“Who knows if he be dead?”: Maud, Signification, and the Madhouse Canto

The most compelling question in Tennyson’s Maud (1855) is not, as some have suggested, “What is it, that has been done?”¹ but rather, “Who knows if he be dead?” (II.119). Both of these inquiries, in their immediate contexts, relate to the speaker’s uncertainty surrounding the fate of Maud’s brother after their duel, but each also represents a more general method of reading the poem. Most readers have approached Maud with the first question in mind, either to attempt to reconstruct the events that take place in this notoriously fragmented narrative or to foreground their absence.² The latter question, however, draws our attention toward what E. Warwick Slinn calls the “brilliance of Tennyson’s dialectical and figurative ambiguity which shifts dramatic action away from external event towards signifying process.”³ Asking “Who knows if he be dead?” provides an occasion to look beyond the “O that ’twere possible” lyric (privileged as the historical, compositional, and thematic germ of Maud⁴) and to thereby reconsider the function of the less-analyzed “madhouse canto” that follows it. Here, the speaker surrenders at last to the insanity that has haunted him throughout the poem and raves under the delusion that he has died and has been buried in a makeshift tomb. Given the poem’s preoccupation with death and madness, it is easy to dismiss the speaker’s conflation of the asylum with a “shallow grave” as an incidental trope deployed to demonstrate the extent of his insanity. Most of Tennyson’s readers have done something of the sort, if they have noticed this section at all. However, even if we accept that the “burial” experienced by the Maud speaker is the disturbed reality of a deranged mind, it nonetheless reflects and cites the concerns of a cultural and scientific discourse that is missed when we focus too much on Tennyson’s sheerly psychological skill in rendering madness. Premature burial, while today associated almost exclusively with Gothic horror, was to the nineteenth century a possible (if not entirely likely) consequence of medical error. Understood within the context of uncertainty surrounding death, Maud’s so-called mad scene discloses a fear of what might be broadly termed insignificance: not only the lack of societal importance the speaker complains of across the poem, but also a textual condition in which one’s very survival depends on other people’s reading practices which are themselves always open to dispute.

The rhetorical question “Who knows if he be dead?” is key to Tennyson’s construction of Maud in and as discourse. A rhetorical question, as Paul de Man explains, “engenders two meanings that are mutually exclusive: the literal meaning asks for the concept (difference) whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning.”⁵ Although we usually privilege the figural meaning over the literal (that is, we understand that the speaker is not literally searching for a person who could report on the status of Maud’s brother but is commenting on the impossibility of establishing that status), de Man invites us to consider the possibility that the literal meaning might also be equally urgent. The conjunction of meanings that are mutually exclusive and mutually dependent creates what de Man calls a referential aberration, an undecidable suspension of reference between literal and figural. The two meanings thus no longer “exist side by side” but “engage each other in direct confrontation, for the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone by it. Nor can we in any way make a valid decision as to which of the readings can be given priority over the other; none can exist in the other’s absence” (de Man, p. 12). The mode of the rhetorical question and the referential aberration it opens in the text help us recover the literal connotations of the Maud speaker’s figural burial. Slinn applies de Man’s frame of referential aberration specifically to explore in Victorian poetry what he describes as “the potential for cultural critique engendered . . . by that suspension of normative referential logic...