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.