"Hang there like fruit, my soul": Tennyson's Feminine Imaginings

Tennyson, we know, was buried with a copy of Cymbeline (as well as various wreaths, and roses from Emily), and in the days before his death on October 5, 1892, he repeatedly asked for the relevant volume, laying it "face down" on the page where Posthumous is reconciled with Imogen, and pressing down with his hand so "heavily" that the spine cracked:¹

Hang there like fruit, my soul, Till the tree die!

Hallam reports his dying father as trying unsuccessfully to read this passage ("which he always called the tenderest lines in Shakespeare") before uttering the sentence "I have opened it,"² and then speaking "his last words, a farewell blessing, to my mother and myself."³ Hallam's account is understandably edited and stylized, but it was clearly an impressive scene.⁴ Dr. Dabbs was more unrestrained in drawing out those elements of the poet's passing that lent themselves to a literary apotheosis. The Laureate dies with the majesty of his own King Arthur, and grips his Shakespeare as if it were his passport to the pantheon:

On the bed a figure of breathing marble, flooded and bathed in the light of a full moon streaming through the oriel window; his hand clasping the Shakespeare which he had asked for but recently, and which he kept by him to the end; the moonlight, the majestic figure as he lay there, "drawing thicker breath," irresistibly brought to our minds his own "Passing of Arthur."

(Memoir, 2:428-429)

Dabbs's account is stagey and dated, but it is the private, rather than the public, aspect of the scene that is intriguing. Specifically, what did the play, and its final scene mean to Tennyson as he approached death? It is well known that the urgency of his reiterated request for the Cymbeline distressed his family who were alarmed by his response to reading some words from it on October 3, whereupon he told the doctor that "now he was convinced of his approaching death" (Martin, p. 581). Turning to the end of the play, we remember Imogen, restored to Posthumous after a period when they had been lost to each other, and when, her life threatened, she had had to brave exile from her sex and her family. Disguising herself as a male, she had entered a wilderness, and all but died, undergoing an episode of death-in-life, and a form of burial, before in the miraculous way of the later plays, she reveals herself and is restored to him.

In what follows, I take this scene as providing a kind of template, a symbolic narrative, that offers a model whereby we can think about what can be called the coexistence, entwinement, and alternation, in Tennyson's imagination, of male and female personae. Broadly, I will hazard a hypothesis that Tennyson's works, like his life and career as a whole, aspired to ultimately masculine positionings of self, but that his work was always animated by an encrypted but constitutive dimension of (what is best called) feminine sensibility that yearned, like Imogen—against hope and experience, as it were —for self-revelation or expression.⁵ My argument will be that this unfolding of femininity manifests itself in fundamental (if intermittent and often dissimilated) ways in Tennyson's poetry, largely in so far as an individual work projects an identity with, or as, its central female figure. Of course, as an obvious case like "Mariana" makes clear, this distinction is not a simple one, but it usefully allows me to explore two related but different kinds of case which I will use to frame my argument.⁶ In the former, as I shall describe it, romance reveals a form of entranced symbiosis where difference between the masculine hero and a female other is suspended or transcended; and in the latter, the imagining of female identity is more directly enacted or voiced, entailing a conversion of gender. In this context, we can speculate that death represented itself for Tennyson as an opening as well as an ending, a crossing of the bar, where an...