"Doing battle with forgotten ghosts": Carnival, Discourse, and Degradation in Tennyson's The Princess

Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Princess is rife with ambiguities and contradictions that prevent a straightforward interpretation of the text. A Victorian frame surrounds the medieval tale of "feminine" Prince and "masculine" Princess, one ultimately transformed from a fierce feminist into a broken nurse; men rather than women tell a story centering on women's issues; and the narrative displays deeply puzzling oddities of tone, genre, and structure: these are just a few of the poem's complicating elements. While it is not surprising, therefore, that little critical consensus exists as to whether Tennyson finally presents a conservative or a progressive vision of gender relations in The Princess, what is less debatable is that contending male and female voices in the text have decidedly ideological implications. ¹

The poem initially promotes expectations of a full exploration of "the woman question" that was then beginning to preoccupy Victorian society, but, as scholars of recent decades have noted, feminist discourse is silenced and patriarchal values upheld in the end. ² Terry Eagleton, in a provocative Marxist and Lacanian reading of the poem, interprets the transformation of the lovers as an attempted resolution of both the Prince's and the mid-nineteenth century state's Oedipal complexes, the former struggling with a "barbaric, nakedly militaristic, blatantly sexist" father and the latter with internal and external changes in class, economic, and political relations. ³ Eagleton suggests that sexuality and politics are conflated in The Princess and that to address one is to address them both. Ultimately, the Prince and Princess are reintegrated into the symbolic order through the "ideological equation . . . feminine male x masculine female = masculine male + feminine female," the couple thereby embracing conventional (if somewhat "humanized") gender roles and propagating the restabilized bourgeois state as well (p. 79). However, despite the poem's apparent surface liberality, Eagleton maintains that univocal masculine discourse retains complete control throughout: "[The Princess] displays no dialectic of discourses whatsoever. . . . There is no sense in which one discourse inheres within, contradicts, interrogates or 'de-centres' another" (pp. 86, 82). At no point, then, does a genuine "interplay of voices" occur that could produce true change.

In what is perhaps the most comprehensive study to date of the poem's treatment of voice and gender, Donald Hall reaches a similar conclusion in Fixing Patriarchy, an examination of the Victorian literary and cultural context that traces how feminist discourse incrementally changed a deeply resistant male hegemony over the course of the nineteenth century. Hall observes that women's increasingly audible demands for improved legal, political, educational, and professional status in the 1840s challenged established gender roles assigning men the public and women the private spheres. Feminist discourse and gender experimentation were perceived as threats to the patriarchal status quo, which in turn attempted to discursively "fix" such trouble by re-establishing a clearly delineated heterosexual binary:

The perimeters and properties of Victorian masculinities were imperfectly secured through ongoing processes of differentiation, denigration, and appropriation, were constantly adjusted through negotiation with demands voiced by those to whom silence had been formerly ascribed, and were finally as fretted and fractured as the class and gender ideologies of the era, ones that only appear seamless to us when we mistake bombast for self-assurance. (Hall, pp. 3-4)

Such bombast through the appropriation of the female Other is evident in The Princess, a representative cultural product of its times: "Tennyson was neither unique, nor particularly blameworthy—he was simply caught in the binaries of his day, as well as those of a particular model and dynamic of dialogue, in which two or more voices cannot be heard at once: following the rules of competitive engagement, one must rise above the cacophony, silencing others" (Hall, p. 54). Tennyson's mid-century poem, then, enacts the discursive triumph of the patriarchy.

While building upon these scholars' insights into the workings of gender and voice in the...