Tennyson’s Lyric Betrayals: Feminine Re-Formation in The Princess and In memorium

Abstract

The Princess: A Medley: The Princess describes Princess Ida’s choice of marriage over feminist activism, punctuating its long blank-verse plot (told by men) with short songs (sung by women). These songs, with their hazy nostalgia, sabotage Tennyson’s efforts to eschew effeminate lyric in favor of masculine-coded epic. They also sabotage Ida’s authority as they hasten her domestic conversion. Alfano associates the appeals of mnemonic and sentimental little songs with the emotional demands of small children, as both pull at Ida’s heartstrings and cause her to forget herself. Yet reading through the lens of gender further complicates the relationship between lyric and plot. Lyrics also interrupt the men’s narrative arc with their insistent retrospection, delaying Ida’s capitulation and implying that a teleological mode of reading is not the only way to understand her story. In Memoriam A. H. H.: In Memoriam is a long poem both shaped and traumatized by brevity. Tennyson exploits its semi-discrete nature to lend his lost friend Hallam fresh form through a fluctuating set of metaphors. But ironically, lyric repetitions and shifting comparisons threaten both to derail In Memoriam’s narrative of consolation and—as they amplify Tennyson’s fear that seeking comfort means forgetting Hallam—to obscure the dead man. At the same time, the association of lyric with womanliness allows Tennyson to gain new knowledge of his friend, employing poetic forgetting to reimagine himself as Hallam’s lover. And via another metaphor that surfaces in The Princess as well, Tennyson uses the developing child to envision a model of plot-based recovery from sorrow that need not rely on the amnesiac abandonment of the beloved.