There are shades of greatness in the major characters of Antony and Cleopatra. Their words are lofty, their actions awe-inspiring, even their trivial bickering is memorable in a way that raises them above the mundane into the realm of the legendary. History pales in comparison to the grand scale of their mutual clashes, and the glow of nobility drapes every action of theirs.
Perhaps this is why Shakespeare introduced into the play a wide array of minor characters who actively subvert the role of the major characters, who open our eyes to the more human facets of their personalities, and give us a more practical and less grandiose perspective on their actions and motivations.
Most of the subversion takes place in the form of the minor characters commenting on and undercutting the atmosphere of nobility and greatness generated by the major characters. Given these deliberately confusing cross-currents, it is difficult to assess Shakespeare’s true feelings towards his major characters – whether he really believed in the touches of grandiloquence he bestowed on them, or whether he looked on them with the same sardonic eye that he often exercised through Enobarbus, and through the other minor characters.
As the play starts, even before we get a chance to meet him, we are introduced to the character of Antony in a speech by Philo that immediately deflates our vision of him as a noble and powerful Roman general. Instead, Philo constructs an image of a once-extraordinary man now reduced to a smitten fool: “You shall see in him the triple pillar of the world transformed into a strumpet’s fool”. And just as he subverts the established image of Antony by attacking his weakness for Cleopatra, Philo also attacks the very love that motivates Antony throughout the play, reducing it to a vulgar infatuation and calling him “the bellows and the fan to cool a gipsy’s lust”.
Philo’s opinion is not a solitary one. Almost every other character in the play looks upon Antony and Cleopatra’s relationship less as a bond of love and more as a power game, in which Cleopatra has used her sexual wiles to entrap Antony into lustful servility. Maecenas envisions Cleopatra as a victor in the game of power when he calls her “a most triumphant lady” and Enobarbus believes Antony to be a helpless pawn in Cleopatra’s hand when describing how “she pursed up his heart on the river of Cydnus”. Maecenas insinuates that Antony no longer has control of his armies when he “gives his potent regiment to a trull”, and Enobarbus tells Cleopatra herself, “An eunuch and your maids manage this war”. When Cleopatra flees from the war, Antony’s loyalty in following her is likened by Scarus and Enobarbus to that of a “doting mallard”.
In fact, the characters of the play seem to equate Antony’s loss of power to a loss of masculinity on his part, and consequently, an acquisition of feminine traits in his personality. In a society dominated by a patriarchal mindset, which Shakespeare was either mocking or was perhaps himself not entirely free of, masculinity was seen to be directly related to men’s power over women, while submission and pliability were considered feminine qualities. Thus, Cleopatra’s ability to manipulate Antony and wield power over him is interpreted by the other characters as an interchange of their masculinity and feminity.
At one point in the play, Charmian indicates the approach of Cleopatra by saying “Here comes Antony”. Although Alexas corrects her with “Not he, the queen”, it is unlikely that Charmian had actually mistaken her own mistress for Antony. It is much more likely that Charmian, still absorbed in the atmosphere of levity of the previous conversation, was poking fun at the man-like qualities that she perceived her mistress to have acquired while simultaneously mocking Antony’s woman-like tendency to submit to Cleopatra’s will. And that is essentially what Canidius means, when he says about Antony: “Our leader’s led, and we are women’s men”.
But far more than Antony, it is Cleopatra who incurs the insults and censure of the minor characters for the Roman general’s conduct. Her sensual nature and her passionate affair with Antony together lead to her image as an immoral woman. Thus, she is called Antony’s “Egyptian dish” by Enobarbus, a “trull” by Maecenas, a “ribauldred nag” by Scarus and a “gipsy” by Philo. Even when she has aroused the curiosity and admiration of the Romans, such as when Enobarbus describes the splendour of her first meeting with Antony to an awed Agrippa, Cleopatra is still sexually objectified by the men: “Royal wench! She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed. He ploughed her, and she cropped”.
Most of the time, Shakespeare does not treat Cleopatra’s character kindly. Her interactions with her messenger reveal unattractive facets of her personality. The first time, when the messenger brings her news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia, she flies into a paroxysm of rage, the violence of which only compares to the violence of Antony’s anger when he sees Caesar’s messenger kissing Cleopatra’s hand later in the play. In both instances, the messengers are punished unfairly and out of proportion to their alleged crimes – Antony has Thidias whipped and humiliated, and Cleopatra strikes her messenger several times, and even draws a knife to kill him. Both instances shed an unpleasant light on the major characters, underscoring their lack of self-control and their inability to behave with dignity, instead resorting to hysteria and vicious hatred. But though Antony can be said to have at least some reason for his vindictive rage against Thidias since Thidias was trying to manipulate Cleopatra into deserting Antony for Caesar, albeit under Caesar’s orders, Cleopatra’s behaviour with her messenger seems to be erratic and an unpleasant reflection on her character. Similarly, Cleopatra’s second scene with the messenger, when he invents faults in Octavia to flatter her, emphasizes her vanity and her conceit.
On the other hand, there are instances in the play when Shakespeare portrays Cleopatra as the extraordinarily beautiful, magnificent, larger-than-life character of legend. Enobarbus, when discussing her with Agrippa and Maecenas delivers a stirring tribute: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies”. Shakespeare seems to have had mixed feelings towards Cleopatra, showing us both her ugly side and her queenly one.
Shakespeare’s use of the minor characters reveals the personalities of Antony and Cleopatra from various points of view. On one level, Antony and Cleopatra are merely two people exhausted by a life of excessive pleasure and luxury. On another level, they are tragic characters willing to risk kingdoms for their love. Shakespeare laughs at them for their foolishness, sympathizes with them for their suffering, critiques them for their faults and admires them for their moments of personal nobility.
But however ambivalent Shakespeare may have been about the love between Antony and Cleopatra, his attitude towards the world of the Roman generals and politicians is unfailingly critical. And since Rome’s political sphere is made up of many of the major characters – Caesar, Antony, Lepidus, Pompey – it is left to the minor characters to uncover the hypocrisy and superficiality hidden behind their noble exteriors.
Antony may have proclaimed himself overjoyed to be marrying Octavia, and Caesar may have professed grief at parting from her, but Enobarbus and Menas are fully aware that “the policy of that purpose made more in the marriage than the love of the parties” and that Antony “married but his occasion here”. The world may hail Antony and Caesar as brilliant generals, but Ventidius knows that “Caesar and Antony have ever won more in their officer than person”. Lepidus may seem to be the powerful third triumvirate of the Roman world, but Eros calls him “the poor third” and the servants laugh contemptuously at his drunken behaviour “this it is to have a name in great men’s fellowship. I had as lief have a reed that will do me no service as a partisan I could not heave”.
Under the guise of a joke to Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus’ barb at the political opportunism and insincerity on both sides is deceptively sharp: “if you borrow one another’s love for the instant, you may, when you hear no more words of Pompey, return it again. You shall have time to wrangle in when you have nothing else to do”. In a similar vein, under the guise of humour, Agrippa and Enobarbus make a scathing critique of Antony and Caesar’s false show of emotion during Octavia’s departure from Rome: “Will Caesar weep?”...”Why, Enobarbus, when Antony found Julius Caesar dead, he cried almost to roaring, and he wept when at Philippi he found Brutus slain.” “That year, indeed, he was troubled with a rheum. What willingly he did confound he wailed, believ’t, till I wept too.” Thus, when Menas tells Enobarbus “All men’s faces are true, whatsome’er their hands are”, his remark reflects not just on the previous encounter between the triumvirate and Pompey, but on the Roman political sphere as a whole.
Menas plays an important role in Shakespeare’s subversion of the major characters. When Pompey decides not to fight the triumvirs and to accept their offer, and when Menas proposes murdering the triumvirate and Pompey refuses, the audience might be relieved but Menas only thinks he is a fool. That is why he tells Enobarbus, “Pompey doth this day laugh away his fortune”, and later, “Who seeks and will not take, when once ‘tis offered, shall never find it more”. Menas also turns the tables on Enobarbus by calling him a great thief “by land”. His statement forces us to wonder if Shakespeare was critiquing colonialism, because he seems to be making an intriguing and persuasive argument – that conquering other territories and capturing their wealth and resources was no less of ‘thieving’ than Menas’ piracy, which, after all, only captured the resources of solitary ships on the ocean.
But even more than Menas, it is Enobarbus who proves invaluable to Shakespeare’s attempts at subversion. Enobarbus has been read by some critics as a choral character, a character similar to the Choruses of ancient Greek tragedies. These Choruses served the purpose of expressing traditional attitudes and guiding the audience's response to the play. Shakespeare, too, employs Enobarbus as a means to convey his own opinions on the proceedings and to guide the audience’s response. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans from which Shakespeare derived Antony and Cleopatra was in narrative form and so Plutarch could insert his own commentary from time to time. But Shakespeare was forced to rely on Enobarbus in order to deliver his own commentary throughout the story.
However, there is an important difference between how the Greek tragedies used their Chorus, and how Shakespeare uses Enobarbus. During the course of the play, Enobarbus expresses attitudes that are anything but traditional. For example, when Antony tells him about Fulvia’s death, instead of sympathizing with Antony or mourning her loss, Enobarbus takes us by surprise with his cheerful lasciviousness: “Why, sir, give the gods a thankful sacrifice. When it pleaseth their deities to take the wife of a man from him, it shows to man the tailors of the earth; comforting therein, that when old robes are worn out, there are members to make new”. Later, after a bout of depression and despair, when Antony suddenly regains his spirits and challenges Caesar to a duel, the audience is ready to applaud Anton’s courage and optimism. But Enobarbus sheds a different light on his sudden bravado: “I see men’s judgements are a parcel of their fortunes, and things outward do draw the inward quality after them to suffer all alike…Caesar, thou hast subdued his judgement too.” When Antony’s soldiers are grieved to hear him tell them it may be the last time they see him alive, the traditional response would be to be sorrowful. But Enobarbus penetrates through Antony’s affectation of despondency and replies to Cleopatra’s puzzled inquiry: “[He means] to make his followers weep”. Later, when Antony is full of courage and fervour to go onto the battlefield and fight Caesar, only Enobarbus realizes that Antony’s newfound mettle will prove the undoing of him: “To be furious is to be frighted out of fear, and in that mood the dove will peck the estridge; and I see still a diminution in our captain’s brain restores his heart. When valour preys on reason, it eats the sword it fights with”. He gains support for his conviction from an unexpected quarter. In Caesar’s camp, the same idea has occurred to Maecenas, who is at that moment saying about Antony: “When one so great begins to rage, he’s hunted even to falling”.
Antony and Cleopatra’s minor characters seem to be absorbed upon bringing down its major characters from their high pedestal, upon depressing their pretensions. Even when they are ostensibly praising a major character, their praise shows up the defects of his character and seems to be highlighting the qualities he does not possess rather than the ones he does. For example, when Proculeius describes Caesar as “a conqueror that will pray in aid for kindness where he for grace is kneeled to” and someone “who is so full of grace that it flows over on all that need”, all that it serves to do it is remind us that he is shrewd, manipulative and definitely not gracious, since we already know that the only reason he wants to keep Cleopatra alive is that he is planning to parade her through the streets of Rome as a symbol of his triumph in the war (“For her life in Rome will be eternal in our triumph”). When Eros calls Antony “that noble countenance wherein the worship of the whole world lies”, the fact that Antony has not courage enough to kill himself when even Eros does so with honour makes Eros’ speech glaringly incongruous. In fact, as Antony admits himself shamefully, Eros seems “thrice nobler” than him. When Agrippa mourns Antony’s death and says of him: “A rarer spirit never did steer humanity; but you gods will give us some faults to make us men”, rather than excusing Antony for his faults since he is merely human, it draws our attention to the nature and number of his faults. In fact, his speech even touches upon Caesar when Maecenas says about him: “When such a spacious mirror’s set before him, he needs must see himself”. It reminds us that Caesar may have been the victor in this war, but essentially, he is the same as Antony and will eventually meet the same downfall.
But even with their many faults, with their selfishness and arrogance, with their cupidity and their deceit, the major characters of Antony and Cleopatra still have strains of the exceptional in them. They are rare and remarkable individuals, and despite the considerable amount of criticism their characters receive at the hands of the minor characters, they will always remain in our memories as charismatic and legendary personalities worthy of the attention they have received over centuries.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
The Reader – An Analysis of the film
I watched The Reader in an empty multiplex hall, its cavernous yawn beckoning me in. And the desolate aisles seemed to be whispering questions at me, asking me where the rest of the populace was. I could have told them - the next hall was playing Aloo Chaat. The allure of empty entertainment was irresistible.
The Reader, on the other hand, held no such pretensions of aiming to entertain. A staunchly intellectual film, it was pale and sombre and brooding, and even the eroticism of a naked Kate Winslet indulging in the throes of passion couldn't lighten it up.
David Kross played the young boy, Michael, in the film, who falls in love with the much older Hanna Schmitz, and embarks on a brief but torrid love affair, only to find her a decade later on trial for mass murder, for being a concentration camp guard and an allegedly willing participant in Nazi horror. And Kate Winslet took on the task of humanizing the 'monster', of making Hanna's distasteful crimes appear rational.
The movie's subject was the Holocaust, but the angle from which it chose to approach the catastrophe was unusual. It placed not the victim, but the perpetrator at the story's center. It showed us the human side to the monster, then it held up the possibility that monstrous actions are not a function of something called Evil, but something messier, stranger and more common to all. This is chilling stuff, and after watching The Reader, the idea that you could as easily have been in Hanna's place and done what she had done clings to you like a bad dream.
Hanna is a complex character, and the film's triumph lies in how difficult it makes for us to judge her, to believe her to be truly evil, despite the horrific crimes we know her to have perpetrated. She is carnal in her sexual pursuits, yet childlike in her simple enchantment with the stories read out to her. She is cold and emotionally distant in her behaviour towards Michael, yet passionately moved to tears as she sits mesmerized in a church while a young choir sings. She is capable of inhuman acts of cruelty towards the Jews, yet we meet her as the caring, compassionate woman who performed a simple act of kindness for a sick boy by helping him up and escorting him home. Even while she is in the courtroom confessing her crimes, we are charmed by her guilelessness and naive candour, and simultaneously repulsed by her casual indifference to the burning alive of 300 Jewish prisoners. 'The dead are still dead', she says, by way of explanation.
I've decided it is a merit of the film that it does not show Hanna to be remorseful and wanting to change. Instead, Hanna is less ashamed of having killed hundreds of people than of her illiteracy. It would have been easy to show her horrified by a realization of her crimes, or humiliated and truly repentant. But no, the director doesn't make it so convenient for us to make excuses for Hanna, or look for ways to believe she’s a good person. He makes her indifferent to her crimes, and then dares us to pass judgement on her. It's almost as if he's asking us - now that you see her side of it without any extenuating circumstances, is she still a demon? Is she beyond forgiveness?
Ron Rosenbaum, in an article for Slate magazine, criticized the film for what, he alleged, was a sympathetic stance on its part towards the German people like Hanna who were involved in Nazi exterminations. He attacked the film for 'misrepresenting history' and for trying to excuse the heinous crimes that the German people were complicit in by expressing sympathy towards them.
But I don't agree with Rosenbaum. For all that it says on Hanna's behalf, to the film’s credit, she is never really let off the hook. Which is why Michael does not admit his relationship with her in court. And also why he coldly rejects her appeal for acceptance years later, when she is released from prison and he is all that she has. The movie is not really justifying Hanna's actions, just showing us her point of view and giving us a somewhat more balanced perception of the Holocaust.
Ultimately this movie, and all such movies that try to unravel the psyche of the victimiser as opposed to the victimised, fulfill an important requirement for a society that is trying to come to terms with the aftermath of a tragedy - that of demystifying the Enemy. It may be tempting for us to demonise the people who commit such brutalities, or to call it 'collective insanity' and assign them a place in the loony bin of history's annals, but there is one great danger in that. A society that declares a man like Hitler insane, or that believes that an entire nation of people suddenly got swept up in some sort of fever, is a society in denial. Because this 'fever' grows slowly, out of the social and political conditions of the times, out of job shortages and national humiliation, until it explodes into a violent mess of death and destruction. Until you see that Hanna Schmitz let all those people burn to death because her superiors prized ruthless efficiency over common humanity, and because her society did not value the lives of the Jews, you can never understand how she came to believe that killing Jews was just her job, the people were just her “responsibility”. Until you understand that she took that job in the prison because the economic situations of the time did not allow her to pass it up, you will fail to realize that a situation like this could happen again in our society, and we would be powerless to stop it. After all, if you were in her place, are you so sure that you would not do what she did?
And in the end, this is what the movie comes down to - a warning. The point of all the questions the movie asks - in fact the point of all literature that questions past events - is the same, to teach us right from wrong by using others' stories as warnings. The Reader is a warning to every person in our society to not make the mistake that Hanna Schmitz made. Every time we are in a position to choose, The Reader tells us to make the ethical choice, to have the moral courage to stand up for humanity instead of following orders.
But would that not make all wars redundant? Think about it.
References:
McCarthy, Todd. The Reader. Variety. (November 30, 2008)
Goldstein, Patrick. No Oscar glory for 'The Reader'? Los Angeles Times. (December 3, 2008).
Rosenbaum, Ron. Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader. Slate. (February 9, 2009).
Honeycutt, Kirk. Film Review: The Reader. The Hollywood Reporter. (November 30, 2008).
Of man-eaters that may not be
The past few months have seen an unusual amount of media attention focused on tigers. First, there was the subject of the relocation of tigers from Ranthambore to the infamous Sariska Tiger Reserve. Then Sachin Tendulkar drew the media’s attention towards the issue of tiger conservation by dedicating his 42nd test hundred to it. And then – barely more than a week later, a tiger was reported missing at the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh. So, with all these news items to remind me that the fate of our tigers still hangs by a thread, I mulled over something I saw on TV, something that once led me to be optimistic about the future of the big cats in India.
I was flipping through the channels one day when I came across a documentary on the Discovery Channel about a tiger that had attacked and killed a girl in a village in the Sundarbans. The villagers were helpless, cut off from the mainland by the surrounding forests and unable to do anything but cower in fear inside their huts as soon as dusk fell.
Investigating officers were sent by the Forest Department, and they quickly narrowed down the suspect-list to three tigers, one of which they’d had their eyes on for quite a while. This tiger had been suspected in at least two other attacks on humans, and the forestry officials were being pressurized to brand it a man-eater and kill it.
But even with evidence against the tiger mounting – its pug-marks, the indentations of its teeth and jaws, its physical attributes and age, all seemed to match those of the tiger that attacked the girl – the conservationists remained stubborn in their refusal to buckle under pressure and call it a man-eater. They would kill a human on less evidence than this, I thought, as I watched in awe while the forest officials battled political and social pressure. This is more humanity than is even shown to humans in our country.
‘The evidence could point to the other two tigers as well’, the officials claimed. ‘And besides there are tigers in the forests that we don’t even know about’.
‘Then kill all three tigers’, ordered the powers-that-be, but by then, even I knew that wasn’t going to happen. They weren’t going to be that unjust to the tigers.
And I, who had expected the officials to come out with all guns blazing, ready to destroy as many animals as necessary to ‘deliver justice’ and placate the villagers, was taken aback that they seemed to be ruthlessly fair to both man and beast. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to eliminate the threat, it was just that they refused to kill indiscriminately, refused to call the tiger a man-eater until they were a 101% sure.
I was puzzled at first – it isn’t normal for the law to be so hesitant about killing one animal. This is the same system of law that supports the killing of thousands of stray dogs every year, because of ‘canine overpopulation’, ironically in a country whose overpopulating humans aren’t going anywhere near extinction. So why forego human arrogance in this case, and think about the animals for once?
But then, I thought, it made sense. In a place with endangered tigers, every single animal is important. Which is not to say that humans are expendable, but who do you think is the victim here? The humans, growing in numbers and spilling over into the territory of the tigers, using up their resources, killing their food, encroaching on their land, destroying their habitats – or the tigers, having to stray farther and farther out of the forest into land which was once their own (and how are they to know it’s not their own anymore?) just so they can get their food and survive?
Anyway, humans are pretty much the last item on the menu that tigers would pick to eat. The tiger that attacked the girl actually dropped her and left after it realized she wasn’t some kind of prey, like a small deer. Only man-eaters have been known to actually stalk and consume people, and genuine man-eaters are rare.
There is no neat ending to this story. No saviour emerged to clear the tiger of all blame. The documentary ended on an ambiguous note – it might have been that tiger and it might not. But one important fact emerged – the Sundarbans officials were not ready to compromise the lives of the tigers without necessity.
Seems like that isn’t the case anymore.
A tiger that recently attacked a woman in Corbett narrowly escaped being shot dead by Uttarakhand officials, and was uprooted from its natural habitat and packed off to a zoo. Similarly, the Uttar Pradesh forest department recently gave arbitrary shoot-at-sight orders as a response to five so-called man-eaters, despite contradictory biological evidence. Not long ago in Tadoba, officials shot down a wrong tiger – a robust male – to appease angry villagers demanding elimination of a tigress accused of serial attacks. In most cases, the local officials’ response to an attack was determined by hasty assumptions, media hype and public pressure, and the top authorities saved their skin by issuing orders to capture or kill the ‘beast’. The only ones losing here were the tigers, but then they didn’t form a viewer-base for the cameras, or a vote bank for the ones pulling the trigger with their pens, now did they?
It’s important to save the humans, but not at the cost of the tigers. There are other ways to solve this problem – how about relocating the humans for a change? There’s nothing wrong with giving humans and tigers equal priority. In fact, as was evident in the documentary I saw, the law certainly provides for it. Now all that’s needed is a little media and public sensitivity.
Some facts about tigers in India
Approximate number of Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans: 500
Number of human attacks by tigers in Sundarbans: 50-250 per year
In 2002, the number of tigers in India was: 3642
In 2008, it was: 1,411
Number of tigers lost since start of 2009: 30 (one every 3 days)
References:
Mazoomdar, Jay. Big Cat is Fair Game. Times of India. (Saturday, March 11, 2009)
“Tiger attacks in the Sunderbans” Wikipedia.com. 29th March. 2009
I was flipping through the channels one day when I came across a documentary on the Discovery Channel about a tiger that had attacked and killed a girl in a village in the Sundarbans. The villagers were helpless, cut off from the mainland by the surrounding forests and unable to do anything but cower in fear inside their huts as soon as dusk fell.
Investigating officers were sent by the Forest Department, and they quickly narrowed down the suspect-list to three tigers, one of which they’d had their eyes on for quite a while. This tiger had been suspected in at least two other attacks on humans, and the forestry officials were being pressurized to brand it a man-eater and kill it.
But even with evidence against the tiger mounting – its pug-marks, the indentations of its teeth and jaws, its physical attributes and age, all seemed to match those of the tiger that attacked the girl – the conservationists remained stubborn in their refusal to buckle under pressure and call it a man-eater. They would kill a human on less evidence than this, I thought, as I watched in awe while the forest officials battled political and social pressure. This is more humanity than is even shown to humans in our country.
‘The evidence could point to the other two tigers as well’, the officials claimed. ‘And besides there are tigers in the forests that we don’t even know about’.
‘Then kill all three tigers’, ordered the powers-that-be, but by then, even I knew that wasn’t going to happen. They weren’t going to be that unjust to the tigers.
And I, who had expected the officials to come out with all guns blazing, ready to destroy as many animals as necessary to ‘deliver justice’ and placate the villagers, was taken aback that they seemed to be ruthlessly fair to both man and beast. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to eliminate the threat, it was just that they refused to kill indiscriminately, refused to call the tiger a man-eater until they were a 101% sure.
I was puzzled at first – it isn’t normal for the law to be so hesitant about killing one animal. This is the same system of law that supports the killing of thousands of stray dogs every year, because of ‘canine overpopulation’, ironically in a country whose overpopulating humans aren’t going anywhere near extinction. So why forego human arrogance in this case, and think about the animals for once?
But then, I thought, it made sense. In a place with endangered tigers, every single animal is important. Which is not to say that humans are expendable, but who do you think is the victim here? The humans, growing in numbers and spilling over into the territory of the tigers, using up their resources, killing their food, encroaching on their land, destroying their habitats – or the tigers, having to stray farther and farther out of the forest into land which was once their own (and how are they to know it’s not their own anymore?) just so they can get their food and survive?
Anyway, humans are pretty much the last item on the menu that tigers would pick to eat. The tiger that attacked the girl actually dropped her and left after it realized she wasn’t some kind of prey, like a small deer. Only man-eaters have been known to actually stalk and consume people, and genuine man-eaters are rare.
There is no neat ending to this story. No saviour emerged to clear the tiger of all blame. The documentary ended on an ambiguous note – it might have been that tiger and it might not. But one important fact emerged – the Sundarbans officials were not ready to compromise the lives of the tigers without necessity.
Seems like that isn’t the case anymore.
A tiger that recently attacked a woman in Corbett narrowly escaped being shot dead by Uttarakhand officials, and was uprooted from its natural habitat and packed off to a zoo. Similarly, the Uttar Pradesh forest department recently gave arbitrary shoot-at-sight orders as a response to five so-called man-eaters, despite contradictory biological evidence. Not long ago in Tadoba, officials shot down a wrong tiger – a robust male – to appease angry villagers demanding elimination of a tigress accused of serial attacks. In most cases, the local officials’ response to an attack was determined by hasty assumptions, media hype and public pressure, and the top authorities saved their skin by issuing orders to capture or kill the ‘beast’. The only ones losing here were the tigers, but then they didn’t form a viewer-base for the cameras, or a vote bank for the ones pulling the trigger with their pens, now did they?
It’s important to save the humans, but not at the cost of the tigers. There are other ways to solve this problem – how about relocating the humans for a change? There’s nothing wrong with giving humans and tigers equal priority. In fact, as was evident in the documentary I saw, the law certainly provides for it. Now all that’s needed is a little media and public sensitivity.
Some facts about tigers in India
Approximate number of Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans: 500
Number of human attacks by tigers in Sundarbans: 50-250 per year
In 2002, the number of tigers in India was: 3642
In 2008, it was: 1,411
Number of tigers lost since start of 2009: 30 (one every 3 days)
References:
Mazoomdar, Jay. Big Cat is Fair Game. Times of India. (Saturday, March 11, 2009)
“Tiger attacks in the Sunderbans” Wikipedia.com. 29th March. 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Victorian themes in Alfred Tennyson's poetry
The Victorian Age is the name given to the period in England roughly between the years 1837, when Queen Victoria ascended the throne, and 1901, when her reign ended. This intervening period in England was marked by major upheavals in society, the reverberations of which can be felt in the literature of the time. The Victorian years were years of rapid change, stimulating thought and provoking criticism. As a result, the period of the Age was rich in literature of almost every kind.
Tennyson lived and wrote during the second half of the 19th century. Many critics consider him the representative poet of the Age, because most of the features of the Victorian Age are echoed in his poetry. His works reflect the pessimism of Victorian literature, the social mores of his society, the clash of religion with the rising scientific temperament, the conservancy yet liberalism of the people and the sense of self-satisfaction that was a characteristic of the Victorian middle and upper classes.
Through his poem The Lady of Shalott, Tennyson explores the conflict between art and life that challenged Victorian age thinkers. He presents to us the dilemma that faced artists, writers, and musicians during the Victorian age: whether to write about the world by keeping at a distance from it, or to enjoy the world by simply living in it.
The poem’s Lady of Shalott is one such artist. For most of her life, she has lived a secluded, isolated life confined in a remote tower, watching the outside world through a magic mirror and weaving its sights. The images she weaves are from reflections, not even from any actual life she might see outside her window. She is thus far removed from ordinary day-to-day human living, such as the daily bustle and activity of the farmers, reapers and market-goers passing near her tower. This sheltered life for the Lady is very pleasant, until she gradually becomes aware that her isolation is leading to the frustration of her own deepest needs for contact and intercourse with the rest of life. As time goes by, she becomes more and more dissatisfied with her ‘imbowered’ life, and expresses her growing yearning for the reality of the outside world with an impatient exclamation: “I am half-sick of shadows”. This conflict between the Lady’s interior and exterior worlds demonstrates the tension between the artist’s own sensual vision and his or her need to experience life directly.
Through his story of the Lady, Tennyson seems to imply that for an artist, there are dangers in personal isolation; that an artist who cuts himself off from the outside world will inevitably become frustrated, and will attempt to break bounds and reach out to reality. But being unprepared and thus ill-fitted to plunge back into the mainstream of life, it would be fatal to his art. The end of the artist’s artistic isolation may lead to the end of his creativity.
The poem The Lady of Shalott may also express a more personal dilemma for Tennyson as a writer: while he perhaps felt an obligation to seek subject matter outside the world of his own mind and his own immediate experiences – to comment on politics, history, or a more general humanity – he may also have feared that this expansion into broader territories might destroy his poetry’s creativity and appeal.
This is echoed in the Lady’s fate. The mysterious curse is the one barrier that prevents the Lady from directly interacting with the rest of the world. But when she glimpses Sir Lancelot in the mirror, she is so fascinated with his image that she forgets all about the curse. She rushes to see him through the window, and in so doing abandons the seclusion of her former life for a life filled with human experiences and emotions. Thus, the moment she sets her art aside to gaze down on the real world, the curse befalls her and she meets her tragic death.
The Lady of Shalott can also be interpreted as a poem concerned with issues of women’s sexuality and their place in the Victorian world. In many of his poems, Tennyson has explored the Victorian attitude towards women and the domestic life. The Victorians had to affect a compromise between the unprecedented licentiousness of the previous age, and the Christian ascetic ideal of complete negation of sex. Thus they elevated the biological necessity of propagation into a moral virtue, and evolved the idea of domestic love and marriage.
Tennyson, too, in his poetry, glorified domestic love and projected the Victorian woman as a fragile, delicate, chaste figure who must be protected and kept inside the home. His Lady of Shalott perfectly embodies the Victorian image of the ideal woman: virginal, embowered, spiritual and mysterious, dedicated to her womanly tasks. The image of a woman isolated from the world, with no relationships and no sexual life, clearly met with Victorian society’s approval, and with Tennyson’s admiration. Her lack of interaction with the rest of the world illustrates the Victorians’ ideas on how a woman must dedicate herself towards her husband and her home, with single-minded devotion and unheeding of all that goes on outside the confines of her four walls. The Lady of Shalott’s view of the world is restricted to the reflections of the exterior world that she sees in her mirror. For the Victorian woman, the mirror was her husband, her only link to the outside world. She was expected to observe the world only through her husband’s eyes and live apart from the general flow of life, protected and preserved in her shrine that was her home.
But the Lady veers away from the Victorians’ ideal conception of a woman when she disregards all societal constraints and breaks away from her meek domesticity to harbour passionate love for a man. Tennyson projects this as her undoing. For her two crimes – the first, of rejecting societal conventions by stepping out of her home and the second, by experiencing strong emotions and passions which were deemed improper in women in the Victorian Age, he inflicts on her the punishment of death. Thus Tennyson, through the tale of the Lady, declares that unconventional behaviour in a Victorian woman will only lead to tragedy and destruction.
In Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, the mythical hero Ulysses shows little regard for his wife, when he dismisses her with the contemptuous phrase ‘match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole’. His callous disregard for her because of her age reveals his arrogance and belief in his masculine superiority. Clearly, he does not see her as his equal. He envisages himself as a fearless warrior travelling to the ends of the earth, unhindered by his old age. But his wife, though the same age as him, is reduced in his mind to the ranks of the weak and the useless. To Ulysses, she is just one of those things that tie him down and stifle him, hinder his glory, and lower his consequence. He shows no gratitude to her for being loyal to him during the vast amounts of time he was away on his adventures. He seems, rather, to take her loyalty and faithfulness for granted, and expects her to stay behind and meekly do his bidding while he goes away to pursue his desires and fancies to ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star’. Nor does he ask his wife to accompany him on his journey – evidently, he considers her either incapable of the courage required to undertake the journey or unsuitable for this pursuit of knowledge. Unlike the men he wishes to travel and explore the world with, he considers his wife to be only a burden, an encumbrance he wishes to be rid of and which he will be glad to leave behind when he sets off ‘to sail beyond the sunset’.
In The Defence of Lucknow, the women are given background roles as helpless cowering victims while the men fight on for their honour and save them from the enemies. Once again, the mask of chivalry hides the chauvinism of the Victorian men. The poet treats the women as fragile possessions, never acknowledging their individuality or courage. There is, of course, no question in Tennyson’s mind of the women fighting along with the men. The only mention of the women’s bravery is when Tennyson shows them devoted to the genteel womanly tasks of tending to their wounded husbands and looking after the needs of the men. He points out the ‘valour of delicate women who tended the hospital bed’, using the ‘delicate’ to reinforce his ideas about their weakness and their dependence on the men to protect them. Clearly, even in the midst of chaos and war, even in the middle of a crisis, the women are not expected to be freed from their domesticity.
In fact, in the entire poem, they are defined only by the men who ‘possess’ them. The soldiers exclaim in the poem: “women and children among us, God help them, our children and wives!” Thus the women’s identity as ‘children and wives’ is bound up with the men they seem to ‘belong’ to.
At one point in the poem, the narrator declares that ‘they shall know we are soldiers and men!’ What the British soldiers want ‘them’ i.e. the Indian rebels to know is that they are not weak, that they are not cowards. This, of course, implies that only men can be heroic, while it falls to the lot of the women to be somehow deficient in daring and spirit. This casual male arrogance only highlights the absurd gender prejudices and stereotypes that inhabited Tennyson’s mind and plagued Victorian society during the time.
There is another kind of arrogance in evidence in The Defence of Lucknow – the arrogant presumption of the Victorians that they were morally and culturally superior to every other race in the world.
By the Victorian Age, the British Empire had gained great power and supremacy throughout the world. The British controlled much of the earth’s resources and had taken over countless nations in Asia and Africa. This, naturally, led the Victorians to encounter societies and customs that were different from their own. But instead of filling them with curiosity and wonder, the knowledge of exotic cultures merely made them contemptuous of the rest of the world.
It was the reign of Queen Victoria, the era of the highest colonial expansion, which also saw the colonies starting to stir against being or remaining colonized. The sense of empire, power, and domination thus challenged made the writers of the time begin reacting aggressively against the countries and their cultures. They started using their poetry and writings to support the political rhetoric of the time so that the government and the monarchy could secure the support of the masses in dominating and brutally suppressing the colonized countries. The writers managed to influence public opinion by manipulating the British people’s ideas about the natives with accounts of ruthless and uncultured savages that needed the advanced Western society and the superior British understanding to become civilized.
Tennyson, as the Poet Laureate of Britain, fulfilled the requirements of this position by turning out appropriate work that argued for the value of Britain’s colonies and bordered on jingoism with its blind support of the Empire.
At the time, India was one of the most important colonies of the British Empire, and the reaction of the British government and the conservative Victorian writers to the 1857 Indian uprising was predictably acerbic. Tennyson’s response was no different. He wrote The Defence of Lucknow entirely from the perspective of the British soldiers, neatly twisting the truth to make the Indians seem like alien invaders and obscuring the actual part the British played in violently colonizing an alien country. He portrayed the Indians in the poem as ‘fiends’ and ‘murderers’, while the British were made into honourable, heroic figures. The British soldiers in the poem declare that they are ‘England in heart and limb’. Clearly, ‘Englishness’ as a superior racial quality was much prized by Tennyson. In fact, the supposed racial ‘inferiority’ of the Indians is emphasized in the poem by Tennyson by the repeated use of the phrase ‘the dark face’.
In the same vein, Tennyson’s Ulysses clearly illustrates the conceited belief of the Victorians that they were far above those they had conquered and were thus perfectly justified in subjugating their colonized subjects. Written from the perspective of the mythical hero Ulysses, the poem gives us a glimpse into how the Victorians looked down on people of other cultures. Ulysses himself considers the people of Ithaca ‘a savage race, that hoard, and sleep, and feed’. Obviously, he perceived them in the same way Tennyson perceived the subjects of the British Empire – as oafish, villainous rustics who were only just saved from total barbarism by the intervention of the colonizers.
In the poem, Ulysses’ aspirations ‘to make mild a rugged people’ and to ‘subdue them to the useful and the good’ are a representation of Tennyson’s patronizing attitude towards the British colonies. He promoted the concept of liberal imperialism with a reform agenda, which was his way of selling the idea of the preservation of British cultural and political hegemony in the colonies. In fact, this concept of ‘liberal imperialism’ was the primary argument the British government made to justify its invasion and subsequent occupation of scores of Asian and African nations.
Ulysses deals with another very important theme that was directly linked to the spread of imperialism and the building up of the British Empire – the theme of ‘the journey’. The pursuit of a journey was very highly regarded in the Victorian world. It was equated with the discovery of the new, to expanding one’s horizons, to acquiring knowledge and hence growing as a society. The Victorians were very proud that their society was undergoing many changes. Almost all the major Victorian thinkers hailed their times as bringing in a new order to replace old systems of thought. They were proud of the fact that their Age was witnessing the dissolution of the earlier feudal system, and the corresponding rise in education among the masses. This is why the idea of travelling to the other parts of the world to gain knowledge of other nations and cultures was so perfectly aligned with the Victorian Age's motto of discovery and change.
The theme of the journey comes up as a recurrent motif in Tennyson's poetry. Whether it be the journey of the poet from the world of the living to the other side of death in Crossing the Bar, the journey of the Lady from a private to a public life in The Lady of Shalott, or the journey that the mythical hero of Ulysses prepares to embark on, it is clear that Tennyson was deeply fascinated with the idea of it.
Ulysses best illustrates the driving forces behind the Victorians’ desire to journey to far-off lands. In the poem, the aging Ulysses appeals to his sailors saying: “Come, my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.” He exhorts his sailors to leave behind the commonplace and the ordinary and venture into the unknown with him. Thus, on one level, the poem deals with the desire to reach beyond the limits of one's field of vision and the mundane details of everyday life.
However, on another level this poem also concerns the poet's own personal journey, for it was composed in the first few weeks after Tennyson learned of the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. As Tennyson himself stated, the poem expresses his own “need of going forward and braving the struggle of life”.
On an even deeper level, Ulysses can be interpreted as an argument for imperialism. The protagonist sounds like a colonial administrator, and his reference to seeking a newer world echoes the phrase ‘New World’, which became common during the Renaissance. For the Victorians, the issue of exploring the world was closely tied in with the subject of conquest – because where they travelled, they wanted to trade, and where they wanted to trade, they found it would be easier and more profitable to simply wrest control of and monopolize the markets. And the easiest way to monopolize the market was to take over the administration of the country.
Ulysses and The Lady of Shalott agree with each other in that they both draw on a voyage by boat as a metaphor for their protagonists’ journey from a banal life to a remarkable one (in Ulysses) and from an enclosed isolated life to a public one (in The Lady of Shalott). Indeed, even in their motivations the two journeys overlap – while the Lady is tired of her banal existence and wants to experience a more remarkable one filled with love and passion, Ulysses craves the knowledge and experience the outside world has to offer, desiring to leave behind his comparatively enclosed life that is isolated from the varied experiences of the world.
However, the Lady’s journey differs from Ulysses’ in two important respects. While Ulysses actively looks forward to his journey, eager to embark on it in his quest for knowledge, the Lady is borne away on her own journey by a force outside her control. She passively surrenders herself to her destiny. Another important difference between the journeys of Ulysses and the Lady is that even though both journeys culminate in their characters’ death, Tennyson endorses the death of Ulysses on the sea as a meaningful and worthwhile one, while he seems to indicate futility and tragedy in the Lady's death.
The fact that Tennyson bestows a tone of glory and heroism to Ulysses’ journey, but warns against the Lady’s very similar one indicates narrow-mindedness on his part, and on the part of the Victorian male. For him, a woman undertaking a journey was improper and deserved to be frowned upon, while a man undertaking a similar one was to be lauded and admired.
Crossing the Bar deals with the passing of the poet after death from this world to the next. The poet imagines the passage as a voyage on sea, envisioning the sandbank across the harbour-mouth or the ‘bar’ as the divider separating the poet’s life and his afterlife.
Both Tennyson's Ulysses and Crossing the Bar consist of aged narrators absorbed in the question of life after death. But while the supernatural in Ulysses represents the religious beliefs of the Greeks through mentions of ‘household gods’ and the ‘Happy Isles’, Crossing the Bar espouses Tennyson’s own Christian faith. With its reference to the ‘Pilot’ of the ship - a metaphor for God - and its repeated allegorical allusions to heaven and the afterlife, the poem can be read as an expression of Tennyson's faith in a Christian God and in the immortality of the human soul.
Yet, towards the end of his life Tennyson revealed that his “religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pantheism.” Tennyson recorded in his Diary: “I believe in Pantheism of a sort.” Evidently, Tennyson reflected a concern common among Victorians in being troubled by the conflict between religious faith and expanding scientific knowledge. The works of scientific thinkers during the Age opened the Victorian's minds to new truths, to an alternate view of the world that questioned the veracity of the Bible and the Church. Unsurprisingly, this brought about considerable turmoil in Victorian society. Ultimately, after a long period of controversy and unrest, the Victorians tried to resolve the clash between science and religion by positing a faith that was more personal than doctrinaire, that made Christ more a figure of morality than divinity.
Interestingly, this is the policy that is still employed by most people even in our own Age to bring about a compromise between religion and science. Though thinkers across the ages have always tried to reconcile the two, modern believers still use the Victorian approach towards their religious faiths in order to survive in a technological world.
In fact, most of the themes we call ‘Victorian’ are actually far more universal, and are reflected in our present world in one form or the other. Women are still fighting to gain gender equality and to prevent society and government from binding their sexuality. Cultural arrogance and prejudice remains alive, and the ‘white’ world is still trying to stamp racial discrimination out of its social order. Television and the internet have become extremely popular, enabling people to journey for knowledge and new experiences to any part of the world, and making it difficult for anyone to maintain an isolated life any longer. Imperialism has found different channels to spread through – cultural imperialism uses the media, while economic imperialism is the dominant attribute of the world market. And meanwhile, society still struggles to answer the fundamental question: how to establish harmony between religion and science, and thus use the two to solve all the above problems that promise to continue to plague this generation and the next.
Tennyson lived and wrote during the second half of the 19th century. Many critics consider him the representative poet of the Age, because most of the features of the Victorian Age are echoed in his poetry. His works reflect the pessimism of Victorian literature, the social mores of his society, the clash of religion with the rising scientific temperament, the conservancy yet liberalism of the people and the sense of self-satisfaction that was a characteristic of the Victorian middle and upper classes.
Through his poem The Lady of Shalott, Tennyson explores the conflict between art and life that challenged Victorian age thinkers. He presents to us the dilemma that faced artists, writers, and musicians during the Victorian age: whether to write about the world by keeping at a distance from it, or to enjoy the world by simply living in it.
The poem’s Lady of Shalott is one such artist. For most of her life, she has lived a secluded, isolated life confined in a remote tower, watching the outside world through a magic mirror and weaving its sights. The images she weaves are from reflections, not even from any actual life she might see outside her window. She is thus far removed from ordinary day-to-day human living, such as the daily bustle and activity of the farmers, reapers and market-goers passing near her tower. This sheltered life for the Lady is very pleasant, until she gradually becomes aware that her isolation is leading to the frustration of her own deepest needs for contact and intercourse with the rest of life. As time goes by, she becomes more and more dissatisfied with her ‘imbowered’ life, and expresses her growing yearning for the reality of the outside world with an impatient exclamation: “I am half-sick of shadows”. This conflict between the Lady’s interior and exterior worlds demonstrates the tension between the artist’s own sensual vision and his or her need to experience life directly.
Through his story of the Lady, Tennyson seems to imply that for an artist, there are dangers in personal isolation; that an artist who cuts himself off from the outside world will inevitably become frustrated, and will attempt to break bounds and reach out to reality. But being unprepared and thus ill-fitted to plunge back into the mainstream of life, it would be fatal to his art. The end of the artist’s artistic isolation may lead to the end of his creativity.
The poem The Lady of Shalott may also express a more personal dilemma for Tennyson as a writer: while he perhaps felt an obligation to seek subject matter outside the world of his own mind and his own immediate experiences – to comment on politics, history, or a more general humanity – he may also have feared that this expansion into broader territories might destroy his poetry’s creativity and appeal.
This is echoed in the Lady’s fate. The mysterious curse is the one barrier that prevents the Lady from directly interacting with the rest of the world. But when she glimpses Sir Lancelot in the mirror, she is so fascinated with his image that she forgets all about the curse. She rushes to see him through the window, and in so doing abandons the seclusion of her former life for a life filled with human experiences and emotions. Thus, the moment she sets her art aside to gaze down on the real world, the curse befalls her and she meets her tragic death.
The Lady of Shalott can also be interpreted as a poem concerned with issues of women’s sexuality and their place in the Victorian world. In many of his poems, Tennyson has explored the Victorian attitude towards women and the domestic life. The Victorians had to affect a compromise between the unprecedented licentiousness of the previous age, and the Christian ascetic ideal of complete negation of sex. Thus they elevated the biological necessity of propagation into a moral virtue, and evolved the idea of domestic love and marriage.
Tennyson, too, in his poetry, glorified domestic love and projected the Victorian woman as a fragile, delicate, chaste figure who must be protected and kept inside the home. His Lady of Shalott perfectly embodies the Victorian image of the ideal woman: virginal, embowered, spiritual and mysterious, dedicated to her womanly tasks. The image of a woman isolated from the world, with no relationships and no sexual life, clearly met with Victorian society’s approval, and with Tennyson’s admiration. Her lack of interaction with the rest of the world illustrates the Victorians’ ideas on how a woman must dedicate herself towards her husband and her home, with single-minded devotion and unheeding of all that goes on outside the confines of her four walls. The Lady of Shalott’s view of the world is restricted to the reflections of the exterior world that she sees in her mirror. For the Victorian woman, the mirror was her husband, her only link to the outside world. She was expected to observe the world only through her husband’s eyes and live apart from the general flow of life, protected and preserved in her shrine that was her home.
But the Lady veers away from the Victorians’ ideal conception of a woman when she disregards all societal constraints and breaks away from her meek domesticity to harbour passionate love for a man. Tennyson projects this as her undoing. For her two crimes – the first, of rejecting societal conventions by stepping out of her home and the second, by experiencing strong emotions and passions which were deemed improper in women in the Victorian Age, he inflicts on her the punishment of death. Thus Tennyson, through the tale of the Lady, declares that unconventional behaviour in a Victorian woman will only lead to tragedy and destruction.
In Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, the mythical hero Ulysses shows little regard for his wife, when he dismisses her with the contemptuous phrase ‘match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole’. His callous disregard for her because of her age reveals his arrogance and belief in his masculine superiority. Clearly, he does not see her as his equal. He envisages himself as a fearless warrior travelling to the ends of the earth, unhindered by his old age. But his wife, though the same age as him, is reduced in his mind to the ranks of the weak and the useless. To Ulysses, she is just one of those things that tie him down and stifle him, hinder his glory, and lower his consequence. He shows no gratitude to her for being loyal to him during the vast amounts of time he was away on his adventures. He seems, rather, to take her loyalty and faithfulness for granted, and expects her to stay behind and meekly do his bidding while he goes away to pursue his desires and fancies to ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star’. Nor does he ask his wife to accompany him on his journey – evidently, he considers her either incapable of the courage required to undertake the journey or unsuitable for this pursuit of knowledge. Unlike the men he wishes to travel and explore the world with, he considers his wife to be only a burden, an encumbrance he wishes to be rid of and which he will be glad to leave behind when he sets off ‘to sail beyond the sunset’.
In The Defence of Lucknow, the women are given background roles as helpless cowering victims while the men fight on for their honour and save them from the enemies. Once again, the mask of chivalry hides the chauvinism of the Victorian men. The poet treats the women as fragile possessions, never acknowledging their individuality or courage. There is, of course, no question in Tennyson’s mind of the women fighting along with the men. The only mention of the women’s bravery is when Tennyson shows them devoted to the genteel womanly tasks of tending to their wounded husbands and looking after the needs of the men. He points out the ‘valour of delicate women who tended the hospital bed’, using the ‘delicate’ to reinforce his ideas about their weakness and their dependence on the men to protect them. Clearly, even in the midst of chaos and war, even in the middle of a crisis, the women are not expected to be freed from their domesticity.
In fact, in the entire poem, they are defined only by the men who ‘possess’ them. The soldiers exclaim in the poem: “women and children among us, God help them, our children and wives!” Thus the women’s identity as ‘children and wives’ is bound up with the men they seem to ‘belong’ to.
At one point in the poem, the narrator declares that ‘they shall know we are soldiers and men!’ What the British soldiers want ‘them’ i.e. the Indian rebels to know is that they are not weak, that they are not cowards. This, of course, implies that only men can be heroic, while it falls to the lot of the women to be somehow deficient in daring and spirit. This casual male arrogance only highlights the absurd gender prejudices and stereotypes that inhabited Tennyson’s mind and plagued Victorian society during the time.
There is another kind of arrogance in evidence in The Defence of Lucknow – the arrogant presumption of the Victorians that they were morally and culturally superior to every other race in the world.
By the Victorian Age, the British Empire had gained great power and supremacy throughout the world. The British controlled much of the earth’s resources and had taken over countless nations in Asia and Africa. This, naturally, led the Victorians to encounter societies and customs that were different from their own. But instead of filling them with curiosity and wonder, the knowledge of exotic cultures merely made them contemptuous of the rest of the world.
It was the reign of Queen Victoria, the era of the highest colonial expansion, which also saw the colonies starting to stir against being or remaining colonized. The sense of empire, power, and domination thus challenged made the writers of the time begin reacting aggressively against the countries and their cultures. They started using their poetry and writings to support the political rhetoric of the time so that the government and the monarchy could secure the support of the masses in dominating and brutally suppressing the colonized countries. The writers managed to influence public opinion by manipulating the British people’s ideas about the natives with accounts of ruthless and uncultured savages that needed the advanced Western society and the superior British understanding to become civilized.
Tennyson, as the Poet Laureate of Britain, fulfilled the requirements of this position by turning out appropriate work that argued for the value of Britain’s colonies and bordered on jingoism with its blind support of the Empire.
At the time, India was one of the most important colonies of the British Empire, and the reaction of the British government and the conservative Victorian writers to the 1857 Indian uprising was predictably acerbic. Tennyson’s response was no different. He wrote The Defence of Lucknow entirely from the perspective of the British soldiers, neatly twisting the truth to make the Indians seem like alien invaders and obscuring the actual part the British played in violently colonizing an alien country. He portrayed the Indians in the poem as ‘fiends’ and ‘murderers’, while the British were made into honourable, heroic figures. The British soldiers in the poem declare that they are ‘England in heart and limb’. Clearly, ‘Englishness’ as a superior racial quality was much prized by Tennyson. In fact, the supposed racial ‘inferiority’ of the Indians is emphasized in the poem by Tennyson by the repeated use of the phrase ‘the dark face’.
In the same vein, Tennyson’s Ulysses clearly illustrates the conceited belief of the Victorians that they were far above those they had conquered and were thus perfectly justified in subjugating their colonized subjects. Written from the perspective of the mythical hero Ulysses, the poem gives us a glimpse into how the Victorians looked down on people of other cultures. Ulysses himself considers the people of Ithaca ‘a savage race, that hoard, and sleep, and feed’. Obviously, he perceived them in the same way Tennyson perceived the subjects of the British Empire – as oafish, villainous rustics who were only just saved from total barbarism by the intervention of the colonizers.
In the poem, Ulysses’ aspirations ‘to make mild a rugged people’ and to ‘subdue them to the useful and the good’ are a representation of Tennyson’s patronizing attitude towards the British colonies. He promoted the concept of liberal imperialism with a reform agenda, which was his way of selling the idea of the preservation of British cultural and political hegemony in the colonies. In fact, this concept of ‘liberal imperialism’ was the primary argument the British government made to justify its invasion and subsequent occupation of scores of Asian and African nations.
Ulysses deals with another very important theme that was directly linked to the spread of imperialism and the building up of the British Empire – the theme of ‘the journey’. The pursuit of a journey was very highly regarded in the Victorian world. It was equated with the discovery of the new, to expanding one’s horizons, to acquiring knowledge and hence growing as a society. The Victorians were very proud that their society was undergoing many changes. Almost all the major Victorian thinkers hailed their times as bringing in a new order to replace old systems of thought. They were proud of the fact that their Age was witnessing the dissolution of the earlier feudal system, and the corresponding rise in education among the masses. This is why the idea of travelling to the other parts of the world to gain knowledge of other nations and cultures was so perfectly aligned with the Victorian Age's motto of discovery and change.
The theme of the journey comes up as a recurrent motif in Tennyson's poetry. Whether it be the journey of the poet from the world of the living to the other side of death in Crossing the Bar, the journey of the Lady from a private to a public life in The Lady of Shalott, or the journey that the mythical hero of Ulysses prepares to embark on, it is clear that Tennyson was deeply fascinated with the idea of it.
Ulysses best illustrates the driving forces behind the Victorians’ desire to journey to far-off lands. In the poem, the aging Ulysses appeals to his sailors saying: “Come, my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.” He exhorts his sailors to leave behind the commonplace and the ordinary and venture into the unknown with him. Thus, on one level, the poem deals with the desire to reach beyond the limits of one's field of vision and the mundane details of everyday life.
However, on another level this poem also concerns the poet's own personal journey, for it was composed in the first few weeks after Tennyson learned of the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. As Tennyson himself stated, the poem expresses his own “need of going forward and braving the struggle of life”.
On an even deeper level, Ulysses can be interpreted as an argument for imperialism. The protagonist sounds like a colonial administrator, and his reference to seeking a newer world echoes the phrase ‘New World’, which became common during the Renaissance. For the Victorians, the issue of exploring the world was closely tied in with the subject of conquest – because where they travelled, they wanted to trade, and where they wanted to trade, they found it would be easier and more profitable to simply wrest control of and monopolize the markets. And the easiest way to monopolize the market was to take over the administration of the country.
Ulysses and The Lady of Shalott agree with each other in that they both draw on a voyage by boat as a metaphor for their protagonists’ journey from a banal life to a remarkable one (in Ulysses) and from an enclosed isolated life to a public one (in The Lady of Shalott). Indeed, even in their motivations the two journeys overlap – while the Lady is tired of her banal existence and wants to experience a more remarkable one filled with love and passion, Ulysses craves the knowledge and experience the outside world has to offer, desiring to leave behind his comparatively enclosed life that is isolated from the varied experiences of the world.
However, the Lady’s journey differs from Ulysses’ in two important respects. While Ulysses actively looks forward to his journey, eager to embark on it in his quest for knowledge, the Lady is borne away on her own journey by a force outside her control. She passively surrenders herself to her destiny. Another important difference between the journeys of Ulysses and the Lady is that even though both journeys culminate in their characters’ death, Tennyson endorses the death of Ulysses on the sea as a meaningful and worthwhile one, while he seems to indicate futility and tragedy in the Lady's death.
The fact that Tennyson bestows a tone of glory and heroism to Ulysses’ journey, but warns against the Lady’s very similar one indicates narrow-mindedness on his part, and on the part of the Victorian male. For him, a woman undertaking a journey was improper and deserved to be frowned upon, while a man undertaking a similar one was to be lauded and admired.
Crossing the Bar deals with the passing of the poet after death from this world to the next. The poet imagines the passage as a voyage on sea, envisioning the sandbank across the harbour-mouth or the ‘bar’ as the divider separating the poet’s life and his afterlife.
Both Tennyson's Ulysses and Crossing the Bar consist of aged narrators absorbed in the question of life after death. But while the supernatural in Ulysses represents the religious beliefs of the Greeks through mentions of ‘household gods’ and the ‘Happy Isles’, Crossing the Bar espouses Tennyson’s own Christian faith. With its reference to the ‘Pilot’ of the ship - a metaphor for God - and its repeated allegorical allusions to heaven and the afterlife, the poem can be read as an expression of Tennyson's faith in a Christian God and in the immortality of the human soul.
Yet, towards the end of his life Tennyson revealed that his “religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pantheism.” Tennyson recorded in his Diary: “I believe in Pantheism of a sort.” Evidently, Tennyson reflected a concern common among Victorians in being troubled by the conflict between religious faith and expanding scientific knowledge. The works of scientific thinkers during the Age opened the Victorian's minds to new truths, to an alternate view of the world that questioned the veracity of the Bible and the Church. Unsurprisingly, this brought about considerable turmoil in Victorian society. Ultimately, after a long period of controversy and unrest, the Victorians tried to resolve the clash between science and religion by positing a faith that was more personal than doctrinaire, that made Christ more a figure of morality than divinity.
Interestingly, this is the policy that is still employed by most people even in our own Age to bring about a compromise between religion and science. Though thinkers across the ages have always tried to reconcile the two, modern believers still use the Victorian approach towards their religious faiths in order to survive in a technological world.
In fact, most of the themes we call ‘Victorian’ are actually far more universal, and are reflected in our present world in one form or the other. Women are still fighting to gain gender equality and to prevent society and government from binding their sexuality. Cultural arrogance and prejudice remains alive, and the ‘white’ world is still trying to stamp racial discrimination out of its social order. Television and the internet have become extremely popular, enabling people to journey for knowledge and new experiences to any part of the world, and making it difficult for anyone to maintain an isolated life any longer. Imperialism has found different channels to spread through – cultural imperialism uses the media, while economic imperialism is the dominant attribute of the world market. And meanwhile, society still struggles to answer the fundamental question: how to establish harmony between religion and science, and thus use the two to solve all the above problems that promise to continue to plague this generation and the next.
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