with a sense of financial indepen­ dence and emotional security. Finally, this study contends that Maud * s emotional element is neither unconscious nor uncontrolled. The emo­ tional element in the poem’s sections of social invective does seem consciously employed when one considers how Tennyson’s hero is deliberately fashioned after the conven­ tional Spasmodic protagonist. Similarly, the emotional element in Maud* s war passages seems purposeful and regu­ lated when one recognizes how the advocacy of war can be understood as the speaker’s ardent desire for his country to cease its internal selfishness and dlvisiveness by turn­ ing its energies outward to the earning of a true peace. Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ................................... 1 Chapter I. THE EARLY YEARS: FAMILY PROBLEMS, 1809-1834.................................24 II. LOVE, COMMERCE, AND MARRIAGE: THE POET'S MATURATION, 1834-1855 .......... 54 III. THE POET VERSUS THE AUTOBIOGRAPHER IN MAUD................................... 106 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................... 1.71 I INTRODUCTION Ralph Rader in his generally accepted study of the "bio­ graphical genesis" of Tennyson’s Maud: A Monodrama has said that the poem is a "crucial document"--a "purgative recapit­ ulation of the inner and outer circumstances of his [Tenny­ son* s3 early life, a deeply rooted act of spiritual self- definition and affirmation. ..." Several Tennyson schol­ ars have shown agreement that Maud is, as Rader calls it, "the swan song of the bitter and troubled young poet, the inaugral hymn of the Laureate." Sir Harold Nicolson, for example, considered it the "last defiant flash" of the "black 3 unhappy mystic of the Lincolnshire Wolds." Another critic, Humbert Wolfe, has regarded it as Tennyson’s "supreme effort as a poet of despair," a kind of funeral-pyre on which twenty II years of personal suffering were burned away. If it is so pivotal in Tennyson’s career, Maud surely deserves more recognition and critical attention than it has received to date. The major Tennyson studies have in­ variably skipped over Maud quicklyj and until recently, a serious paucity of periodical studies of Maud has existed. Fortunately, several valuable articles dealing with Maud have been published during the past few years. Their appearance clearly indicates an increase of interest in the poem. However, these periodical analyses, for the most part, have been necessarily narrow in their focus; some, unfor­ tunately, have been rather general in their treatment. Clyde 2 de L. Ryals’s comment of a few years ago that "Modem critics have hardly known what to make of this lyric monologue"holds nearly as true today as it did when it was made in 1962. In the almost one hundred twenty years since the poem’s publica­ tion there have been only two full-length studies of Maud done; both are deficient in several respects. Kenneth Kirk- wood’s study, while it was published in 1951» was actually in the main written prior to World War II as he explains in his Author’s Note. Further, although it makes several val­ uable comments on the structure of the "Monologue," it has a tendency to be somewhat verbose, repetitive, and diffuse. Moreover, only 200 copies of Kirkwood’s book were ever issued, o R. J. Mann’s little book, also very useful in some respects, is similarly restricted by its date of printing (1856) and style. Hence, both writers because of their methodology and dates were unable to utilize the excellent body of research which has been done in the last four decades—research which according to the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Lit­ erature includes about two hundred fifty studies of Tenny­ son’s poetry published since 1957 and which has apparently more than doubled in volume since 1935 according to a com­ parison of the three hundred seventy entries in the CBEL and its Supplement (of 1935 and 1955) with the number of seven hundred to eight hundred items in the New CBEL.^ Signifi­ cant perhaps, too, is the fact that these last four decades of Tennyson scholarship are firmly distanced from the peak 3 "Period of Tennysonian Backlash." Ralph Rader’s extensive examination in 1963 of the sources Tennyson drew upon for the composition of Maud, itself indebted to this surge of Tennysonian scholarship, calls for renewed interest in Maud. A fascinating work, Rader’s Tennyson's "Maud"; The Biograph­ ical Genesis should have opened the way for several new full- length studies of Tennyson's second major long poem. Unfor­ tunately, such has not yet occurred. This study is undertaken to reexamine a number of con­ clusions about the nature of Maud's aesthetic merits arrived at in Rader's important biographical account of Tennyson's composition of Maud. In his disquisition Rader contends that Maud is flawed by a "hidden emotional dimension" which resides in the "Monodrama" as a result of Tennyson's ina­ bility to distance himself sufficiently from the emotional experiences he was writing about over the two-year period of 185^-1855. He believes that "the emotion which flows from the frenetic hero" is "distorted and disproportionate to its objects as they appear in the poem."10 Viewing the love story as "strained and unreal"H and as "queer" and "disjointed," Rader cites the "character of the emotion" in the poem as its chief imperfection. Because Maud is "filled with exaggerated sentiments," because its frenzied protagonist is overcharged with an "extravagantly self-cen­ tered emotion," says Rader, the reader is prevented "from identifying with him fully and sympathetically, despite the 4 fact that such identification is almost required by the 12 nature of the poem." While writing Maud in 1854-1855» asserts Rader, Tenny­ son was unable to recognize the extravagance of the emotion he was having his speaker express in several parts of the poem. Neither did he fully realize the extent to which he was drawing his materials for the poem from his own past pain­ ful experiences. Rather, the composition was characterized by "an astonishing unconsciousness of the autobiographical bear­ ings of the poem."13 This happened because Tennyson had re­ pressed the accumulated hurt from his adolescent years and from his later years of financial struggle and disillusionment with the ways of love. Because he was by 1854 not yet emotionally free of these troubles, contends Rader, he was unable to ac­ quire "the proper precondition" or "perspective" with which to write Maud. He was incapable of maintaining an adequately "detached intuition of the original emotional object." Con­ sequently, a "hidden emotional dimension" developed. For Tennyson, the poem took on a measure of meaning which it does not have for the reader unfamiliar with the biographical back­ ground at its core, believes Rader. This study will seek to show that the poet’s early life was the quarry he mined rather than the obsessions he was un­ able to deal with poetically and that the emotion which flows from the thoughts of the poem’s speaker is not disproportionate to its objects nor a source of serious imperfection but is 5 rather conscious and controlled. This study will proceed on the premise that there is a need for a reconsideration of the relationship between Tennyson’s life and the poem, par­ ticularly the issue of whether the confluence between the poet’s experiences during the pre-1850 period and the situ­ ations of the speaker in the poem means that Maud is auto­ matically over-personal and emotional. Frequently, as Ruskin noted in discussing the poem, Tennyson effectively employs the pathetic fallacy in the language of a dramatic character in an intensely dramatic situation; and frequently it is a consciously employed device intended to startle the Victorian reading public into an awareness of the evils present in mid- Victorian society. Also, it will be argued that Maud to the extent that it is a complex and difficult poem does benefit from an understanding of its biographical background. Such knowledge provides the interested reader a deeper appreciation of the poem. But while the biographical elements in Maud are the necessary materials with which Tennyson composed the work, and while they do add force to the poem, they are not the poem.